CHRONOLOGY

Ángeles Villalba Salvador

This text has been published in the catalog of the exhibition by the artist Fernando Zóbel, held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. It should go with the following reference: VILLALBA SALVADOR, ÁNGELES: "Cronología Fernando Zóbel", in VVAA: Catálogo exposición ZÓBEL, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Ediciones Aldeasa, Madrid, 2003, pp.205-236.

Ángeles Villalba Salvador received her doctorate from the Faculty of Geography and History, Complutense University, with a thesis on “Fernando Zóbel. Vida y Obra (1989)”. She is currently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Communication Sciences Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, Madrid.

1924 On August 27, Fernando Zóbel, son of Enrique Zóbel de Ayala, a Spanish industrialist and Art patron born in Madrid, Spain, and Fermina Montojo y Torróntegui, (native of Galicia, Spain) is born in Manila (Philippines), Fernando Zóbel bears Spanish nationality. He belongs to a family of good financial and social position, whose roots in the Philippines go back ten generations. The family is involved in the world of real estate and industry. Fernando Zóbel embarks on his primary education in the Philippines, where he also learns English, which will become his second language. At the age of seven, due to a back ailment, he is bedridden for almost a year.

Because of the nature of his father’s work, the Zóbel family is constantly on the move and Fernando Zóbel spends his childhood in a variety of places: The Philippines, Spain and the rest of Europe. The family moves to Madrid, where Zóbel attends the school, Colegio del Pilar. He is forced to leave on account of a respiratory disorder and is sent to a Swiss school where his studies consist mainly of French, Italian and German. In 1936, the Zóbel family returns to the Philippines.

1940 Just as he completes his secondary education at Brent College, Baguio (the Philippines), the Second World War breaks out, preventing him from leaving the islands. He registers in a preparatory course in medicine at Manila’s University of Santo Tomás, where he will continue as a student until the Japanese invasion of the Philippines at the end of the same year.

1942 Zóbel is forced to abandon the university when the Japanese start to set up their prisoner-of-war camps on the campus. He starts to suffer from a problem in his spine and is taken to the National Orthopedic Hospital, where he spends almost a year on an orthopedic bed. He starts to paint.

“For a whole year, I was bedridden. I had all the time in the world to think and it was then that I started to consider the idea of becoming an artist..” ¹

The Japanese army seizes the Zóbel home in Manila and Fernando and the family move to a country house situated in Calatagan, about 160 km from Manila, in the province of Batangas. They remain there until the war ends in the early days of 1945. As circumstances prevent him from carrying out any activity, he spends these years engaged in reading and reflection.

“It was as if, all at once, the clock had stopped ticking. There was nothing to do. I devoted my time to reading and thinking. This came in very handy because, when the war ended and I was able to go to university, I discovered that I had already read most of the books that were on the syllabus.” ²

1943 Death of his father, Enrique Zóbel de Ayala³.

1946 In January, he goes to Harvard University to study Humanities. As soon as he arrives in the United States, he buys a box of oil paints, which he starts to use without any specific academic guidance. At the end of the academic year, he remains at the university for the summer, attending advanced writing classes in English and reading works by García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Proust (Du côté de chez Swann and À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs). He spends a weekend in New York, where he goes to see an exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work at the MoMA. He translates García Lorca’s first farce, El amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, into English and illustrates the manuscript with drawings in which the characters appear as caricaturised puppets, just as Lorca describes them by means of the written word. These drawings are his first known plastic work.⁴.

At the end of this year, he meets painter Reed Champion and her husband, Jim Pfeufer, a lecturer in the Fine Arts. He forms a close friendship with both of them. They enlighten him about pictorial creation and in them, he finds both drive and artistic guidance as he begins his career as a painter. Of the works he paints from 1946 to 1949, only two survive, as he would destroy most of them in 1951. A las cinco de la tarde (1946) and Arlequín, La luna y Pierrot (1947) are his first paintings, in which he again uses Lorca’s poetry as his point of departure. Both paintings show the influence of Picasso’s Blue Period and synthetic cubism. Copies of Van Gogh and Verrocchio are also to be found among these early works.

1949 In May, he completes his degree course with a dissertation on the plays of García Lorca. Titled Theme and conflict in Lorcan drama, the dissertation is awarded a magna cum laude. Although it is his intention and wish to prolong his stay at the university, family pressure forces him to return to the Philippines⁵.

Once he is back in Manila, he starts working at Ayala, the family business, about which he knows little and is not too interested in finding out more. His poor knowledge of corporate affairs is the perfect excuse for registering at the Harvard Law School and, in September, he returns to the United States. After two months at the Law School, he decides to leave:

““To think things over, as I have some time to spare. Winter. In autumn, I have never found Harvard more beautiful or more remote. Another planet. Something has snapped or got lost within me. This school [Harvard Law School] is crushing me. The idea of two more years is too much. I have no time to breathe. It’s awful to live through whole days without doing anything that I really want to do, when all I have to say is, ‘This is far as I go’ (…).” ⁶

At the end of the year, he starts working at the Harvard College Library’s Department of Graphic Arts as assistant to Philip Hofer, then the curator of engravings and graphic arts.

“Really,” Zóbel remarked years later, “the reason why I worked as bibliographical researcher is that, at the time, I was taking up painting seriously. I had contacted several painters in Boston and it was in my interest to stay a little longer in that atmosphere and carry on learning, and this bibliographical research enabled me to do so.”⁷

         

NOTES

1.  Fernando Zóbel in the interview conducted by Armando Manalo, “Fernando Zóbel, a virtuoso of paint”, Pace, Manila, March 24 1972.

2.  Fernando Zóbel in the interview conducted by Joaquín Soler Serrano in A fondo con..., TVE, 24 de diciembre de 1979.

3.  Although his father dies when Fernando Zóbel is only 19, both his mark and that of Fernando’s grandfather, Jacobo Zóbel Zangróniz, will be reflected in some aspects of his personality and in the generous, supportive attitude he showed towards the world of art throughout his existence. His grandfather, Jacobo Zóbel Zangróniz, a numismatist, archaeologist, palaeologist, writer and polyglot (he spoke 11 languages), was a full member of the Royal Academy of History and Mayor of Manila. In addition to introducing the islands’ first tram and bicycles, he founded the first library in the Philippines. He is also the author of two major studies, the first of which concerned ancient Spanish coins and was published in 1877 with the title, Estudios históricos de la moneda antigua española desde su origen hasta el Imperio Romano; and the second, a numismatic manual, Manual numismático, published in 1879. Both works are considered to be indispensable sources of reference today. Fernando’s father, Enrique Zóbel, was a leading figure in the Philippine industrial and commercial worlds (he founded the first porcelain and glass works and also the first insurance companies, apart from creating pharmaceutical, distilling and fishing concerns and fostering the urban development of large areas in Manila and so on). At the same time, he was extremely active as a lover of art and culture (while reading Mining Engineering at the Sorbonne in Paris, he attended painting classes with Louise Glieze): he was the driving force behind the construction of Manila’s Metropolitan Theatre, his house became an artists’ salon, he was the patron of painter Fernando Amorsolo and he funded archaeological digs. So as to perpetuate cultural ties between Spain and the Philippines, in 1920, he established a literary award known as the Zóbel Prize and, in 1924, was a founding member of the Academia Filipina, correspondent of the Real Academia Española (The Royal Academy of the Spanish Language).

4.  This manuscript is at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

5.  “What nice projects await me if I manage to stay. An article on Hooghe followed by that very necessary work; a study of seventeenth-century art. Then I could spend my time studying other worthy painters, unfairly forgotten: Gustave Moreau, Jacques Bellange, Adolphe Monticelli, Ensor, Mariano Fortuny, Néstor Martín de la Torre and so on. I discover another engraver, a disciple of Callot: Della Bella. A touch too impulsive but extremely good and tremendously prolific. What a life, to live surrounded by books and paintings, painting and writing! Hitch: To whom can I offer half of this life of a delighted monk? And with what money? On its own, it is of no use.” Fernando Zóbel. Cambridge, May 11 1949.

6.  Fernando Zóbel. Cambridge, November 21 1949.

7.  Fernando Zóbel in the interview conducted by Joaquín Soler Serrano in A fondo con ..., Televisión Española, December 24 1979.

         

1950 At the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Zóbel finds an engraving workshop where he experiments with all the techniques: in addition to oil and watercolor, he draws with all kinds of pen and tries his hand at etching, dry point, boxwood engravings and xylography. He remains with the department until 1951, during which time he puts collections in order, undertakes bibliographical studies and helps organize the engraving classes. He thus commences the didactic activities which will become fundamental both in his personal life and in his artistic career. He gives his first lectures: one on French printing techniques, another on illustrated books ⁸, and a third, on items which, generally speaking, fail to arouse the collector’s interest ⁹.

1951 The painters to influence him most in this first stage are Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine, John Marin and Rattner ¹⁰. Of all of them, however, Boston-born Bloom becomes his main reference point in these early years of self-training. His admiration for Bloom leads to a close friendship which would have turned into a master-student relationship had Zóbel not finally rejected the idea.

“It occurs to me: –on this point, Zóbel writes– what a good idea it would be to go on earning nothing and persuade Hyman Bloom to teach me how to paint. I think he would treat me like a student. I’m practically sure. But 1) if he tries to involve me in aspects of pure technique, I might very well get bored. 2) At this time, when I’m living off other people’s kindness, I don’t have the nerve to earn nothing, however little that might be when I can.”¹¹

In his early paintings, apparently religious in theme, there is an undertone of fierce social criticism, not without a touch of satire. By and large, they are characterised by a symbolic romanticism, a profound poetic sentiment and surfaces rich in matter and color.

Not long afterwards, he takes part in his first collective exhibition at Boston’s Swetzoff Gallery, together with Jack Truman, Hyman Bloom, Karl Priebe, George Montgomery, Celo Lambrides and Edward John Stevens, among others. One of the pictures on display at the exhibition is Pez (1951). The sketch for this first painting may be seen in the first volume of his notebooks ¹². The same year, he takes part in another exhibition, Original prints, held at the same gallery. Zóbel’s engravings are exhibited alongside those of other artists like Vlaminck, Klee, Bresdin, Chagall, Lautrec, Rouault, Picasso, Cézanne and Feininger.

During this period, Zóbel forms a close friendship with William Bond, the manuscript curator at the Houghton Library, and with William Bentick Smith, curator of books of calligraphy and ornaments and director of the Harvard Allumni Bulletin. Every week, Bond and Smith organize a lunch, attended assiduously by Zóbel. Other guests include poets and bibliographers (Jacob Planck and the man who would later become director of Sotheby’s New York, Robert Metzdorf) and top members of the university’s staff. Throughout this and the following year he does graphic illustrations for the Harvard Allumni Bulletin, a publication designed for Harvard graduates. His drawings consist of a series of ironic caricatures portraying aspects of student life on the university campus.

When his stay at Harvard comes to an end, he goes to Spain on holiday. There still exist two notebooks about this trip, containing highly descriptive, detailed drawings of everything that draws his attention: amongst other things, typical Spanish figures, bullfighters, ceramics from Toledo, Talavera and Puente del Arzobispo and traditional houses in some villages of Gerona, Albarracín and Guadalupe ¹³.

