CESAR TORRENTE LEGASPI

LEGASPI, CESAR TORRENTE b. Tondo Manila 2 Apr 1917 d. Metro Manila 7 Apr 1994. National Artist in

Painting. He is the son of Manuel Legaspi and Rosario Torrente. He is married to Vitaliana Kaligdan. They

have five children, one of whom, Celeste, is one of the most gifted proponents of Filipino popular music.

Legaspi earned his Certificate of proficiency at the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts in 1936.

He then pursued art studies abroad as a scholar at the Cultura Hispanic, in Madrid, 1953-1954. He

subsequently entered the Academie Ramon in Paris, France.

Legaspi espoused the cause of modem art from its early years and nurtured it with his fellow pioneering

modernists, Carlos V, Francisco, Galo B. Ocampo, Hernando R. Ocampo, and Vicente Manasala, to full

maturity. Today, he is the most active surviving member of the Thirteen Moderns. While his work shows the

influence of cubism, cubism's rigorous intellectual approach of its intellectual phase in Legaspi's works gives

way to the more harmonious aspect of its synthetic phase. There is a facetting of figures into larger planes

which overlap and cut through space in transparent curvilinear rhythms and which achieve a richly textured

orchestration of hues and tones. Except for his earlier monochromatic canvases, Legaspi's paintings fully

release the expressive potential of color, creating a sensuous chromatic ambience with a variety of subjects

from dancers and flower gardens, to dynamic street scene.

His early paintings, from the period immediately before and after the war, reflect his personal reaction to the

national trauma. Man and Woman (also entitled Beggars), 1945, in an expressionist idiom involving

distortion, shows a couple in rags amidst the skeletons of buildings which we broken like surrealist sculpture.

Another important work, Gadgets, 1947, done in two versions, reflects the increasing importance of machines

in the post-war industrialization period, as well as what he perceived was the insidious threat of human

metamorphosing into machine.

Legaspi spent many years as magazine illustrator and artistic director in advertising agencies, while he took

time in between his work to do paintings. In 1963 he held a one person show at the Luz Gallery. This marked

the beginning of an active phase with major pieces, such as Chiaroscuro, in which rocks and stone quarries

become his central image and symbol and in which structure is the predominant concern. Spatial depth is

suggested by the darker tonalities of the recesses in the granite rock that half conceals organic forms, like

curling fetuses, embedded within, In these and subsequent works, Legaspi strove towards an artistic language

based on the integrity of shapes and figures that would convey an entire range of values, from strength to

sensitivity, power to grace, dynamism to lyricism.

In 1968 Legaspi finally left advertising to devote his time to painting. His subsequent works significantly

modified the cubist idiom by rhythmic curvilinear lines and planes contrary to the angularity of the original

style. From 1974 onward his paintings became more chromatic, sometimes even effulgent with color; layers of

transparent passages create prismatic effects Figures dynamically cut through space in gestural movements.

Light enhances color and form or dematerializes and dissolves them into airy transparencies, creating

resonances in space. The human figure, in its well articulated muscular and structural frame, increasingly

becomes an eloquent vehicle for expression, while a plav of contrasts ensues between organic form and

geometric structure, transparency and solidity, the flexible and the inexorable, tensions that generate the vitality

of Legaspi's arts. In 1976 Legaspi did a number of multilayered paintings on wood panel to give actual depth

and shadows to the illusion of spatial movement. He has also done a large diptych with a crucified torso

spanning the two panels; the graffiti of the times are scattered ever the wall like background.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Legaspi paintings that deal with universal human experience, such as The

Survivor. These large, heroic canvases, done in his dynamic style, convey the surging, straining movements

of human beings in aspiration, struggle, and triumph. Aside from being dramatic metaphors of human

condition, they are also visual correlatives of inner moods. The "biota" imagery explores organic and visceral

movements beneath the surface where human beings are one with nature, woven of the same tissues as the

trees. The images of struggle and nightmare transpose onto the imagery of art the emotional tensions of

everyday that seek resolution in dreams. In 1978 Legaspi held a big retrospective show at the Museum of

Philippine Art, Ten years later he held a major three-part exhibit, including the Jeepney series in which the

dynamism of the imagery bring together the spatial and temporal dimensions, dream and reality, the past and

the present.

Legaspi's awards from the Art Association of the Philippines are: fourth prize, Sick Child, 1948, first prize,

Gadgets, 1944; fourth prize, PIanters, 1949; and third prize, Ritual, 1951. He won first prize for Stairway to

Heaven in the Manila club Art Exhibition in 1949. His Symphony won an honorable mention award in the

Manila Grand Opera House Exhibition in 1950. He received the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinagan award from

the City of Manila in 1972. He received the Gawad CCP para sa Sining award from the Cultural Center of the

Philippines in 1990. He was proclaimed National Artist in painting in 1990.