ABOUT THE WORK

Legaspi’s nudes ranged from the representational to abstractions. Cesar Legaspi’s engaging nudes are often shy of full eroticism, are direct and fresh and engage the viewer on several levels at once, taking in as they do, both Filipino and Western art traditions. Leonidas Benesa writes: “When the subject is the female nude, color and line become softer and more fluid. This is true of Legaspi’s canvases showing the female form exclusively in the decade of the 1970s.” This Legaspi nude from 1979 is a fine example of the National Artist’s mastery of tonal composition. Cesar Legaspi always acknowledged the lessons he learned from a brief stint at the Academie Ranson in Paris in 1954. He recounted that Professor Goetz at the Academie showed him the importance of tonal composition by asking him to walk slowly across a hall at the far end of which were reproductions, as an exercise in viewing paintings primarily in terms of tone that lends suppleness to the composition. In the female nude, Legaspi found an eloquent vehicle for expression, even as a play of contrasts ensues between organic form and structure, transparency and solidity, in tensions that generate the intense vitality in his art. 71