{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":47339,"auction_id":95,"set_id":125,"lot_number":"89","artist":"Vicente Manansala (1910 - 1981)","title":"Vendors","starting_price":16000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1963 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"39\" x 27\" (99 cm x 69 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE DON EUGENIO “GENY” LOPEZ JR. COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"1963 was a career high point for Vicente Manansala. That fortuitous year, Manansala was conferred the highly prestigious Republic Cultural Heritage Award, the precursor to the National Artist Award.<br /><br />Manansala would also be featured on the cover of two reputable magazines of his time: The Sunday Times Magazine (which featured his work \"Birds in Flight\") and The Chinese Weekly.<br /><br />Vendors come from that climactic year in Manansala's career. More than that, the piece comes from an exciting series of works that yet another makes Manansala a cubist virtuoso: the \"Stained Glass Series.\"<br /><br />By 1963, Manansala had been very involved in a series of works dubbed the \"Stained Glass Series.\" The name of this body of work comes from the fact that it evokes the \"leaded, cloison effect seen in stained glass,\" as eminent art critic Rod. Paras-Perez puts it in his monograph on Manansala. The series began when Manansala was awarded a Smith-Mundt-Specialist Grant to study stained glass techniques at New York's Greenland Studio under Le Compt from March to July 1960.<br /><br />Speaking of the interesting origins of this series, Manansala says in the Paras-Perez book: \"I had this vision while I was riding the cable car in L.A. (Los Angeles). At that time, I was studying stained glass at Greenland Studio. I saw a stained glass on top of a table with lights under it. The vibration and scintillating color fascinated me. Sabi ko, “Pwedeng gawin sa painting ito!” [I said to myself, this can be done in my paintings!].\"<br /><br />\"It [Stained Glass Series] is a phase that gives to his works a vibrancy of color and a stronger surface assertiveness, which prefigures a pendulum-like swing into the recovery of pictorial depth,\" writes Paras-Perez.<br /><br />1963's Vendors evokes leaded lights or leaded windows (These are decorative windows created through came glasswork. This is made possible by soldering individual pieces of art glass through came strips (usually lead) and, thus, forming intricate designs.). Manansala uses this technique to render a diaphanous configuration of patterns that exude a vivid interplay between light, forms, and pictorial depth. Planes are fragmented through delicate gradations of color, which in turn makes distinguishing one figure from another easily identifiable, as \"light\" seemingly penetrates in a breeze through each and every plane.<br /><br />At this point in his career, it had already become evident that Manansala's cubist language avoids fragmenting his forms to retain that inner sense of dignity and humanity to his subjects, the Filipino masses. In doing so, Manansala evokes the inherent power of the broad range of the oppressed masses as the supreme liberator of society, much like how he renders the titular vendors in this masterpiece: enigmatic faces that give off a penetrating gaze and statures showing dignified pride in their profound contribution as providers and makers of society's wealth.<br /><br />With the subjects’ diaphanous forms, Vendors also evoke that fortuitous day during Manansala's ninemonth Parisian sojourn in 1950-51, where he studied at the University of Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the tutelage of the French cubist Fernand Leger, Picasso and Braque's close contemporary. Agnes Duval, writing in her article \"Manansala,\" published in the April 1968 issue of Solidarity: Current Affairs, Ideas, and the Arts: \"Window shopping one day [in Paris], he [Manansala] noted the interplay of reflected images on the plate-glass and the objects inside the window displays.\"<br /><br />This felicitous encounter would mark the realization within Manansala of his now-iconic and much-beloved Transparent Cubism. This style would tangibly manifest itself in the early 1960s, beginning in his Whirr Series, depicting birds in flight. Thus, we see in 1963's Vendors Manansala situating himself at the cusp of a style that has become his most important legacy in Philippine art. (Adrian Maranan)","lot_group":"Painting","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":16000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":16000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":19225600,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":47026,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/95/125/lot/89.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":88,"next":90,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}