PROPERTY FROM THE LETICIA RAMOS SHAHANI COLLECTION

Provenance: Philippine Art Gallery, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

I t was in 1950 that Vicente S. Manansala would create two important themes that would inform his works : The Madonna and the Barong-Barong. He is said to have been the first to paint the clapboard hovels that sprang up relentlessly in the ruins of post-war Manila. In one fell swoop, and also in the same year, he would put the two powerful constructs together to create “The Madonna of the Slums”, one of the most vivid and symbolic artworks of that critical period of Philippine modern art. In the company of the arch-Neo Realist Hernando R. Ocampo, he would become part of the most significant art movement of the country; and originate his own highly recognizable style that would be dubbed by art critics as ‘Transparent Cubism.’ In a revealing interview of this modernist master in This Week Magazine in 1958, the beginnings of the ‘Barong Barong’ paintings are outlined: “After the war, he worked as a staff artist of the Evening News and lived in the slums of Reina Regente (in Binondo) among the barong-barongs of the squatters. It was here that he got the idea for the barong-barong paintings which started a trend in Philippine painting. Now almost every Filipino painter has painted barong-barong and many are still painting them. It was also here that his nationalistic feeling was aroused, a feeling that can now be seen in his work. All his paintings in this period were set in the slums, the makeshift dwellings of the squatters always forming the background, whether the subject be a madonna or a jobless sabungero whiling away the time in front of his hut.”