Cesar Torrente Legaspi
Cesar Legaspi on April 2, 1917 in Tondo, Manila (1917–1994) is a Filipino National Artist awardee in painting. He was also an art director prior to going full-time in his visual art practice in the 1960s. His early (1940s-1960s) works, alongside those of peer, Hernando Ocampo are described as depictions of anguish and dehumanization of beggars and laborers in the city. These include Man and Woman (alternatively known as Beggars) and Gadgets'. Primarily because of this early period, critics have further cited Legaspi's having "reconstituted" in his paintings "cubism's unfeeling, geometric ordering of figures into a social expressionism rendered by interacting forms filled with rhythmic movement".
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Early life
A National Artist in painting, Legaspi was the son of Manuel Legaspi and Rosario Torrente. He was married to
VitalianaKaligdan with whom he had five children. His daughter, 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 thenpursued 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