At the end of this year, he returns to Manila, where he starts working at Ayala, the family business. So as to find time to paint, he gets up early and also spends every weekend in front of the easel. Correspondence with his friends in the American artistic world is frequent and intense.

1952 Return to Manila

From his return to Manila until 1961, the year he moves to Spain permanently, he lives a double life in which he combines his work in the corporate world with his work as an artist (painting, research, classes, patronage, writing, publications…). He joins a group of young people who exhibit at the Philippine Art Gallery. During this period, his best friends are painters Arturo Luz, Hernando Ocampo, Anita Magsasay-Ho and Vicente Manansala and writers Rafael Zulueta da Costa, I.P. Soliongco and Emilio Aguilar Cruz. He takes part in a collective exhibition, the Annual watercolour exhibition, held by the Art Association of the Philippines, and also exhibits a watercolor on plywood, Stultifera Navis (Ship of fools), in the First anniversary exhibition at the Philippine Art Gallery. Now fully integrated in Manila’s most up-to-theminute artistic circles, Zóbel soon becomes involved in the debate arising among the young painters of the moment about the relationship between the new art and tradition and the cultural identity of the Philippines. He publishes three articles on the subject, all of which are extremely enlightening about the artistic moment lived by Zóbel at that time. The articles are entitled: Pintura moderna en Filipinas (Modern painting in the Philippines), Art in the Philippines today and Filipino Artistic Expression ¹⁴.

He joins the Art Association of the Philippines. One of his first projects at the association is the publication of a book on the history of Philippine art from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Published in 1958 with the title, The Art of the Philippines, the book satisfied a pressing need in the sense that very little had been written on the subject. At Manila’s University of Ateneo, he gives a course titled The appreciation of art, aimed at postgraduates.

1953 He is elected President of the Art Association of the Philippines.

First individual exhibition: Exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints, held at the Philippine Art Gallery. At this exhibition, he presents a series of works in which he abandons his Bostonian symbolic and romantic themes for Philippine themes revolving round local customs and manners. Here, he addresses intimiste, street themes on the one hand and religious themes on the other. Generally speaking, the works are conceived as surfaces filling up with flat, vivid colors where, at times, traditional perspective completely disappears and, at others, highly subtle spatial references combine with two-dimensional spaces and figures. Matisse’s influence is of significance in these figurative works, which are characterised by a glossy texture where thick, black strokes prefiguring the gestural content of later works are sometimes superposed on the masses of color. On the occasion of this exhibition, he publishes an article about his work method, entitled Methods of Philippine Contemporary Painters. He writes:

“My approach is a deliberate one. Possible subjects are hastily jotted down in ink, sometimes in watercolor. I do this constantly, anywhere. If the subject shows promise, I do drawings, sometimes quite large ones. In a drawing, I try to work out, as completely as possible, some aspect of what I conceive as the finished painting. Its color scheme, for instance, or its composition, or a part of it. Normally, I accumulate as many as thirty drawings and perhaps fifty sketches before I even touch the final painting. In the case of my Bodegón antillano, I prepared for over three years. The final painting is not copied from the sketches. I approach it as an entirely new problem with its own individual rules and solution. The value of preparatory work is that I have committed most of my mistakes beforehand; I have with me a kind of mental file. This permits me to work rapidly on that final painting. I try to finish it within a week at the most. If I don’t, I am likely to start what is, in effect, a new painting on top of the old one and the process might stretch out into eternity. Also, by working rapidly, I can conserve a certain freshness of execution that I feel essential to the finished work. The public should see no evidence of hesitation or experiment. After all, a painting communicates, in a sense, as much as speech, and no good speaker will be caught rustling papers, coughing or stammering (…).” ¹⁵

The same year sees his first attempts at abstraction in his painting, as in Reflected Sunset (1953) and Barco frutero II (1953). As he finds such endeavors to be lacking in meaning and also somewhat incoherent, it will not be long before he abandons the idea. He destroys these paintings and returns to the Filipino theme. Some of his first efforts are presented at the collective display, First Non-Objective Art Exhibition at the Philippine Art Gallery and at the II Spanish American Biennale, held in Havana (Barco frutero I, Barco frutero II and Bodegón antillano (1953).

He is awarded first prize by the Art Association of the Philippines for his painting Carroza (1953) at the semiannual painting contest.

1954 Manila

Second individual exhibition, 12 paintings by Fernando Zóbel, at Manila’s Contemporary Arts Gallery. A success with both public and critics, who refer to him as being at the forefront of the current of renewal in Philippine art. He continues with the Filipino theme, further enhanced by the use of oil on canvas. At the Philippine Art Gallery, he takes part in the collective exhibition, 16 Artists. His work is also displayed at the VII Annual Exhibition held by the Art Association of the Philippines.

For a second term, he is elected President of the Art Association of the Philippines.

He does the mural paintings for one of the chapels in the Forbes Park Church in Manila, dedicated to the memory of his father. The murals are inspired on the Catalonian Romanesque paintings of Tost, Seo de Urgel and Ribas. In Manila, he publishes a selection of his drawings: Sketchbooks. Fernando Zóbel. The book contains an essay by Arturo Rogerio Luz, an introduction by Emilio Aguilar Cruz, a sonnet dedicated to Zóbel by Zulueta da Costa and a technical description and annotated index by the artist.

At the beginning of the year, Zóbel, weighed down by the idea of living two utterly different lives, undergoes a personal and artistic crisis, from which he will recover in 1955, when a new painter is born after a year in which he again travels to the United States and then to Europe.

Providence, Massachusetts

In October, he starts at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he has been invited to stay as a resident artist. He obtains the post with the help of his friends, James and Reed Pfeufer, who have taken up residence in Providence. His main activity at the school consists of learning engraving techniques. James Pfeufer, who holds engraving classes on Rhode Island, teaches him the techniques of lithography, how to make the trimming, borders and edging for books and how to master the art of engraving in general. He also attends painting, drawing and architecture classes, in addition to devoting a large part of his time to reading in the school library. In Providence, he paints several landscapes with thick textures and vivid colors, and also the odd portrait. Abstract expressionism goes down well in America and has tremendous influence on the artistic ambit.

First individual exhibition in the United States, at Boston’s Swetzoff Gallery, where paintings executed in the Philippines are displayed. At the end of this year, he is “bedazzled” on discovering the work of Mark Rothko, who was not very wellknown at the time, at an exhibition titled Recent Paintings by Mark Rothko, held at the Providence Museum. On display are the works in which the artist arrives at the formula that characterizes his painting: huge, horizontal blotches of color completely flooding the canvas. Fascinated and disconcerted by the eloquence of these enormous, totally abstract paintings, Zóbel visits the exhibition every day. At the same time, his friend Ronald Binks introduces him to the possibilities of photography, which, with its direct images, satisfies his desire to reproduce the themes to which he is drawn. These two discoveries lead him to reconsider his painting and, for a whole year, he strives to find his abstract pictorial language. A few months later, in Granada, Zóbel recalls these paintings by Rothko and writes:

“No need for painting here. They did it with architecture. With every single refinement, I can think of Rothko again. Also hide-and-seek. But you must sit on the floor. It is absolutely essential. You should suspect the alabaster basins by their reflections. And by their sounds. No place to count fish. Or to count anything for that matter. Arithmetic quantity is any form treated as a rather amusing joke. This is for the senses: eye, ear and nose, like those specialists. If you insist on counting, vertigo will take over. Deliberately. And everywhere, a caricature of symmetry. Symmetry that doesn’t quite work. Hidden surprises at the edge of the boredom; a toy for hot afternoons. The square as a ruling principle; in other words the blank shape, the neutral, the canvas. The rest is tension under a veil of languor. It appears that every floor has been soaked in blood at one time or another. This too communicates. Also the hole at the horizon, showing green and little leaves, surrounded by every wall conceivable, inviting you to forget all this tiresome handwork and take a jump (…).”¹⁶

1955 Providence

Exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art: Paintings by Fernando Zóbel and by Elias Friedensohn. He takes part in the III Spanish-American Art Biennale, held in Barcelona. Here, he represents the Philippines, along with painters Nena Saguil, Luis Lasa and José Joya. During his stay on Rhode Island, he makes the most of every minute of his time: he travels frequently to Harvard and to Boston, where he visits Hyman Bloom’s studio; he goes to Yale University Museum (Connecticut) to see the collection of Société Anonyme organized by Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier; and he visits New York on a regular basis to see exhibitions. Zóbel is fortunate enough to experience firsthand one of the greatest moments of North American art and witness the birth of abstract expressionism. On one of these lightning trips he organizes for the purpose of going round the galleries, he visits exhibitions of Boston painters Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine, Giacometti, Picasso and Mathieu at the Kootz Gallery. In the course of these months, he visits the American painter of Philippine origin, Alfonso Ossorio, at his house in East Hampton (New York), where the two of them talk until well into the night about painting and the fact of being an artist. The conversation has a great impact on the young Zóbel, who was, at that time, in the throes of a profound change of existential and artistic direction. About this, he wrote the following:

“ (…) I spend most of the night talking with Alfonso Ossorio; in fact, between the two of us, we finish a whole bottle of Scotch and I get to bed at 4.30 in the morning. We talked mainly of painting and of being a painter. The gist of his remarks, repeated over and over again with variations and a kind of anguish: ‘Don’t let them stop you.’ He lives and paints at high pitch, burning the candle at both ends. He is spending and living on his capital (…). Loathes compromise, any attempt to popularize. ‘Art must be difficult to see, difficult to understand, difficult to own.’ Ideally, he would like to see people forced to choose between buying an automobile and buying a painting. About 10 years older than I, unquestionably good, with a desperate, Dostoyevskian sort of goodness. Completely generous. Completely humourless. Inflexible and full of pratfalls. Completely committed to his art, which, for him, is an extension of religion. Gorgeously out of touch with reality. Commands respect and grudging admiration. His work, now almost completely abstract, is full of technical ingenuity and bright color. It is profoundly cold, contradicting its surface appearance of emotion. Forced and contrived, it rewards only the intellect, not the eye, and fails to convince.”

Alfonso’s house, the old Herter estate, is magnificent. The exterior, pleasantly dingy and unkempt, a side giving on to a lake with swans. The interior is dazzling white, clean and bare. Any number of rooms without furniture; just white rooms hung with paintings: Clyfford Still, Pollock, some thirty Dubuffets, Alfonso’s own work. In the bathroom, an early De Kooning. The guest rooms are festooned with gruesome bric-àbrac from the Société d’Art Brut collection that he formed with Dubuffet and André Breton. Depressing and depressed objects are made out of human hair, leads, bits of wool. Pinkings from asylum waste baskets and garbage cans, chosen for their careful unpleasantness. Downstairs, a glassed-in pergola with a mauve Victorian lampshade, tropical plants, and a Giacometti figure on the piano. ¹⁷

DDuring the months at the Rhode Island School of Design, he continues with his research in the field of bibliophilism and publishes two articles. The first is about an eighteenthcentury manuscript titled Historia de un ruidoso desafío, by Don Francisco Xavier de Santiago y Palomares. It belongs to the collection of the Department of Graphic Arts at the Harvard College Library ¹⁸. Y el segundo, con un tema más general, sobre los libros ilustrados por artistas ¹⁹.

