Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Switzerland

ABOUT THE WORK

In 1586 El Greco did The Burial of Count Orgaz. In 1901, Picasso did Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas. This work may be regarded as a completely personal work of Manansala, the circumstances behind the story we may never know. It also further initiates his mature artistic period, as well as the processes of dematerialization, which will continue in his later works. The abstract school argues that subject matter is something that gets in the way. It sidetracks the issue being pure expression by means of color, texture, line and shape existing in their own right to the point of representing nothing at all. Abstract painting, which may get so abstract that the picture is reduced to a few strokes of color, lime and shape existing in their own right, while representing the theme of the picture, is the artist’s final release from the associative emotional values that the artist may try to avoid when Manansala interpreted a subjective, even dour theme of a burial.