Provenance: Private collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Solid Forms and Vibrant Colors Exemplar of Legaspi’s Cubist Genius Created on the eve of the year 1970 – the beginning of the decade that art critic Alice Guillermo says is also the beginning of Cesar Legaspi’s maturity in style – this 1969 work features his prismatic planes and broken figures that barely clung to the figurative reality from which Legaspi based them on.. One of the giants of Philippine modernism, Legaspi’s scrappy background as a commercial artist stood out amongst his fine arts-educated contemporaries. He was trained in penand-ink illustrations, making his red-green colorblindness (or deuteranopia) more bearable as he pursued his dream of the arts. 1969 also saw Legaspi one year after shedding his illustrator career, resigning from his post as the Vice President of Philprom in 1968 to focus on his painting full-time. However, he had been active in the art scene before that, meeting H.R. Ocampo in 1938 who urged Legaspi to pursue painting and even strongly influenced Legaspi’s art. The two of them fostered a lifelong friendship, bonded by their fascination and modernistic tendencies. Veering into Cubism in the ‘60s, this 1969 work bears the culmination of a decade’s worth of artistic endeavor. Objective reality is no longer the golden standard that an artist must achieve – instead, the neo-realistic element of distortion and fragmentation takes center stage. With conviction, Legaspi broke down the pictorial reality unhesitatingly, leaving only the curvy figure of a woman recognizable in the swirly, fragmented aftermath of his relentless abstraction. This deliberate preservation of the human body is a distinct element of a Legaspi canvas. From his early expressionist distortion to his cubist fragmentation, the human body is an exalted subject in Legaspi’s oeuvre, perhaps an artistic outlet as a response to the surgeries he had to undergo as a child. Contracting pneumonia when he was barely one year old, the young Legaspi was a regular patient at the Mary Chiles Hospital, a fact that scarred him both mentally and physically. “I think that even if I were to paint a completely abstract painting, I shall always be abstracting the human figure,” he said in Cid Reyes’s Conversations on Philippine Art. “I can never get away from the figure.” Indeed, despite Legaspi’s adherence to the harsh, unforgiving breakdown of Cubism, he can never seem to fully distort the human figure. Amidst his prismatic works, the human anatomy remains intact, a sense of reverence evident through his deliberate preservation of the body. Legaspi’s 1970s paintings show the artist’s full potential when it comes to harnessing the human body and this 1969 piece is the perfect starting point to trace its evolution. “The images of human anatomy in the paintings of Cesar Legaspi seemed to flower or were wretched from the core of his being,” Ditas R. Samson writes in the catalog Cesar Legaspi: A Brave Modern, published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition in 2014. Indeed, Legaspi’s ability to break down objective reality into a subjective world, whether it be the human body or an inanimate object, creates a pictorial vision that is harshly beautiful. Under his masterful brush, Legaspi manages to transform his subjects into a fragmented masterpiece akin to that of a church’s stained glass windows, evoking a deep contemplation for his Cubist pieces. (Hannah Valiente)