Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist

ABOUT THE WORK

The subjects convey a presence that consists of the combination of vulnerability in the lack of social embellishments and dignity and solidity in the broadly structured lines. Structured into planes and facets, the mother and child in the hammock acquire an essential simplicity and purity amid the decorative patterns of the details. At 19, Manansala was the youngest in the class that finally graduated from the UP School of Fine Arts. Among Manansalas’ classicist teachers were Fernando and Pablo Amorsolo, Fabian de la Rosa, Vicente Rivera y Mir, Ramon Peralta, Teodoro Buenaventura - names which are today engraved in Philippine art history. All of his grades were excellent except one. A professor wanted him to use fine strokes; he liked bold strokes and took a failing grade for his independent mind. Apparently his talent is not meant for the classroom. This painting was done in 1944. Four years later, in 1948, he was to become a UNESCO scholarship grantee. Later, he was to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Many have sung praises for his ebullient colors, his sensuous shapes bursting with “baroque” curves or contours, his brisk, lively strokes. Manansala can compress much of the festive spirit and love of the simple life. The evidence of his best known works is that of a man whose cup runneth over. Throughout his career, Manansala continually alternated between greater abstraction and greater figuration; though his figurative works often contain abstract elements. Manansala indulged in subtle faceting and the use of vibrant color, discarding the conventions of natural forms. In this painting, the mother and the sleeping child are done in meticulous and detailed yet abbreviated style, yet with no hint of the synthetic cubism which he was to innovate later in his career. Manansala blends the mother and child (in the hammock) into the overall ethereal mood of transparence, reflection, iridescence, luminous coloring, opalescence, flowing forms and volumes, all are defined and held in transparent cubism all Manansala’s own, eliminating any heavyhanded sense of grit and toil. It doesn’t mean that Manansala did not subscribe to the social consciousness aesthetic. The artist has had an abiding sympathy for common folk like beggars and vendors. Color takes new meanings in the hands of Manansala. Color becomes an inquiry into visual relationships that range from the backdrop atmosphere to the controlled pictorial forms of the two farmer figures. Beneath the surface gloss and visual exuberance can be seen a craftsmanship honed by many years of study of the works by Picasso, Braque and Gris, and especially his teacher Leger. It is interesting to draw comparisons between the handling of his subjects before and after his training under Leger in Paris. Before his Parisian sojourn, the subtlety of form as explored by color was emphasized. Decades later, clarity of light through his own transparent cubism is what he would explore. Manansala’s own take on cubism grew out of a seething era of inquiry and experiment, with his generation of modernist artists seeking to make iconic Filipino imagery as their vehicle for their unique modernist visions and forms. The Neo-realists, of which Manansala was a member, perceived abstract art as taking two directions. One is non-naturalistic, in which subject matter is altered or transformed by simplification, distortion, fragmentation or deconstruction to give greater prominence to line, color, volume, pattern, composition, and paint quality. The result is representational abstraction. As seen in the works of Neo-realists Manansala, Tabuena, and Legaspi, it takes perceived reality as a starting point: but instead reproducing it with the accuracy of direct observation, they recreate it in ways that strongly emphasize the purely plastic and organizational qualities of a painting. Describing the result as abstract becomes a matter of comparative degree. That is to say, some works are more abstract than others with respect to how much of subject matter is reduced in terms of likeness to natural appearance.