![]() In “Isda” (Fish), schools of fish swim in a gouache of painted paper cut-outs with birds flying overhead. In the middle ground, he put in a two-toned bottle, a couple of brown fish, a slice of watermelon below a guitar, a wooden chopping board along with a blue mortar and pestle. “Pagkain” (Food) is an cubist’s still life rendition of overlapping tables with wooden bowl and green fronds, the other with a plate of chicken drumsticks and a bowl of fish. “Pamilya” (Family” depicts a family sharing two fishes, praying before meals against a backdrop of corncob and fishnet baskets. “Harana” (Serenaders) is a mosaic-style brushwork of seated musicians with their guitar and banduria in hand. “Manok “ (Roosters) shows multi-hued gamecocks strutting about against a faceted cityscape with houses on stilts. The murals include “Kalabaw” (Water Buffalo) with the interlocking shapes of powerful bulls resting on the field around a rosy calf, with birds hovering on the backdrop of a shifting cityscape. They are still recognizable.īut while I’m not really a great fan of the modernists, I was surprised I enjoyed Mang Enteng’s seven-mural Philamlife Series, which the insurance giant commissioned for its Manila headquarters in 1961 and now re-homed at the National Museum’s new Philamlife Gallery. They were rendered in sombre earth tones, unlike Manansala’s sun-drenched women heaving sheaves of rice in a riot of faceted, overlapping planes of blues and tangerines, yellows and greens.Īnd unlike Picasso, the shapes and forms of Manansala’s subjects are not overly distorted. I came to the Musee d’ Orsay, Paris, precisely to view Millet’s Realistic masterpiece of three peasant women painfully stooped as they pick up stray wheat grains left over by harvesters on the fields. Gazing at his mural, “Magsasaka”, which had been likened to Millet’s “The Gleaners”, I saw no resemblance. The great Filipino cubist painter, Vicente Silva Manasala, “Mang Enteng”, has been compared to both Jean Francois Millet and to Pablo Picasso.īut the way I saw it, he was neither. The Ayala Museum’s exhibit, which runs until April 15, 2015, includes the artist’s Cubist works from the pre-war period, to his Neo-Realist opuses in the 1950s and 1960s, along with his select large-scale canvases from the 1970s to the 1980s. In effect, he reconstituted Cubism’s unfeeling, geometric ordering of figures into social expressionism by interacting forms filled with rhythmic movement These include Man and Woman (alternatively known as Beggars) and Gadgets’. Known for his fragmented pictorial style, weaving social comment and juxtaposing the mythical and modern into his overlapping, interacting forms with disturbing power and intensity, he paved the way for the acceptance of modern art in the country and was recognized as a Filipino National Artist for Visual Arts in 1990.Īn art director prior to going full-time in his visual art practice in the 1960s, Legaspi’s early (1940s-1960s) works, alongside those of his contemporary, Hernando Ocampo, depicted the dehumanization of urban beggars and laborers. ![]() Legaspi belonged to the pre-War “Thirteen Moderns” who sought new ways of visual expression and later on, refined Cubism in the local context, pioneering Neo-Realism in the Philippines. Ayala Museum showcases a Filipino master of Cubism, Cesar Legaspi: The Brave Modern in this month’s Images of Nation exhibit. ![]()
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