PROPERTY FROM THE LETICIA RAMOS SHAHANI COLLECTION
Vicente Manansala (1920 - 1981)
Madonna and Child
signed and dated 1956 (lower right)
oil on canvas with metal tubes
30 3/4" x 19 3/4" (78 cm x 50 cm)

PROVENANCE
Philippine Art Gallery, Manila

MANANSALA AND THE MADONNA
At the Dawn of Filipino Modern Art
by L I S A G U E R R E RO N A K P I L

It was in 1950 that Vicente S. Manansala would create
two important themes that would inform his works :
The Madonna and the Barong-Barong. He is said to
have been the first to paint the clapboard hovels that
sprang up relentlessly in the ruins of post-war Manila. In
one fell swoop, and also in the same year, he would
put the two powerful constructs together to create
“The Madonna of the Slums”, one of the most vivid and
symbolic artworks of that critical period of Philippine
modern art.
In the company of the arch-Neo Realist Hernando R.
Ocampo, he would become part of the most significant
art movement of the country; and originate his own highly
recognizable style that would be dubbed by art critics as
‘Transparent Cubism.’
In a revealing interview of this modernist master in This
Week Magazine in 1958, the beginnings of the ‘Barong
Barong’ paintings are outlined:
“After the war, he worked as a staff artist of the Evening News
and lived in the slums of Reina Regente (in Binondo) among
the barong-barongs of the squatters. It was here that he got
the idea for the barong-barong paintings which started a trend
in Philippine painting. Now almost every Filipino painter has
painted barong-barong and many are still painting them. It
was also here that his nationalistic feeling was aroused, a
feeling that can now be seen in his work. All his paintings
in this period were set in the slums, the makeshift dwellings
of the squatters always forming the background, whether the
subject be a madonna or a jobless sabungero whiling away the
time in front of his hut.”

In the Madonna portrait at hand, Manansala has
replaced the brown angles and patchwork planes of his
first famous work, “Madonna of the Slums” — which only
served to emphasize the overcrowding and dire straits
of the squatter colony — with a more structured but still
geometric backdrop. Inventively, these are fashioned out
of aluminum paint tubes, beaten flat and cut into various
shapes and sizes, no two alike, silhouetting the mother
and child as well.
In the same 1958 interview, Manansala would confide his
own hard times during the War years, uncertain where to
find enough paint to make a precarious living. He related
how he was was forced “to scrape old hardened paint,
grind it into powder, and mix it with coconut oil” in order
to continue to accept the commissions for paintings he
depended on.
The present Madonna may thus be viewed as partinstallation,
part affirmation of a more prosperous period
in his life, created from the most precious material an artist
could have. Paint — the expensive imported kind, indeed
— was now in plentiful supply for Manansala as he had
become the country’s most sought-after artist. The pliable
metal is covered in luminous greens and blues, accented
with bright oranges. It is an optimistic even joyous work,
no longer expressing the biting commentary on social ills
of his original pieces.
The Madonna was a theme that Manansala would return
to over the decade. “I paint to express what I feel and to
satisfy myself,” he was quoted as saying in 1958. “I paint
not what I see but what I feel.”
As a result, the interview noted, “Most of the time, it
takes Manansala many paintings to express fully what he
feels about a certain subject. Again it takes him many
paintings to exploit fully a form that captures his fancy.
Hence, he usually paints a series of canvases about only
one subject, each painting totally different from the other.
Not only that, he seems to express his ideas and emotions
in other forms. It is this desire that has prompted him
to branch out to sculpture. He wants to see how his
paintings will look like in three dimensions. When he has
spent his emotions through self-expression, only then is
he satisfied.”

Manansala would thus not only create paintings and
sculptures of his favorite themes such as the Madonna
but also charcoal drawings, wood-cuts and watercolors,
Western and Orientalist. The mixed-media work at
hand, however, is the only one known of its kind but is
instantly recognizable in the style he preferred to called
“mannerism”.
It is unsurprising that this unusual rendition of the
transcendental mother would belong to the feminist and
cultural leader Senator Leticia Ramos Shahani. Sister to
one Philippine President, cousin to another, the Senator
was also an important political force in her own right.
She would pioneer the concept of women’s rights, and
the female role in diplomacy and governance in the
Philippines as well as on the international stage. Senator
Shahani was also previously an ambassador and a
leading figure in the United Nations. She would also coauthor
the bill that would create the influential National
Commission for Culture and the Arts which continues to
shape the cultural agenda of the country to this day.