Provenance: PROPERTY FROM THE ALICIA MARQUEZ-LIM COSETENG COLLECTION

ABOUT THE WORK

Alicia Coseteng, more formally known as Alicia Guanco Marquez-Lim, was from an old family of Iloilo City. She would marry the industrialist Emerson Coseteng who, with his brother, put up one of the first large-scale tile companies, Mariwasa Manufacturing Inc. Alicia, a UP Professor with an MA from Stanford University, would be a prominent figure in the Philippine cultural scene as a historian, author of a book on Spanish colonial churches and as an art critic. Coseteng would also be appointed ambassador to Mexico. She would champion Filipino modernists as early as the Fifties and Sixties and would become friends with key members of the Neo-Realists, including Vicente Manansala. In the work at hand, Manansala creates a powerful portrait of planting rice, as diametrically opposite to the same theme depicted by Fabian de la Rosa and his more famous nephew Fernando Amorsolo in their prize-winning works form the colonial era. Instead, Manansala strives for authenticity, to capture with bold, dark strokes, the difficult lives of the tillers of soil. The farmers are not lithe, romanticized characters but real men and women who are outlined in the strong, solid lines of hard work, sacrifice and endurance. (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)