Europe

In April, his stay on Rhode Island comes to an end and he goes on a three-month tour of Europe with his friend, biologist John Moir. First he goes to Paris, then to Spain (Úbeda, Ronda, Mérida, Granada, Seville, Madrid and Gerona) and lastly, to Italy, where he visits Florence, Ravenna and Venice, amongst other places.

In Madrid, he discovers young Spanish painting at the Galería Fernando Fe and visits the studio of Benjamín Palencia. On this, his first contact with Spanish painting, Zóbel writes:

“I met Guillermo Delgado during his show at Fernando Fe. (…) His pictures, uncompromisingly abstract, show a process completely under control, completely ‘worked out’, unlike the abstract expressionists. A classical undertone. From a distance, some of his things could pass for Zurbarán’s still lifes. There were several other abstract painters of roughly the same age. I remember Luis Feito and Canogar. All, without exception, seem to be on the defensive. (…) I bought one of Delgado’s pictures. I surprised him by not haggling over the price. He confessed later that it was his first serious sale. Prices are high in Spain but actually painters seem to end by giving their pictures to friends.” ²⁰

He meets Gerardo Rueda who, from then on, will be one of his best friends. On June 19 the same year, after a party organized by Rueda as a way of introducing him to other painters, Zóbel writes the following about these initial contacts:

“Gerardo’s studio is no longer a secret hideout. It was full of people drinking wine and eating omelettes. The Isabel girls (Isabel Montojo and Isabel Garrigues), the Feduchis – making sure that there was enough for everybody and that dishes got washed. Wouldn’t let the men help, which still surprises me after America. I agreed to swap paintings with Gerardo. In many ways, our heads operate in the same manner.”

On the same trip, he strikes up friendships with Luis Feito, Guillermo Delgado and Antonio Lorenzo.

Manila

On returning to Manila, he keeps in touch with his colleagues in Spain by letter. He abandons figuration and tries to synthesise the luminism of Rothko, the matter painting of Feito and Burri and the calligraphy of Kline and his own drawings. He destroys most of the works produced in this period.

By studying the artistic objects to be found in the countless churches scattered over the islands, Zóbel continues with his research into the expression of the specifically Filipino in art. For the purpose, he focuses on an area to the north of Luzón, in Ilocos, where he comes across a number of religious images and votive offerings in a sixteenth-century church. Two years later, he publishes an article on the subject, entitled Silver ex-votos in Ilocos.²¹.

He publishes an article on the American and European art he has seen during his holidays: Art abroad: an impression ²².

1956

Individual exhibition, Fifteen paintings by Fernando Zóbel at the Philippine Art Gallery. This exhibition of abstract works causes some surprise and has relatively little success, except among painters. In these early abstract paintings, we find above all influences of American abstract expressionism, of Pollock’s dripping, of Willem de Kooning and especially of the gestural painting of Franz Kline

He goes to Japan on a business trip related to his job at Ayala. He takes lots of photographs, especially of the temples and sand gardens (a bamboo garden, the Temple of Rioanji and its sand garden in Kyoto, the stone gardens of the Daisen Temple). About all this, he writes:

“With Dan to an out-of-the-way, moss-colored garden. (…) All the huge trees are here, but in miniature. An equivocal effect, mildly soothing, mildly crying, and, in the long run, quite irritating. The cement wastebaskets made to look like tree trunks also bother me. The Japanese is neither Buddhist nor Christian. He is entirely of this world. He accepts death as a blank finality. Poverty is another matter; he evades it by transforming it into an aesthetic principle. Elegance and poverty fuse into shibui: the first is purged, the second, dignified. (…) Private life remains an enigma. At any rate, it remains very private indeed.” ²³

After this trip, Zóbel has his house refurbished on the lines of a Japanese aesthetic.

Together with artists Cobb, González, Hillsmith, Sherman and Zerbe, he takes part in the exhibition, 6 Contemporary Painters, held at the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield. He also takes part in the photography exhibition at the Philippine Art Gallery in Manila

He is invited by Manila’s University of Ateneo to give a course on the history of art during the academic year of 1956-57. The lectures are a success and there will be further courses on a range of subjects (contemporary, Chinese, Japanese art and so on) until 1961, when Zóbel returns to Spain for good. As a result of this academic experience, he makes friends in the new generation of Philippine and North American intellectuals: painters Lee Aguinaldo and Roberto RodríguezChabet, poets Emmanuel Torres and Leónidas V. Benesa, architect Leandro V. Locsin and his wife, Cecilia Yulo, and Tessie Ojeda, who would later become the wife of Arturo Luz and the director of the gallery of the same name. He also strikes up a friendship with the young archaeologist and engraving specialist, Roger S. Keyes, and his future wife, Keiko Mizushima, a paper restorer and expert in Japanese engraving.

He is appointed Honorary Cultural Attaché at the Spanish Embassy in the Philippines. Through this appointment, Zóbel, in conjunction with UNESCO, obtains scholarships enabling Philippine painters to go abroad. People travelling to Spain on these scholarships include Arturo Luz, Legaspi, José Joya, Nena Saguil and Larry Tronco.

Lecture on present-day Philippine art: Modern Art in the Philippines, at Manila’s Rotary Club.

He publishes an article on Gerardo Rueda ²⁴.

1957 Individual exhibition: Zóbel, an exhibition of new paintings, at the Philippine Art Gallery. The abstraction of his painting evolves towards the expression of movement. He embarks on a long series called Saetas, where, as he would tell Rafael Pérez-Madero years later, the theme is “movement expressed metaphorically through the use of line. The movement of leaves, blades of grass, trees, birds, people; movement observed, sensed, never imitated, but, I hope, translated.”²⁵ In Saetas, inspired on the Japanese sand gardens he had visited the year before, fine calligraphic lines are superposed on colored backgrounds where he tries to reflect Rothko’s luminism.²⁶ After countless experiments, the technical problem entailed in using oil to produce a fine, long, controlled line is solved by the use of a surgical syringe. This instrument, which he will use constantly from now on, bears a close relation to the pen with which he produces his sketches and drawings. There are many volumes filled with these drawings, constituting a manner of visual diary taking us through the evolution of his painting.

Invitation to the Zóbel exhibition held at the Philippine Art Gallery in Manila, 1957. ²⁷.

1958 Exhibition Zóbel. Paintings / Schneidam. Sculptures at the Philippine Art Gallery, Manila.

He starts working on an archaeological dig on an estate belonging to his family on the peninsula of Calatagan. The work is continued by the National Museum of the Philippines under the supervision of Dr. Robert B. Fox. A huge number of china pieces are discovered, prompting Zóbel to broaden his interest in Chinese art in general and Chinese painting and calligraphy in particular. In the course of time, he will become a great connoisseur of the subject. On Zóbel’s initiative, the objects found at the site are donated to the National Museum. As a result of this experience, until 1960, he attends classes in Chinese technique, where he is taught by a Shanghai painter, Professor Ch’en Bing Sun. In a letter to his American friend, Paul Haldeman, he writes:

“I learn to read (not speak) and write Chinese. I love this; a new world, a new way of expressing thought, so different that it affects the very quality of thought. An ideal exercise for the painter – if you can control a Chinese brush, surely you can control anything. (…) To fill in the blanks, I am preparing a series of 30 lectures on Chinese and Japanese art. But what a wonderful way to force oneself to learn something to get organized. Do send me some postcards of oriental things.” ²⁸

He is appointed honorary curator of the National Museum of the Philippines.

In October, he takes a year’s holiday and sets up his residence in Madrid. His house is located on Calle Velázquez, number 98. From this year onwards, he shares a study with his friend, painter Gerardo Rueda ²⁹. He forms friendships with Saura, Sempere, Chirino and Antonio Magaz. He commences the collection of Spanish abstract painting which will later form the basis of the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art (Museo de Arte Abstracto Español) in Cuenca.

1959 Individual exhibition at Madrid’s Galería Biosca. This is his first individual exhibition in Spain and is also the first time that Juana Mordó, the director of the Galería Biosca at the time, has held an exhibition of an abstract artist’s work. The exhibition consists, on the one hand, of Saetas and, on the other, a new series of black calligraphic pictures on white, known as Serie Negra, which will not be completed until 1963. Antonio Magaz Sangro’s book on these works, Zóbel. Pinturas y Dibujos, is published ³⁰.

Zóbel takes part in the exhibition, Negro y Blanco. Exposición homenaje a Chillida, Oteiza, Miró-Artigas, Tàpies y Palazuelo, at Madrid’s Sala Darro. At this exhibition, Zóbel identifies with the Spanish painters of his generation and this will be one of the reasons why he decides to leave the Philippines and the world of business to devote himself entirely to painting.

He returns to the Philippines, although his artistic activity continues to be based in Spain. He works as managing partner at Ayala; he paints, teaches and carries on with his archaeological studies, but his thoughts are in Spain. At the end of the year, Zóbel summarizes this difficult and complicated period as follows:

“Some attempt must be made to pick out the shape of the past year. So many things have happened; (…) Spain, by contrast, is a blast of light. It completely fills the vacuum. (…) Friends: Gerardo and Manolo rediscovered. New ones: an odd kind of spiritual twinship in Tony Magaz; the human richness of Antonio Lorenzo; the hard intelligence of Saura. (…) Even the delight in walking the streets and hearing the sound of Spanish. The sound of home. Perhaps this is the important thing: this recognition of home. If one must lose oneself, this is where I want to be lost. Through all the ornaments, through the ease of English prose, I recognize myself in the last analysis as a Spaniard. And all the rest is just a tale. (…) I find myself inside the painting of Spain; I’m one of the gang. Accepted as such by the others who are, on the whole, my friends. I rejoin them at the moment of discovery, when we begin to attract attention. I see this happen before my eyes: Tàpies covered with cash and glory from the Venice Biennale, Feito established in Paris, Saura in everyone’s hair (?), Canogar reproduced in full color in French art magazines, startlingly well, and I become a part of the government tours of other countries: Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia, South America. The point is proven, at least on that level. I am an established painter, whatever that means. The real discovery is the possibility of a way of life.” (Manila, december 1959).

He participates in absentia in a travelling exhibition of Spanish painters, La joven pintura española, which is taken, among other cities, to Basel, Freiburg and Munich.

         

NOTES

8.  In 1995, during his stay at the Rhode Island School of Design, he publishes an article on this subject: “The artist and the illustrated book”.

9.  Zóbel makes the following reflection about the third lecture: “Prof. Jackson rejects my thesis that the ugly may, from a sociological point of view, have as much value as the lovely. Or rather, to be clearer, he rejects my idea that it is something worth collecting. I can think of lots of ugly things that now are lovely: sixteenth and seventeenth-century books, all baroque, just as Gothic once was ars barbara. And all the lovely things that now are ugly: Rafael Sanzio, Aubrey Beardsley, that fool Meryon, Ribera. Who knows? I’ll keep silent. His point of view is correct: we have to keep the best. But the best, the best? What for? (…)” Fernando Zóbel, Cambridge, December 20 1950.

