Crucifixion

"Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, three years before Manansala was born. It took another thirty-nine years before Manansala had a meaningful encounter with the revolutionary style. Cubism then became the generating force of Manansala's mature works, the stylistic centre of his main oeuvres. It was not a master-following relationship --it was like extending the premises of a tradition. Cubism did not curtail the dimension of Manansala's vision. He enriched the style and gave it a new context. Above all, he gave it a new sense of place." (Rodolfo Paras-Perez, Manansala, manila, 1980, p. 75.)

It is no doubt that Cubism freed Manansala's vision from the genre tradition of direct transcription of nature as well as supremacy of emotion of Abstract-Expressionism. It provided the artist with a visual idiom to continue working in the figuration mode, articulating new ways to record the Filipino images which remained one of the essential elements of Manansala's cubist works. It is apt to say that Manansala 'indigenised' Cubism in the Philippines folk or common everyday subjects. By utilising an adapted form of Cubism when images were transposed into geometric multi-faceted forms on continually shifting and over-lapping planes. For Manansala, Cubism did not necessitate a complete disfuguration, in place was a respect for the integrity of the natural forms of the subjects only to be viewed from pluralistic perspectives.