Vicente Manansala

Biography

As a boy in Macabebe, Vicente Manansala sold newspapers and shined shoes, and in his free time made kites and drew in charcoal. For the 1910s this is an ordinary story of a provincial boy; what is unusual is that by the age of fifteen he had a painting teacher.

He was born on 22 January 1910 in San Roque, in Macabebe, in the province of Pampanga, the son of Perfecto Manansala and Engracia Silva. At fifteen he began to study with the painter Ramon Peralta. A year later he entered the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines, where he studied from 1926 to 1930. After graduating he worked as an illustrator for the newspaper the Philippine Herald and the weekly Liwayway, and designed layouts for the magazines Photonews and Saturday Evening News Magazine. He also trained at the Otis School of Drawing.

An early painting survives from before his travels abroad: “Bangkusay Seascape” (1940), oil on canvas, small in size, 36 by 46 centimetres.

In 1949 UNESCO gave him a six-month grant to study in Canada, where he worked at the École des Beaux-Arts in Banff and Montreal. The following year the French government awarded him a nine-month scholarship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It was after these trips that he emerged as an artist whose language rests on cubism but is turned toward Philippine subjects. He belonged to the “Thirteen Moderns”, a group of modernists associated with Victorio Edades, and to the prominent Cruz, Manansala, Lopez family clan.

He arrived at what is called transparent cubism. The delicate tones, shapes and patterns of figure and surroundings are superimposed so that the layers show through. A good example of the method is “Kalabaw” (“Carabao”, 1965, oil on canvas, 72 by 97 centimetres). The theme of most of his work is the passage from countryside to city. “Madonna of the Slums” (1950, oil on lawanit board, 86 by 61 centimetres) shows a mother and child who have come from the provinces and ended up among the shanties of the city. In “Jeepneys” the folk elements of provincial life are joined to the crowding of a large city. His other works include “Slum Dwellers”, “Balut Vendors”, “Pounding Rice”, “Bayanihan”, “Pila Pila sa Bigas” (1980) and “Birdman” (1973); in 2012 a forgery incident was connected with the last of these. He also painted the murals “Stations of the Cross” in the Church of the Parish of the Holy Sacrifice and designed the seal of Arellano University.

It seems to me that what matters most in these works is not style but point of view: he painted people who had just moved and had not yet become city dwellers. The American influence that had come to the country appears in his work through daily life, not through slogans.

Manansala died on 22 August 1981 in Manila. In the same year President Ferdinand Marcos named him a National Artist of the Philippines in Visual Arts. He is regarded as a direct forerunner of the Filipino neo-realists: he influenced Malang, Angelito Antonio, Norma Belleza and Manuel Baldemor directly. His works are held by the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila, the Philippine Center in New York, the Singapore Art Museum and Holy Angel University in Angeles City, where a section called the Vicente Manansala Collection has recently opened, holding most of the estate he left.