10.  However, the young painter’s gaze knew no limits. At the Harvard Fogg Museum, it was Greek sculpture and Chinese painting; at the Museum of Modern Art, the work of Soutine; at the Metropolitan, archaic bronzes and mediaeval armour; at Boston’s Fine Arts, Rubens and El Greco. According to his writing, his favorite painters at that time are also Rembrandt, Georges de la Tour, Rodolphe Bresdin, the Germans of the DanubeSchool and Samuel Palmer.

11.  Fernando Zóbel. Cambridge, March 8, 1951.

12.  After he starts painting at Harvard, we find that Zóbel’s work can be traced along two closely connected paths: on the one hand, his notebooks and, on the other, his work in oil. In order to understand the complete dimension of this artist (painter, researcher, drawer, engraver, photographer, teacher, patron, collector, writer, bibliophile, cosmopolitan and tireless traveler), a highly cultured man of sober but exquisite taste, it is essential to trace his artistic path through the notebooks catalogued and dated between 1950 and 1984.

13.  Cuaderno Zóbel. Filipinas 1951-1953 (F.Z.M. 4), dated June to September 1951 and in Cuaderno Zóbel. Filipinas 1951-1953 (F.Z.M. 5), dated September to March 1952.

14.  “Pintura moderna en Filipinas”, Mundo Hispánico, January 1953; “Art in the Philippines To-day”, Liturgical Arts, Vol. 21, nº 2. Manila, September 1953, pp. 108-109; and “Filipino artistic expression”, Philippine Studies, Vol. I, nº 2, Manila, September 1953, pp. 125-130.

15.  Fernando Zóbel in AAP Bulletin, Manila, October 1953.

16.  Fernando Zóbel, Granada, 1955.

17.  Fernando Zóbel, East Hampton, March 13 1955.

18.  “A Calligraphic Duel”, in Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. IX, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1955.

19.  “The artist and the illustrated book”, in Spectrum, Vol. V, nº 1, Providence, Massachusetts, 1955.

20.  Fernando Zóbel, Madrid, June 10 and 11 1955.

21.  Philippine Studies, Vol. V, nº 3, Manila, September 1957, pp. 261-267.

22.  In AAP Bulletin, Manila, 1955.

23.  Fernando Zóbel, Japan, 1956.

24.  In Five paintings by four Spanish painters, Vol. VI, nº 1, Ed. Art Association of the Philippines, Manila, January-February 1956, p. 27.

25.  In Rafael Pérez-Madero, Zóbel. La Serie Blanca, Ed. Rayuela, Madrid, 1978, p. 19.

26.  “My paintings in motion are closely related to oriental painting. The series, Saetas, was inspired on Japanese sand gardens. All those lines, painstakingly drawn with a rake, give off a disturbing effect”. Zóbel in the interview conducted by Armando Manalo: “Fernando Zóbel: a virtuoso of paint”, Pace, Manila, March 24 1972.

27.  In Philippine Studies, Vol. V, nº 3, Manila, September 1957, pp. 261-267.

28.  Letter from Fernando Zóbel to Paul Haldeman, dated December 6 1959. The letter is at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

29.  “The dazzling studio that I share with Gerardo becomes a point of departure. We grow shells like a nautilus. This one is white, with plants and paintings of friends, Gerardo’s glass from La Granja, Greek and Roman coins, books, Chinese potlets and Tanagra figurines, iridescent bottles from the Roman East. (…)”Fernando Zóbel. Manila, December 1959.

30.  Madrid, 1959. 54 pages, 10 plates in black and white. Several reproductions of drawings intercalated in the text.

         

1960 He takes part in the collective exhibition, Before Picasso. After Miró, at New York’s The Solomon R. Guggenheim

Trip to Tokyo.

He gives a course on Chinese art and another, on Japanese art at Manila’s University of Ateneo. His tremendous generosity and constant support of art are again noticeable on this occasion, when he donates the money he is paid for the course to the university library for the purchase of collections and reproductions of key paintings in the history of art. ³¹.

In the years elapsing between 1955 and 1960, Zóbel realizes that Spain is an intellectual, sentimental and pictorial synthesis of what he has been seeking all his life. This awareness throws him into a state of endless anxiety about his life as an artist. As he combines this with his work at the family business, he becomes the inevitable victim of an identity crisis, coupled with a deep depression. Although he tries to overcome this by painting frantically, he finally contracts an alarming disease of unknown physical cause. In December of this year, Zóbel dismantles his office at Ayala and, after 10 years of trying to reconcile his artistic life with the life of a businessman, he decides to go and live in Spain and devote his entire life to painting.

1961 Individual exhibition at the Luz Gallery, Manila. The gallery has been opened this year by his friend Arturo Luz and is soon to become the leading gallery in the Philippines. The exhibition is on a large scale and is a huge success. It marks the end of a stage.

He moves to Madrid for good. Individual exhibition at Sala Neblí, Madrid. At both exhibitions, he displays pictures from Serie Negra (1959-62), black calligraphies on white. As there is no longer any color, the vibrations caused by the contrast of one or two colors disappear while the artist succeeds in suggesting direction, speed or volume by means of the sweeping strokes of a dry brush across the black calligraphies. As for technique, he avails himself of a syringe, going over the canvas with generous strokes which form angles or deliberately open up on the bare white. This use of black and white leads most of the period’s critics to look on him as an informalist painter. However, unlike other painters such as Saura, Millares or Canogar, Zóbel meditates, observes and studies; he does not trust his hand, the improvised gesture, and such an attitude cannot produce a clamor, a paroxysm or an indictment. Zóbel detaches himself from art informel, as he explains clearly and concisely in a text where he defines his painting in Serie Negra:

Painting of light and line, of movement. Pictures of a swift, improvised execution, like Chinese and Japanese painting. Improvisation permitted by a studied and infinite number of drawings. Line; trajectory. Imprint of movement. Painting without any fuss, without anguish, without any melodramatics. Traditional, yes, but of the ‘other’ Spanish tradition. Of the Velázquez tradition standing in opposition to the Goya tradition (by which no contempt is meant). Of the same Velázquez who attaches as much value to theInfanta as he does to the dress she is wearing and the curtain behind her head. The painter neither gives an opinion nor makes a judgement: he just acts. ‘A statement’. There is gratitude. Awareness of just how much painting has been done. Abstract, to be more precise. Perhaps out of modesty. And out of a lack of interest in foodstuffs. And through attaching too much value to things, which isn’t the same as attaching value to the way they look. Privacy. The armchair by Matisse that so shocked the Russians. Court painting? In any event, a smile. And he’s not always ironic. And why not?” ³²

In the course of the previous ten years in the Philippines, his interest in archaeology, religious sculpture and contemporary Philippine art had led him to form excellent collections in the three fields and as a final touch to his acts of patronage on the islands, he donates the collections to Manila’s University of Ateneo. The collections will be used to create the Ateneo Art Gallery in June of this year. The paintings in this collection ranged from figurative styles to abstraction and included works by some of the leading Philippine artists of the time, such as Arturo Luz, Vicente Manansala, José Joya and Hernando R. Ocampo ³³.

He publishes an article on Philippine porcelain: “The first Philippine porcelain” ³⁴.

1962 Manila’s University of Ateneo grants him the honour of becoming the university’s first doctor honoris causa. He is also awarded the title of honorary director of the museum.

He takes part in a number of collective exhibitions outside Spain, including two of particular note: Modern Spanish Painting at London’s Tate Gallery (the exhibition poster is a reproduction of Zóbel’s Colmenar) and the XXXI Venice Biennale, where he meets Gustavo Torner, amongst other painters ³⁵.

In Madrid, he participates in the exhibition, Cinco pintores: Sempere, Rueda, Manrique, Vela y Zóbel at the Galería Neblí.

Trip to Chicago. With his friend Mike Dobry, he visits the Chicago Art Institute to see an exhibition of paintings from what is now the Museum of the National Palace of Taipei (formerly the Forbidden City), Taiwan. ³⁶.

About this exhibition, he writes:

“Went with Mike Dobry to see the Gu Gong paintings being shown at the Art Institute. The Song landscapes are much bigger than I thought. The reproductions I knew, being much reduced, gave no idea of the amount of calligraphy involved. I thought that came later. (But content lords it over form. Rembrandt and Velázquez would have felt at home; especially Rembrandt). The Qing ‘scholarly’ paintings, presumably at their best, continue to look sloppy and weak. Am I missing the point? Or are they, as I suspect, primarily framed autographs by mysterious worthies playing parlour games with a brush for each other’s benefit? After all, many of us are doing much the same. Some of the results look terribly inept though, I suppose. The footnotes are all there, terribly amusing to those who can spot them.

Fan Guang “travelers” tickled into gigantic existence, the artist intent on his theme, using the brush stroke as a means, not an end. Mike draws my attention to Xu Daoning’s Fishing on a snowy river. Crisp, decided; calm emptiness. A Japanese emptiness, but without sugar. After a while, the tart and, further, the tasteless, always seem the best. In a sense, how little there is to all this; these flimsy works surrounded by the logorrhoea of the centuries. By contrast, our Louvres and Prados seem dense, heavy, full of furniture and gesticulation. The Chinese world is full of privacy. These works, never intended for a public showing, have an embarrassed look. Assaulted modesty (…)” ³⁷ He travels to Venice to attend the inauguration of the XXXI Biennale and also to Rome. Back in Madrid, on July 20, he writes the following:

“It’s almost a week since Gerardo [Rueda], Alfonso [Zóbel] and I came back from Venice. It’s taken me a week to get organized again. I’m finding myself clumsy. My painting, which contains a certain element of virtuosity, forces me to practice it almost every day; the gaps are noticeable. From the trip itself, I have kept about three hundred sketches. The Biennale is a kind of slave market where one smells and is smelled. Too much of pictures. I didn’t manage to see them all. I think I didn’t manage to see even half. I might say the same about the Spanish Pavilion. It looked like a shop window on Calle Hortaleza or Calle Fuencarral. My stuff looked good against the black walls. Its simplicity stood out in the midst of all the panoply. I’ve been offered exhibitions in NY, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco (Feingarten, Bodley), in Rome (La Salita, Don Quixote), in Naples. They seem to be a lot, too many. (…) Manessier, for political reasons and unjustifiably, walked off with first prize. Giacometti, justifiably, walked off with the sculpture prize. His pictures deteriorated greatly in the period from 1957 to 1959. For me, the best things about Venice were the Jean Paul Riopelle and Hundertwasser Pavilions. The latter took me completely by surprise. As we Spaniards had nobody to defend us before the panel, we left empty-handed. (…) President Segni, tired and distinguished, a figurehead in a morning coat, surrounded by clamorously decorative civil servants and military officials, visited each pavilion and came out with an immortal phrase for each artist. By the time he came to my pictures, he was worn out after so much talking and sliced the air with his hands as if he were a plane taking off. He evidently sees things more clearly than many critics. (…) The best thing about the Biennale is Venice. That enormous toy. (…) Anything that can be said about Venice has already been said. It is being worn away by so many eyes looking at it. (…) We go back to Rome, looking at all the fountains that appear in our path. (…) Wonderful retrospective exhibition of Mark Rothko. New colors, vibrant and sombre. The best pictures I see from start to finish of the trip are, with the exception of a Bonnard in Venice, a female nude in front of a mirror of twisting, sizzling colors. In Italy, all is color. I feel this great urge to buy a box of watercolors and mess around a bit. To paint with glaze. Also: the small Etruscan bronzes at Villa Giulia are marvellous. I draw wherever I go; in Venice, Tintoretto, in Rome, fountains and water. I buy myself a bronze Roman lantern, a sestertium of Lucio Vero, a cut gemstone from the eighteenth century, an engraving of two girl’s faces by Renzo Vespignani. (…)”

