{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":45687,"auction_id":92,"set_id":121,"lot_number":"42","artist":"Vicente Manansala (1910 - 1981)","title":"Neo-Realist Pangguinge","starting_price":800000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1952 (upper right)","medium":"oil on wood","size":"12\" x 16\" (30 cm x 41 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private collection, Manila","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"The Neo-Realist Gamble Winner Takes All in the Game of Art and Life

It’s hard to imagine what Manila in 1945 must have felt like. Completely devastated, it was a place of jagged landscapes and people burying their dead.

But it was also a moment for renewal and re-invention.

In the years after the war, bookended by the years 1946 and 1947, the Manila art scene was seething with intellectual energy. This is in itself was a completely remarkable phenomenon. Rising magnificently above the rubble of World War II, undeterred by the grim necessity of rebuilding the lives of an entire generation, the Filipino artist fought against all odds to keep the seven arts alive. In fact, it seemed to be an urgent responsibility to bring it back to life in the face of the direst of circumstances.

In 1948, the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP)— perhaps not officially the first of its kind because there were one or two other salon-oriented organizations in the 1920s — was founded. It was the brainchild of the tireless, energetic Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, a sugar planter’s daughter.

Tellingly, its offices were to be found first on the ruins of the University of the Philippines (where the Supreme Court stands today) and later in the pock-marked remains of the National Museum. Its first competitive exhibitions would also take place there : Carlos “Botong Francisco” would win first prize for Kaingin, a work that portrayed subsistence farmers scrabbling for land.

It spelled such a sea change that the next year Edades was publicly and dramatically called out in the press over the cause of modern art by no less than the venerable Guillermo Tolentino, respected sculptor and academic cohort of the grand old man Fernando Amorsolo at the University of the Philippines.

Thus, in 1949, the AAP would be sufficiently pressured by the figurative painters among its membership to announce two categories for their painting competitions : the ‘Modern’ and the ‘Conservative.’

For one reason or another, these classifications were abolished in 1950 — allowing a group that had named themselves the ‘Neo-Realists’ to scoop up all the major awards in a grand slam of three back-to-back competitions. That feat cemented their reputations for generations to come.

Vicente Manansala would say, “Edades cracked open the door for Filipino modern art”— motioning with his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate the narrowest of spaces — “but it was HR Ocampo who kicked down the door.”

Who exactly was this band of audacious brothers?

On June 9th, 1950 — exactly in the middle of the first year of the mid-century, the Manila Times (circulation : 1 Million readers a day) ran a small notice buried on page 5, headlined “AAP to Sponsor First Neo-Realist Art Exhibition.”

It was scheduled the following weekend from June 17 to 25 at the Manila Hotel — and it would be the first time the word “NeoRealist” would appear in public — the announcement went on to explain that it had taken its cue from the 19th-century literary critic, Francesco de Sanctis. “To create reality, an artist must have the force to kill it. But instantly, the fragments draw together, seeking one another, with the obscure presentiment of the new life in which they are destined.”

Hernando R. Ocampo was the ringleader of this group that included Cesar Legaspi, Vicente Manansala, Romeo Tabuena, Ramon Estella, Victor Oteyza, and Nena Saguil.

If the AAP would be the first building block in the story of Filipino modern art, then the Neo-Realists were the second.

The Neo-Realists were also the country’s first or first-known, properly accorded “social realists” — painting of the half-lives in Manila slums, the “barong barong” (a makeshift house made of discarded materials) that was home to almost all of post-War Manila.

Composed of writers and journalists, reporters and editorial cartoonists, they would become a force to reckon with; so much so that when the Philippine Art Gallery opened its doors as the first gallery exclusively to champion the cause of abstract art, they were natural allies.

Together, they would form a powerful ecosystem.

It was in the midst of this creative cauldron that this painting by Manansala was made — a portrait of the brothers-in-arms that would set the course of Philippine art as boldly as Juan Luna and Resurreccion Hidalgo and their heirs Fernando Amorsolo and Guillermo Tolentino did before them.

Manansala invites us into a mis-en-scene, as a fly on the wall of a house that could only be HR Ocampo’s (the familiar wroughtiron lattice-work on the windows are a giveaway). Four men gamble on a game of chance, friendly foes all. Cesar Legazpi, HR’s bestie and closest confidante, can be seen to his right. The other seats at the table are for Arturo Luz, the youngest of them, while Victor Oteyza makes the fourth in this hand.

Magtanggul Asa writing in the exhibition catalogue for what he would term “The First Exhibit of Non-Objective Art in Tagala’, hailed HR Ocampo as “the Father of Non-Objective Art in the Philippines”.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":7000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":7000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":8411200,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":44408,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/92/121/lot/42.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":41,"next":43,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}