Rendering unto Cesar what is Cesar’s: The Veneration of Cesar Legaspi
Rendering unto Cesar what is Cesar’s:
The Veneration of Cesar Legaspi
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, December 17, 1988
(First of two parts)
A HOMEGROWN Cubism, often exasperatingly polite, was the pictorial idiom of the Neo-Realist triumvirate, otherwise known as the Taza De Oro trio. Hernando Ocampo abbreviated his organic and metaphorically-derived images into brightly-colored cascading shapes with molded facets, a poet and irrepressible theoretician who painted pictures with the grace of a dancer and the density of a stone wall.
Vicente Manansala, the muchomacho maestro who usually painted like a woman, delighted in gossamer transparencies and dynamic planar ambiguities, mastering the nuances of a locallyflavored investigative representation despite a lifetime of stylistic ambivalence.
And Cesar Legaspi, the least articulate and least-celebrated of the three, often painted tersely-rendered heroic figurations that somehow reminded people of Ocampo’s molded facets and Manansala’s structural adventurism, an accomplished painter who — supposedly lacking the brilliance and fiery sense of self-worth that characterized his two comrades — was content to labor in their shadow as an ill-defined entity, ascertaining to eventual prominence by sheer dint of seniority.
Legaspi, now 71, is being feted three simultaneous exhibits at the commercially-successful Finale Art File in Makati, at the National Museum, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila — a well-timed outburst accompanied by fanfare commonly reserved for art masters on their last legs, and strongly reminiscent of the scholarly attention accorded Manansala shortly before his demise. (Ironically, Ocampo, the promotional strategist of the three, passed away unexpectedly a decade ago this year, and was rumored to have been deprived of his fair share by a cruel wartime stigma that somehow cast doubt on his worth as a "collectible" master.)
This sudden outpouring of attention — well-deserved regardless of the actual state of Legaspi’s health — has almost certainly fanned public interest in the artist’s work, particularly among serious and opportunistic collectors alike, all of whom undoubtedly sense the maestro’s own imminent passing in the present turn of events.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Rendering unto Cesar what is Cesar’s: The Veneration of Cesar Legaspi” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, December 17, 1988