In Madrid, he moves to another house and study at number 12, Calle Fortuny. He starts engraving with Dimitri Papagueorghiu and becomes actively engaged in etching with Antonio Lorenzo. About his engraving activities, he writes frequent letters to his North American engraver friend, Bernard Childs. He travels to Paris with Antonio Lorenzo and Gerardo Rueda. October. Visits to the Louvre, some galleries and his friend Bernard Childs, who gives them an engraving session. Childs is the friend to influence him most, the one to show him the secrets and problems of inks, plates, paper, etc.. ³⁸ About his visit to Childs’ studio, Zóbel writes:

“Antonio and I watching Childs engrave. He’s impressed by Antonio’s etchings – ‘only two weeks’. An interesting detail: The time Bernard spends from inking the plate to finally passing it through the screw press is two and a half hours. He wastes no movements. He inks with a spatula and cleans with a piece of newspaper. In the inking process, it’s as if he were painting each plate. There is nothing more pleasurable than watching somebody do something he knows how to do really well. When inking a plate, Bernard uses his head more than most of the painters that I know use theirs when they’re painting a picture. (He doesn’t like etching, he finds it indirect). When we leave the studio, we’re in a daze, our heads bursting, and we go to Charbonnel to buy materials”.

This anecdote is completed by the one told by painter Antonio Lorenzo in the prologue to the catalogue of his graphic work. He tells of how he became interested in engraving as a result of the trip to Paris with Zóbel. “It was not until 1960, during a trip to Paris with Fernando Zóbel and Gerardo Rueda, that I became interested in engraving. It happened in the Paris study of North American artist Bernard Childs, an old acquaintance of Zóbel’s. We became friends. I showed an interest and he let me soak the paper and turn the shafts on the screw press… Bernard Childs initiated me, and Zóbel, who was also there sometimes – he would spend the day hunting for books and engravings – and was aware of my weaknesses, acted as tempter by rushing me off to Charbonnel to buy inks, scrapers, punches, polishers and lots of other things, rounding off our purchases with a small screw press. We dismantled the shafts and put it in the boot of the car.” ³⁹ On his way to Manila, where he usually goes for Christmas, he stops off at New York. He makes this journey in the year when pop art is at its height in the United States. While he is there, Zóbel visits the historic exhibition, New Realisms, at the Sidney Janis Gallery. He writes of it as follows:

“Super exhibition at the Janis. Super catalogue. Everything’s super except the objects. I found them forced and boring. At Wittenborn, I see a book: Do-it-yourself collages. Critics think that modern art has revolutionized publicity art. It’s the other way round.” ⁴⁰

One year later, on November 17, 1963, he writes on the subject again

“Pop art feeds off the advertisement, the photograph, vulgarity. To my mind, this double digestion is excessive; the first is quite enough. The rasping sensation produced by the pile of cans of soup is something I feel and have felt perfectly without needing Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol to show me. (But it’s an art for the public). They’ve got the wrong idea with this fashion game. You have to look for the other, the thing that doesn’t change, the thing that serves. What they’re doing here is a kind of tickle.”

His visits to the Prado are constant. He unfailingly carries his notebook with him so as to study and analyze the paintings of the past with his pen. As his visits are long, he applies for a Prado copier’s card so that he may sit and draw in comfort. ⁴¹ He develops an interest in bullfighting (there are countless bullring drawings and observations in his notebooks). He collects Spanish blue and white ceramics from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries and silverware in the Spanish baroque style.

Fernando Nuño exhibits his photographs of artists in the Sala del Prado at Madrid’s Ateneo, including some taken of Fernando Zóbel while painting.

Zóbel started to buy works by Spanish painters of his own generation in 1955. Between then and now, his still small collection includes works by Antonio Saura, Gerardo Rueda, Luis Feito, Guillermo Delgado, Antonio Lorenzo, Manuel Millares and Eusebio Sempere. At the end of the year, before setting off for the Philippines, Zóbel mentions the “Toledo Project” (the future Museum of Abstract Art) for the first time. This is his first idea about what to do with his collection of paintings by Spanish abstract artists.

“I leave reluctantly. I say goodbye to Antonio [Lorenzo] and Gerardo [Rueda]. We talk about the Toledo Project.” (Madrid, November, 27, 1962).

This year witnesses the completion of Serie Negra with Ornitóptero (1962).

1963 The years elapsing between 1963 and 1975 constitute the longest stage in Zóbel’s painting. This year, he returns to color and slowly, the siennas, dark browns, ochres and greys start to appear, as in works like Atienza, Armadura III and Pancorbo. The theme of memory, hinted at in previous series, begins to take shape in this new stage, in which Zóbel, by means of forms, objects and imagination, seeks “to remember in pictorial terms”, as he himself put it. In the prelude to this colorist stage, Zóbel develops the idea of painting based on the memory of the experience lived, a concept whose literary equivalent is to be found in Marcel Proust’s great work, À la recherche du temps perdu. About Proust’s influence on his work, Zóbel is very clear when he speaks of Homenaje a Patricio Montojo (1963), now in the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español:

“I have always been struck by the part in Côté de chez Swann where Proust describes a walk round Cambray – a walk in a country and a time which aren’t mine initially but become mine in the end; to put it another way, as I read, I recognise, with a strange, inexplicable nostalgia, the relish of my own childhood. On another occasion, over two years ago, I think, I decided to try a kind of painting based on memory; by this, I mean a climate painting, leaving the viewer to complete it with his memories. The realist focuses on that loaf of bread, that flower. I’d like to create a climate in which the bread, the flower, were born of the viewer’s imagination. There is something of this in Homenaje a Patricio Montojo: I discussed this at length with Toni Magaz last night. It’s not that it’s about a naval battle. Obviously, the picture is an abstract composition. But, from my point of view, as I use elements exterior to the picture, and from Toni’s, who contributes personal elements quite similar to my own, it is clearly a naval battle. An educated North American would probably see it as a scene from Melville. This morning, Rubio Camín turned out a landscape of plateaus (figuration always proves clear, bordering on the most extreme realism. However, it varies from person to person, the plateau as clear as the battle). The painting establishes the climate, ‘in the order of’, as Torner would say. The viewer completes it with his subjective experience, which, for me, translates into a battle (complete to the last detail with lights, the floating tree, gunpowder on the water) and for Camín, it translates into a plateau (rocks, parched plants, mists, a shepherd’s cottage and so on). Ortega’s definition of the cannon: ‘You take a hole and surround it with iron…’ etc. (The picture as a hole filled by the viewer. I provide the iron that gives shape to the hole). Retrospectively, previous works fill out with meaning: El Faro, La primera amapola and so on. A complete scenario of painting opens up; an approach as yet untried. Subjective painting (until now, rendered subjective by the painter); now aimed at the viewer. Painting as a mirror. I’m expressing myself badly because I still don’t have a clear idea about the limits and possibilities. All this will fall into place with time.” ⁴²

Exhibition of drawings at the Galería Fortuny, Madrid. A book of his drawings is published: Zóbel. Dibujos, drawings, dessins, with a text by Antonio Lorenzo⁴³.

As the year elapses, the idea to install a painting collection somewhere outside the four walls of his Madrid home begins to take shape. With this view in mind, in April, he goes to Toledo with Gerardo Rueda, but fails to find anything satisfactory. A few days later, Gustavo Torner invites him to spend the day in Cuenca to show him his house and take him round the city, along with José María Agulló, Rafael and Carmen Leoz and Juana Mordó. In June, the museum project starts to develop when, through Gustavo Torner, the Mayor of Cuenca offers him the possibility of installing his collection in the building of the “Hanging Houses” (at the time, the houses are being renovated and no decision has been taken as to their future use). On seeing the houses, Zóbel does not hesitate. On June 16, after visiting the “Hanging Houses”, he writes:

“Two days in Cuenca with Torner and Lorenzo. The mayor, Rodrigo Lozano de la Fuente, goes out of his way to help us and find solutions. We take a look. A magnificent museum could be installed in the “Hanging Houses”. 20 to 30 years paying a nominal rent and the pictures are my property. The buildings are handed over to me ready for use but, from then on, expenses are on my own account. (…) I see it as a good proposition, a nice thing to do and it saves me from spending nearly a million pesetas on a house. I can use that money to buy pictures. The best idea would be to encourage painters to come and spend the summer here. You have to make the most of your opportunities as they arise. Otherwise, regret sets in.”

The fact that there is now a space to house the collection affects decisions as to its content and, from now on, Zóbel will consider it necessary to have a more complete representation of Spanish artists belonging to the abstract generation. He selects the works and always asks the artist to give his opinion. As he accepts neither gifts nor donations, he is in a position to act quite freely. He usually buys the works directly from the artists, although he sometimes goes to the galleries, or exchanges his work for that of the artist, or the artist produces a work specifically for the museum. He then forms a team with Torner and Rueda, who will be responsible for adapting the museum’s spaces and installing the paintings. In July, Zóbel takes up residence in Cuenca. In September, he starts work on the museum. Full of enthusiasm about the museum project, Zóbel writes to his American friend, Paul Haldeman (October 4 1963):

“My big project is a Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in the city of Cuenca – two and a half hours from Madrid. In the renowned “Hanging Houses”, which the kind-hearted, forwardlooking local corporation has let me rent for thirty years at something like 1.50 dollars per annum. How nice fo everybody! I have a feeling it is going to turn into one of the loveliest small museums in the world. As I will be owner, director, curator, acquisitions committee, patron, board of trustees and dictator, I rather think I shall have a lovely time. My life’s ambition: a final club with only one member – me. (There will be room for only about 40 paintings but they shall hang with all the glamour that my fervid jeweller’s imagination can devise).”

In October, he buys Sarcófago para Felipe II (1963) by Manuel Millares, one of the museum’s most important works. After visiting the artist at his studio, he writes:

“The other day, Manolo Millares called me. He’d heard about the museum and he told me that he had a couple of pictures he wanted me to see before Pierre Matisse arrived, because he likes them and, above all, he would like one or two of them to stay in Spain. I went with Gerardo after lunch. (…) He tells me that, after painting, his greatest interest is archaeology. We see the paintings. An excellent triptych built round bottoms and corsets, an allusion to the Profumo Case. To me, it seems a bit of out of character for Millares and, what’s more, it is far too clichéd. I prefer the other one, a huge diptych depicting a sarcophagus, the body of Felipe II, or whatever. For all the poor quality and coarseness of the matter, it is astonishingly elegant. The difference between pop art and Millares is that Millares takes an aesthetic approach, he composes. The shock is not the issue; it is more like a tip or something of the sort. He himself says: ‘I haven’t the slightest interest in neo-Dada.”

