Cesar Buenaventuras greatest achievement is that his paintings were known as unofficial "Ambassadors of Goodwill" for the country in the visual arts. Hundreds of living rooms abroad display his works. In the 50s and 60s, Peace Corps volunteers, American Embassy employees, US servicemen and their wives, as well as tourists and several Hollywood actors picked out a Cesar Buenaventura nine times out of 10, including Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and George Montgomery. They enjoy his paintings of glorious sunsets, grand fleshed-out cloud formations and three-colored skies. The most popular being a sallow monochrome that is hard to duplicate. His paintings had a mood, certain quietness that a Buenaventura collector can spot from a distance.
Unlike his father, who was a distinguished UP professor or his brother Teddy Junior who had taken formal studies in art at UP before the war, Cesar did not study art in school. This was because his father opposed to the idea of having two sons competing in the same field. It was only at the old mans retirement when Cesar finally received formal instruction from his father. As it turned out, Cesar surpassed the skill and fame of both father and brother.
Eventually, Cesar became a protégé of Fernando Amorsolo who had complete confidence in his talent. So, when he had large or important commissions, he would invite the latter to help him as an Amorsolo manchador, an apprentice who "stains" the silhouette of the master painter. Amorsolo was a classicist whose general "backlighting" was in fact a type of European light. Like Amorsolo, Cesar could create illusions of detail by the use of color. A single shade was made up of a great number of intermediate shades mixed by instinct.
It was an honor to be on Mabini. The studios of early graduates of the premier art schools in the country such as the University of the Philippines and the University of Santo Tomas were located here. The ones with credentials were: Gabriel Custodio, Simeon Saulog, Ben Alano, Oscar Navarro, Antonio Dumlao, Edward Perrenoud and Felix Zablan. Those who had formal art schooling among the younger second generation artists were Serafin Serna, Elias Laxa, Romeo Enriquez, Roger San Miguel, Leonardo Zablan and Teodoro Junior, Cesar Buenaventuras elder brother. The works of all of these respectable painters are in the collections of 800 paintings of Atty. Jovenal and Punay Fernandez.
"Like a demarcation line that assured who ate and who starved, making it on Mabini at the time was the gauge, the yardstick for success," Stangl concluded.
No one has ever recorded the history of this tainted "sister" in its entirety. But the life of its brightest star, Cesar Buenaventura, will explain much about it.
The colony of artists on Mabini started with the old giants known for their classical mastery. Cesar was younger than these men, but he stole the thunder from them, so to speak. In the late 50s, and all of the 60s and 70s, his works alone in their own bracket commanded the best prices and the surest sales.
After his death, Mabini fell into seediness and has never been quite the same again. He represented all that it was, good and bad, noble and ignoble. At his death, the art world on Mabini almost ground to a halt.
This is Cesar Buenaventuras greatest contribution to Philippine art helping pave the way for a future generation of modernists.
Lyd Arguilla and the progressive, avant-garde P.A.G. artists had a hard time, in the beginning to get collectors to buy their modernist works.
The reason Cesar managed to do it gradually and more successfully was because Cesar had a gift for versatility. At a moments notice, he could swing like a pendulum from realism to expression or to full abstraction with equal knack.
On the international scene, Cesar Buenaventura was the most well-known landscape painter of the country from after the war until his death in 1983.