Accompanied by a certificate issued by Mr. Christian M. Aguilar confirming the authenticity of this lot

Provenance: León Gallery, The Kingly Treasures Auction, Makati City, 5 December 2015, Lot 146

ABOUT THE WORK

A girl in a yellow gown reads a book while four others gather around to listen. Throughout the ages, artists such as Jean Baptiste, Simeon Chardin, Roderick O Connor, Walter Kuhn, Winslow Homer. Eastman Johnson and Thomas Anschultz have captured on canvas the rewarding hours spent with a book, and many of their paintings reflect the distinctions made by the English philosopher Francis Bacon. Some books, he said, were to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Where else but in the first category belong the many nineteenth century paintings in which lovely ladies, posed in gracious settings, appear to be whiling away the hours with a book? The nineteenth century roots of the subject—the pleasures of reading, where the artist captures private moments with the printed word- have been mentioned, but Aguilar Alcuaz is known to be among the country’s premier abstractionists even if he has time and again switched to his figurative mode. The full length figures, so characteristic of Alcuaz’ group compositions, the use of blacks and neutrals, the emphasis on color values, and the brushwork is explained by Alice Guillermo: “Alcuaz had as much in common with many other Filipino abstractionists of his generation. Because many of them shared a common background, the Escuela de Bellas Artes or Academia later transformed into the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts…” (thus) “they could not easily shed their academic training. Thus many of them developed a dualistic approach to art, doing both figurative and abstract works.” Alcuaz studied at the UP in 1949 and at the Real Academia de bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. Thus, Aguilar Alcuaz did not have to do the usual journey of the modernist artists of his generation — to explore penetrating interpretation of his subjects — what with his unerring sense of the elegant. Leonidas Benesa wrote in 1976 that Alcuaz “...shares with Manet and Renoir a romanticism and love for the human subject, an affection that idealizes it and presents it in its best lights. This is especially true when the subjects are women. When painting women, Aguilar Alcuaz is at his romantic expressionist best. Aguilar Alcuaz was quoted in 1977: “I am only doing what I believe in. I am sure that nobody would say that I am living in a romantic age. I am a romantic man living in a modern age.”