One year later, he buys another work from him, an arpillera (a technique whereby scraps of fabric are appliqued onto a hessian backing) titled Cuadro, which is reproduced in the first catalogue Zóbel publishes for the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in 1966. Also in 1963, he buys two works from Manuel Rivera, Espejo de duende and a landscape.

This year, he concludes his research into Philippine art and publishes in Manila an impeccable study titled Philippine Religious Imagery, about Philippine images painted, sculpted or modelled during the period of Spanish domination from 1565 to 1898. In this study, Zóbel reaches the conclusion that, beyond any doubt, the best area in which to study the existence of a Filipino style with its very own characteristics is colonial statuary.

Lectures: one titled El renacer de la pintura española, on the rebirth of Spanish painting, at the Colegio de Leyes del Ateneo de Manila, and another about the Eastern painter, El mundo del pintor oriental, given at a course organized by the Cátedra San Pablo, Madrid.

1964 He rejects the offer of the Professorship of History of Art at Mills College, Berkeley (California)

Individual exhibition at the Luz Gallery, Manila. He also works on a series of etchings at the studio of painter Manuel Rodríguez, in Manila. In Madrid, individual exhibition at the Galería Juana Mordó, inaugurated this year by the gallery owner of the same name. It is his first exhibition in Spain after his return to color.

Trip to New York to participate in the Spanish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair and to finalise the details for his exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, to take place the following year. This is a year of intense activity at the museum, with acquisitions, trips, visits to studios and so on. In a remarkably short time, Zóbel succeeds in drawing a good number of artists to Cuenca, all of whom are enthusiastic about the idea of the museum. By Easter of this year, in addition to Antonio Saura and Gustavo Torner who actually live there, Gerardo Rueda, Manuel Millares, Manuel Hernández Mompó and Amadeo Gabino have studios in the city. And Zóbel writes:

“Mompó arrived yesterday to stay at the house. Millares and Serrano went the day before. Escassi is staying with Ángeles Gasset. I saw Greco and Adriansens on the street. The place is full of painters. It is also just plain full”

This year, he buys a number of works from José Guerrero, Gustavo Torner and also from Manuel Hernández Mompó, who executes Semana Santa en Cuenca expressly for the museum. The inclusion of Chillida in the collection is another of the objectives for this year. Through Antonio Saura, the two artists meet in Cuenca in May and Zóbel asks him to make a piece for the museum. ⁴⁴. At the end of this year, Chillida tells Zóbel that he has completed the sculpture for Cuenca: Abesti Gogora IV (1959-1964). ⁴⁵.

With regard to this sculpture and his conversations with Chillida in various encounters, Zóbel writes about the quality of the Basque artist’s thought and work with extraordinary lucidness:

““Chillida, as friendly as ever, tells me that the sculpture is ready. It’s big. A point of departure for an even bigger one. Maeght doesn’t charge commission so we get it for half the normal price: about 350 k (this may be cheap for a Chillida, and indeed it is, but it nearly used up all my resources). From the photograph, you can tell that it’s made of wood, compacted with that strange way of not missing a single detail, so characteristic of Chillida. He’s been turning it over in his mind for three years. (…) From a very early age, Eduardo has wanted to become an artist. The biggest problem he had to face was giving up the architecture degree course he’d started. He didn’t want to upset his family but in the end, he found himself forced to abandon the course halfway through. He was talking about the days when he used to play football and about his reputation for ending all the matches in a fight. He has no cuttings from this period of glory and his children (eight of them) can hardly believe him when he says that he played for Real Madrid. (…) He works slowly. His ideas spring up as he works. He’d been working on Abesti Gogora IV for Cuenca since 1961 and finished it just a couple of months ago. Once the work is finished, he doesn’t mind parting with it; he knows it by heart (with Manolo Mompó, on the other hand, it’s an entirely different matter. Taking a drawing away from Manolo is like pulling out one of his teeth (…).” “Eduardo Chillida is here for the Canada Cup. He loves golf. He game to dinner with Pili plus Lorenzos. He felt like talking and talked steadily and rather beautifully until two. Mainly, it was Antonio and myself who kept prodding him. In Paris, the two horrible years between figuration and abstraction where he worked every day and could get nothing done. At one point, he decided to return to figuration to recover his footing and found, to his horror, that he no longer knew how. Panic. He walked the Quais for hours – at one point, he remembered stopping in front of a shop window full of clothing – dummies, and telling himself, ‘At least the man who made those knew what he was doing.’ He decided that perhaps Paris was pushing him out of shape, and he returned to Hernani, recently married, short of funds, the future a complete fog. The lowest point of his life. He suspected that he had burnt himself out as a sculptor
Those drawings of hands. He didn’t do them while he was sick; what he did when he was sick was a whole series of squiggly Indian ink abstractions drawn with a Chinese brush. (…) My Abesti Gogora, the first of the series; his first sculpture in wood. It took years to finish, with many pauses and false completions. It used to be much larger than it is now. ‘The heart is still the same, anything superfluous has to be removed. The sculptor does not see in the same way as a painter does. He looks at things deeply. If he were doing your portrait, he would cease to see a profile. He would focus on the centre of your skull and from here, from within, the forms would issue forth.’ Dismisses Calder, Henry Moore (…). Likes Giacometti, Lippold. A passion for Medardo Rosso. Told me to check out a virtually unknown, older Spanish painter in Paris, named Fernández. Virtually unknown. Very honest. I asked him to send me photographs or something. We got to talking about people who write about art. Started translating from Lin Yutang’s collections of Chinese excerpts. He was fascinated. ‘I must have something Chinese somewhere inside my body.’ His own favorite is Gaston Bachelard. Those bearded youngsters look down their noses at him; most of the time, they don’t have the slightest idea what he is talking about. Bachelard wrote the introduction to Chillida’s first catalogue. Chillida moved heaven and earth to meet him; once they’d met, there was a meeting of minds almost instantly. Chillida merely wanted permission to quote from Bachelard; ‘mais nous sommes frères!’, said poet to that and wrote the presentation. (…) Chillida never makes models, he draws to establish the mood, then lays the drawings aside and attacks his final materials directly. He tried working from a model once and the results were disastrous. (…)”

He publishes an article about Gerardo Rueda in Manila ⁴⁶, 6 and also in this year, writes the prologue to the catalogue for the exhibition of the Johnson collection, Arte actual USA. This exhibition is organized by the Directorate General of the Fine Arts and is held in Madrid, at the Casón del Buen Retiro.

1965 A short trip to Manila, where he prints a portfolio of 24 small etchings, Libro de horas, at Manuel Rodríguez’s workshop, and gives the lecture, Philippine Folk Art.

He travels to New York on the occasion of his individual exhibition at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery.

Individual exhibition at the Galería Sur, Santander. Once he has decided to set up the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca, his trips to this city are constant; for years, it will be on the road and in the city that he will find most of his themes for landscapes, as in Tarancón (1964), Balcones (1964), Carretera de Valencia (1966) and many others which he will paint in the course of time. Little by little, the city and its surrounding area take possession of the painter and Cuenca fills his notebooks, his pictures and also his writing. In April, back in Cuenca after visiting Manila and New York for the purpose of his exhibition, he writes:

“As we drive, tensions uncoil. New York seems infinitely remote. I begin to feel like myself again after we pass Tarancón. Flat, cold light with clouds. Felled trees on both sides of the highway for a widening that may take a decade to come. The almond blossoms are gone and the poppies have not yet come; spring on the verge of its second wind. Slowly, my appetite for the shape and color of the meseta reawakens and I begin to feel like a painter again. I haven’t really touched a brush in almost three months.”

Trip to Barcelona in October, with Gerardo Rueda and Gustavo Torner, to visit Tàpies at his studio and buy a major work from him for the museum. Zóbel had already reserved Grand Equerre at the Stadler Gallery in Paris, but he wants to know Tàpies’ opinion on the matter. In the end, in accordance with Tàpies’ opinion, this is the work he chooses.

1966 Death of his mother, Fermina Montojo y Torróntegui.

Individual exhibitions at the Galería Juana Mordó in Madrid and Galería La Pasarela in Seville, where he gives alecture about the Spanish abstract painting of the Cuenca Museum, Pintura abstracta española en el Museo de Cuenca. Zóbel paints little while the works at the museum are going on. He hangs but two of his pictures: Ornitóptero (1962) and Pequeña Primavera para Claudio Monteverdi (1966).

Inauguration of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español of Cuenca on June 30. The following day, he writes the following about the event:

“Simple inauguration: Governor, Mayor, the President of the Council, Rodrigo Lozano de la Fuente, Fernando Nicolás and some local newspapermen. I asked Rodrigo to open the door (visibly shaken, surprise and delight), which he did with considerable difficulty, using the big iron key decorated with a purple ribbon. The museum looked beautiful, everything apparently in place. The officials were delighted. We had a cordial and very late dinner, full of ponderous compliments. My feet had swollen and throbbed. I slept like a log. The morning at the museum was quiet. We taped an interview for radio and T.V. The Edurnes came from Madrid and mainly we just sat around, chatting, occasionally going to listen to the comments of the sprinkling of visitors. I had invited nobody, on purpose, so that nobody could claim later on that they had been left out. Therefore, the groups that arrived from Madrid in the afternoon came simply because they felt like coming. There were almost fifty for dinner: Juana Mordó and, of course, the Edurnes, Manuel and Mari Rivera, Manolo and Elvireta Millares, Carmen Laffón, up from Seville, Jaime Burguillos, a sprinkling of Ruiz de la Prada brothers, Lucio Muñoz and Amalia Avia, Paco López Hernández, Antonio and Margarita Lorenzo, the Paluzzis with a young girl painter from Chicago, very attractive in a yellow shawl and a Cordovan hat, Martín Chirino and his wife, Alberto Portera and his wife, Isabel Bennet, Eusebio Sempere, Macua, Fernando Nuño, Gerardo and so on and so on. Nuño took a great photograph of the whole group, festooned along the stairway. The group’s visit to the museum was a great success.”

A catalogue is published, with an introduction by Fernando Zóbel and black and white photographs by Fernando Nuño of some of the works. On the cover of this, the first catalogue, there is a photograph of the “Hanging Houses” at night. In 1973, Ricard Giralt-Miracle designs a dust cover for the catalogue, showing a photograph of the Blassi brothers, who will work with Zóbel on most of his publishing projects. At the museum, a number of young artists play a part, including Jordi Teixidor and José María Yturralde, also Nicolás Sahuquillo and Ángel Cruz. By this time, the museum has about 100 works, 12 sculptures, about 200 drawings, engravings and posters and several books, illustrated and engraved by Spanish artists. It is not a didactic historical collection, nor is it a comprehensive representation of Spanish abstract artists. ⁴⁷, firstly, becaus financial efforts have their limitations ⁴⁸ and secondly, because a private collection is made in accordance with the collector’s taste and involves

“a way of seeing as opposed to chance and whim.”

Zóbel is made Member of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise for the creation of the museum and is also named Member of the Order of Isabel the Catholic.

1967 With his return to color, Zóbel starts to produces series of paintings, and one of the first to appear in this new stage is Diálogos, dialogues with paintings, the conversations he has, pencil, pen or brush in hand, with works by other artists. In the main, these conversations take place during his trips, at museums and exhibitions, and are always recorded in some way in his notebooks. They reflect the world surrounding the painter. The works of other artists become a subject for study, for he never copies but contemplates, analyses, interprets, disarranges and rearranges so as to build in his own way (light, movement, color, gesture, intention). During an interview several years later, he explains the significance of this series within his work:

“I think this series will last all my life, until the day I depart this world. The idea behind Diálogos is to speak of art with art, but with the brushes at the ready. I stand before a picture I like and I prefer to communicate with that work by painting too. It’s a way of seeing and doing painting and will become a constant in my life, because it’s a pleasure and I see no reason to stop practising it… When “I speak” in these dialogues, I concentrate on one facet and the result is not an imitation but a comment. In plagiarism, more often than not, it’s the style that’s imitated and when I establish one of these dialogues, I can’t remember a single instance where the other painter’s style has been the subject of the dialogue.” ⁴⁹

His interlocutors are many: Braque, Morandi, Rembrandt, Lotto, Poussin, Tintoretto, Adriaen Coorte, Saenredam, John Singer Sargent, Bonnard, Turner, Monet, etc. With each of them, the conversation is different. For instance, with Degas and Manet, the topic of conversation will be color; with Turner and Monet, chromatic values. About Tintoretto, with whom he holds several dialogues, there are countless drawings throughout his notebooks. When writing of the St. George in London’s National Gallery, he says:

“Each goes his own way: he expands and contracts like a boa constrictor’s poison gland. The unquestionable ‘s’ in raspberry pink, a cloak echoing into a cloud. An ‘S’ that is always pulled in opposite directions, along a staircase of horizontal movements. The saint throws himself upon the dragon (later to be stolen by Gustav Doré), which will inevitably send him rolling down to the water, together with his cardboard horse. With his lance, he presses a spring to release that well-fed virgin in a gesture somewhere between dread and that of a chubby angel bearing tidings of glory. The body, for instance, might serve to reinforce the diagonal movement and the obedient tree finishes it off. In all of Tintoretto’s work, there are a couple of superposed pictures; at times, they are even contradictory. Here, the theme is not convincing, the gestures even less. The gesture, however, is. I’m referring to the gesture of the painter. And it’s a strange picture – and part of any. It is no mean task to give life to a series of horizontals. It’s rather like trying to destroy a commonplace. Kandinsky, who sought to convert his collection of commonplaces into language, would have objected to this series of rebel horizontals and illogical colors (the warm ones marking out the distance within the cold ones). A dialogue in three steps crossing the whole picture (three squares), starting with the Christ and finishing with the water vanishing to the left. Contained within an oval frame, but it is precisely inside the frame that action takes place. The viewer does not stand IN FRONT, he goes round and comes in from the back. It’s a bit like a picture turned back to front. As if we’d been allowed in with a special pass provided by someone with connections. The plebs – invisible – remain on the outside, in the area of the classical arch.”⁵⁰

The opening of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español draws the international press and, around this time, many articles about the museum are published (Time Magazine, Architectural Forum, Herald Tribune, Studio International, London Telegraph, Gazette des Beaux Arts, etc.). The museum is visited frequently by specialists, curators and artists. Of particular note is the visit of Alfred H. Barr, the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). On January 1 1967, Zóbel writes the following about Barr’s visit:

“More visitors: Carlos and Charo Reim, Javier Reim, Teixidor with girlfriend, Yturralde with wife and baby. Around noon, Jean Bratton turned up with Alfred Barr from the Museum of Modern Art and his wife. Quiet, elderly, very charming and intelligent. (…) Barr saw the place slowly, taking notes. At the end, he asked if he had time for a second round. He did, so he started again at the beginning and repeated the whole tour. Lunch at Sempere’s. Barr leaned over and whispered that he and his wife thought it the most beautiful museum they had ever seen. I asked him if he would repeat that. He said yes, and repeated it aloud. The crowd cheered and we made him honorary curator on the spot. More singing, dancing and so on. The Barrs were obviously enthralled. Barr asked me to help review their Spanish collections at the MoMA. I offered to help fill the gaps.”

From this year onwards, Rafael Pérez-Madero will work alongside Fernando Zóbel as secretary, administrator and assistant in all the projects concerning his work and the museum. In addition to working on a publication about his painting, La Serie Blanca, and a short about his work, after his death, he took over management of his work and organized most of the exhibitions, including this one.

Lecture on the two currents of Spanish abstract art, Las dos corrientes del arte abstracto español, at Cuenca’s Casa de Cultura.

1968 Individual exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York.

At the end of the sixties, Zóbel’s work grows more geometric while, generally speaking, his style becomes colder. In this sense, it reflects the harshness noticeable in nearly all the artistic currents of this decade. In these works, spaces are built by means of lines drawn in pencil, broken lines and impeccable perspectives. Trapeziums, rhombuses and cubes articulate the composition by means of an architectural framework. Series on themes relating to Cuenca start to appear – La fuente, La calle estrecha –, themes alluding to Seville – Conde Ibarra – and themes from classical painting, such as the six dialogues with Pieter Saenredam (1968) and the seven conversations with painter Adriaen Coorte (1968). The essence lies in the practice of developing a theme gradually by means of lots of pictures, drawings, sketches and photographs. After Zóbel’s exhibition at Seville’s Galería La Pasarela the year before, this city starts to form part of his life. In Seville, he becomes a very close friend of painter Carmen Laffón, with whom and José Soto he shares a studio. Also around this time, he strikes up a friendship with the Bonet Correa family and painters Joaquín Sáenz and Gerardo Delgado.

1969 First photography exhibition, Cuenca y sus niños at Cuenca’s Casa de Cultura.

A year of intense travelling: New York, Washington and Boston; Teruel and Albarracín; London; Munich and Geneva.

He writes a text about Antonio Lorenzo, titled, Lorenzo. Machines for the imagination, appearing in the catalogue for the exhibition of this artist’s work at the Galería Kreisler

         

NOTES

31.  Father Miguel A. Bernard, a great friend of Zóbel’s from Manila, recalled the matter: “There was an amusing incident when we first got Fernando Zóbel to lecture in the Ateneo Graduate School. The Dean of Graduate Studies asked him to give a quick lecture, followed by a period for questions and discussion. Zóbel’s first question was: ‘How much do you pay?’ This was a disconcerting question coming from Fernando Zóbel. The dean said: ‘Thirty pesos an hour, sixty for the two-hour period.’ Zóbel replied: ‘That is respectable.’ But at the end of each term, he would take this cheque, endorse it, give it back and say: ‘Use this money to buy reproductions of famous paintings. Have them framed and charge the cost of the framing to me.” Miguel A. Bernard, “Fernando Zóbel, an artist and scholar. 1924-1984”, Kinaadman, vol. VII, 1, Manila, 1985, p. 53.

32.  In the notebook “F.Z.A. 1958-1959”, p. 51.

33.  As the years go by, Zóbel continues to give his support to these artists through gestures like the one he showed when his nephew, Jaime Zóbel de Ayala, was the Philippine ambassador in London: he gave him an important collection of works by Philippine painters, to be put on show at the embassy, thus indirectly disseminating their work abroad. Vid. Armando Manalo, “Fernando Zóbel. A virtuoso of paint”, Pace, Manila, March 24, 1972.

34.  In Philippine Studies, Vol. IX, nº 19, Manila, 1961.

35.  The Spanish Pavilion, selected by Luis González Robles, included works by painters such as Vicente Vela, Rafael Canogar, Juan Genovés, Hernández Mompó, Guinovart and Zóbel, amongst others.

36.  This exhibition showed landscapes belonging to the Song Dynasty (tenth to thirteenth centuries), paintings by erudite members of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and works by painters Fan Guang (eleventh century) and Xu Daoning, from the Northern Song Dynasty.

37.  Fernando Zóbel, Chicago, March 1 1962.

38.  Vid. Rafael Pérez-Madero. Zóbel. Obra gráfica completa. Cuenca, 1999, p. 13.

39.  Antonio Lorenzo and José J. Bakedano: Catálogo exposición Antonio Lorenzo. Obra gráfica (1959-1992), Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao, 1992.

40.  Fernando Zóbel, November 29 1962.

41.  ““I collect my Prado copier’s card (nº. 342). The main thing is that it entitles me to a chair. I’d almost finished the pictures that happened to have a chair opposite. Drawing the pictures is a way of seeing them. It cleanses the eyes and leaves the most unexpected things in the subconscious.” Fernando Zóbel, Madrid, August 21 1962.

42.  Fernando Zóbel, Madrid, October 29 1964.

43.  Madrid, 1963. 96 pages, 27 plates in black and white, edition of 999 numbered copies. The text has been translated into English and French. All the copies are stamped onto handmade linen paper of the varieties Ingres and Castell, produced by Guarro, Barcelona.

44.  “Chillida, who came to Cuenca with his wife, invited by Saura, was also younger than I thought. (…) Direct, friendly, obviously intelligent and very well-informed. (…) Chillida loves Greece. He spoke on and on. He feels their art (he kept using the adjective, noble; a good indication of the sort of thing he is after himself) is a direct consequence of the quality of light (if the light has the quality, why has the art it produces dried up for two thousand years?). He enthused over the museum.I asked him to do one of his wooden things for the first landing.” Fernando Zóbel, Cuenca, May 1964.

45.  Chillida could not answer him during their first encounter because, initially, this piece had been allocated to the Houston Fine Arts Museum, which finally bought the first and last of the Abesti Gogora series, both of which were executed in granite.

46.  “Rueda”, The Chronicle Magazine, Vol. XIX, nº 8, Manila, February 22 1964.

47.  In 1966, painters represented at the museum include, amongst others, Antonio Saura and the other members of the El Paso Group, Cuixart, Tàpies, Tharrats, Millares, Chillida, José Guerrero, Lucio Muñoz, Antonio Lorenzo, Gerardo Rueda, Gustavo Torner, Sempere, Néstor Basterrechea, José María Labra and Zóbel.

48.  Although Zóbel’s financial resources were solid, the effort deployed during this period was considerable. To cope with the great expense involved in opening the museum (frames, lighting, books for the library, furniture and fittings, personnel, maintenance and so on), Zóbel sold his magnificent collection of stamps. Furthermore, we know that, during this period, he gave away several houses, paid the hospital bills of two sick friends (Agustín Albalat and Antonio Magaz Sangro) for many years; any artist in trouble who came to him for help would always find him willing; he saved a Valencian review from closure; in 1964, he donated a collection of drawings by Spanish abstract artists to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and so on and so forth.

49.  In the interview, “Preguntas a… Fernando Zóbel”, conducted by Carlos García Osuna. El Imparcial, Madrid, 24 de febrero de 1978.

50.  In the notebook Fernando Zóbel de Ayala. Drawings (1963-1964), pp. 51 y 53.

         

1970 Exhibition of drawings at the Galería Egam, Madrid.

The Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard University publishes Fernando Zóbel. Cuenca. Sketchbook of a Spanish hilltown. This book contains about 40 ink and watercolor drawings chosen from a sketchbook executed by Zóbel from 1963 to 1965. By this time, when The Museo de Arte Abstracto Español is about to come into being, he has bought himself a house in the city. They are descriptive drawings in which Zóbel depicts the city in painstaking detail, its streets, his house, his friends’ studios and countless observations and anecdotes, conveyed with that subtle and ironic sense of humour which is so typical of his personality. The book is published by the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts of Harvard College Library by way of acknowledging Zóbel as the first assistant of the department’s curator, while the book itself commemoratesthe twentieth anniversary of Houghton Library. It contains a prologue by Philip Hofer, director of the Department of Graphic Arts at Harvard College, and an introduction by Fernando Zóbel. Zóbel himself translates the handwritten notes that go with the drawings from the original Spanish version. ⁵¹.

He takes part in the Museo de Arte Abstracto exhibition, 12 pintores españoles, held at the Göteborgs Konstmuseum (Sweden). He travels to Göteborg to attend the inauguration and gives a lecture on the Spanish abstract generation, La generación abstracta española.
He visits London and Amsterdam.

1971 Individual exhibition at the Galería Juana Mordó, Madrid.
Zóbel continues to serialize his work. During this period, Diálogos is followed by series relating to Cuenca landscapes, anatomies and football. Cuenca and its river, the Júcar, and the views from the high part of the city will be the central features in two of the landscape series of this period: El Júcar (1971-1972) and La Vista (1972-1974).

Trip to London in June. He has been invited to the congress of the Oriental Ceramic Society, of which he is a member, so as to attend the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation and join a private visit to the exhibition organized for the event, The Ceramic Art of China, held at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. He also attends a lunch for the society’s members, organized by the Dean of Winchester College, Oxford. At the lunch, he makes a series of notes about the college lake. Not long afterwards, these notes would be used to produce El lago and El estanque (1971). From these two themes (lake and pond), Zóbel set himself the project of making a large picture, a manner of synopsis of the aspects of a river. After some deliberation, the river chosen is the Júcar as it passes through Cuenca. Throughout the year, Zóbel works systematically on the theme, the end result being the series, El Júcar, which includes about 30 pictures, 100 drawings and two collections of photographs. He puts it on show the following year, together with the drawings and photographs he has used in the development of the theme. The colors of the Júcar seen in the paintings constitute the chromatic base of the series while acting as an abstract reference to something real. These colors are threaded into the composition by means of a linear network which endows the work with a solid structure. While painting this series, Zóbel keeps a diary of the development and process of El Júcar. In 1995, Rafael Pérez-Madero organizes an exhibition of this series at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español and includes the diary, unpublished until that time, in the catalogue. ⁵².

A new studio in Seville, on the famous Plaza de Pilatos, one of city’s most beautiful and emblematic spots.

Trip to the Far East.

1972 Exhibition of El Júcar at the Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Seville and at Cuenca’s Casa de Cultura. Another of the themes he starts working on this year is the series, Academias, studies in color of the human body, based on figure studies, some taken from life and others, from paintings belonging to the Renaissance, to mannerism and baroque (Mantegna, Bellini, Pontormo, Lanfranco, Strozzi, Della Bella, etc.).

Zóbel is named Honorary Citizen of Cuenca by the local corporation.

He tours Eastern Europe, Vienna, Bratislava, Prague.

1973 He embarks on another picture project, similar to El Júcar but based this time on the view from the window in his studio in Cuenca. The series, titled La Vista, is almost as long as the previous one. Color is reduced to greys while the geometric network practically disappears altogether. With El Júcar and La Vista, Zóbel starts to use photography as part of the picture’s development. The note-drawing-sketch-picture process is extended to include photographs and the work process becomes even more analytical and clinical. In Seville, he has the idea for a new series, Fútbol, where his interest in the human figure spreads to the bodies of children in motion as they play football. The sport is a pretext. Here, Zóbel is trying to paint color and movement as a single entity.

Lecture: Caligrafía oriental, at Seville’s Museum of Contemporary Art. With Pablo Serrano, he participates in the round table, La creación en el arte, part of the cycle of lectures, Análisis del arte actual, held at the US Cultural Centre in Madrid. Trips to London and Copenhagen He receives the Gold Medal from the Philatelic and Cultural Group of Cuenca for the support and help he has given to the association.

1974 Exhibition of the series, La Vista, in the context of the development of a picture. Galería Juana Mordó, Madrid and Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Seville. Rafael Pérez-Madero and Esteban Lasala make a short about the series: Zóbel. Un tema.

Trip to Harvard University on the occasion of the twentyfifth anniversary of his graduation. While he is there, he is appointed Honorary Curator of Calligraphy of the Harvard College Library. He publishes Zóbel. Cuaderno de apuntes. This book is of special significance for Zóbel as it contains a selection of quotations about painting from other authors. He has been collecting them since the fifties in his sketchbooks. The book has a prologue and an index by authors, both the work of Zóbel, with brief biographical and bibliographical notes about each of the authors of the quotations. It is printed by Gráficas del Sur, Sevilla, the typographic design is by Joaquín Sáenz and Manuel González and the cover is designed by Jaime and Jorge Blassi. ⁵³.

The management and supervision of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español require a dedication and on-going attention for which Zóbel does not have time. He therefore appoints a director: Pablo López de Osaba, philosopher, theologian and art historian and also a specialist in sacred music. He has known him since the inauguration of the museum in 1966. In the Philippines, the second edition of his book Philippine Religious Imagery, is published.

1975 Harvard University appoints him member of the advisory committee for the acquisition of rare books and manuscripts. After twelve years spent studying color, in the final pictures of La Vista, Zóbel’s painting becomes predominantly white. He thus commences the series, Serie Blanca, which he will continue until 1978. These paintings are characterised by infinitely degraded whites which distribute spaces and volumes and seem to lose themselves on the edges of the canvas. Whites approaching blues, greys and greyish browns fuse with the virgin whiteness of the canvas or paper in such a way that the whole thing becomes the background. With Serie Blanca, the thematic aspect is broadened: light, volume, form, gesture, anatomies, still lifes and of course, themes from the history of art. With this series, he starts to paint watercolors as another way of taking notes for a work based on elimination and selection. He publishes his first book of photographs, Mis fotos de Cuenca. In the introductory note, Zóbel explains that, for him, photography is another way of making notes:

“They’re painter’s photographs. Photos of effects and relationships which made an impact on me and may prove useful in helping me paint. Their descriptive aspect is of no importance. The true value of these photographs might be a touch of gloss, a harmony or a dissonance of color, a composition in diagonals imposed on the children by chance as they play. I think I make myself clear if I say that, for me, photography is one of many ways of taking notes from life.” ⁵⁴

Trips to Boston, Paris, Holland and Venice.

1976 He writes a text about Simeón Sáiz, published in the catalogue for the exhibition held by this artist at Madrid’s Galería Edurne. Simeón Sáiz and sculptor Peter Soriano, are two young artists who work under Zóbel’s guidance in their respective training periods. He writes another text for his friends, the brothers Jorge and Jaime Blassi, both of whom are designers and photographers. The text is published in the catalogue for their exhibition, held in honour of Antonio Machado in the exhibition rooms of Banco de Granada, Granada.

Trips to Normandy (France), London, Boston and San Francisco. With Gerardo Rueda and Juan Antonio and Victoria Vallejo-Nájera, he attends the inauguration of the Museum of Contemporary Art at Castillo de San José, Lanzarote.

Lecture on the language of drawing, El lenguaje del dibujo, Caja de Ahorros de Sevilla.

1977 Watercolor exhibition at the Galerie Jacob, Paris.

He writes the prologue to the book Leandro V. Locsin, about one of the most relevant architects in the Far East. Of Philippine origin, he has been a great friend of Zóbel’s since the fifties. He also writes a text on Eusebio Sempere. ⁵⁵.

A book about his work, El misterio de lo transparente, by Mario Hernández, is published ⁵⁶. Trips to London, Paris, Germany and Austria (with Gustavo Torner, Gerardo Rueda and Pablo López de Osaba) and Boston.

Lecture on twentieth-century North American painting, Pintura norteamericana en el siglo XX, for the inauguration of the exhibition, Arte USA at Fundación Juan March, Madrid. While he is there, Zóbel, in conjunction with Carmen Laffón, conducts a guided tour of the exhibition for a group of students from the Fine Arts School of Seville.

1978 Exhibition of Serie Blanca at the Galería Theo and a watercolor exhibition at the Galería Rayuela in Madrid. In Serie Blanca, his interest in the figure is transferred to the various ways in which the human body arranges itself. It is no longer a question of its movement, as in the previous stage, but of rest between two movements and, in particular, the gestures made by children. Thus, series appear within a series, such as the one named Gestos, which includes series of paintings named after the model portrayed: Nazario (1977), Leonardo (1977-78), Dioni (1977), El Rafi (1977) and Barocci (1977- 78), along with the gestures of cyclists and musicians. The gesture of musicians playing at a concert, and flutes with their cold, metallic form, take up another large part of his painting during these years. Again, Zóbel speaks of his work through his painting. As in other facets of his life, it is not just that he enjoys and has a keen interest in concerts and festivals, which he attends on a regular basis; he actually sets about learning to play the flute.

Publication of several books on Zóbel’s work: La Serie Blanca, by Rafael Pérez-Madero ⁵⁷; Zóbel. Acuarelas, with texts by José Miguel Ullán ⁵⁸; and Diálogos con la pintura de Fernando Zóbel, by Pancho Ortuño ⁵⁹.

Trazos, the Televisión Española programme directed by Paloma Chamorro, broadcasts two instalments about Zóbel and his work. Also in this year, Zóbel appears on the TVE programme, Imágenes, in which he talks about his collection of oriental art in his Madrid home and the exhibition of the Chinese art collection belonging to King Carl Gustaf Adolphus VI of Sweden. This exhibition is held in the same year in Madrid.

Extension of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, with the construction of a new building attached to the original “Hanging Houses”. Designed by Gustavo Torner, the extension triples the space available for exhibitions, leaving room for a library specialising in contemporary art and repositories.

Trips to Paris and Galicia.

Lecture: Cuadros y espectadores, as part of the cycle about visual perception, Percepción visual en el arte, held at the School of Applied Arts of Seville.

1979 Trips to London, New York, Boston, Singapore and Berlin (with Gerardo Rueda and the Vallejo-Nájeras).

Lecture: De Kooning: expresionismo y color, for the inauguration of the Willem de Kooning exhibition at Fundación Juan March, Madrid.

         

NOTES

51.  Fernando Zóbel. Cuenca. Sketchbook of a Spanish hilltown. Walker and Company, Nueva York, and Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Harvard College Library. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970.

52.  Catalogue for the exhibition Fernando Zóbel. Río Júcar, Fundación Juan March, Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca, 1995.

53.  Fernando Zóbel. Cuaderno de apuntes. Published by Galería Juana Mordó, Madrid, 1974.

54.  The book is published by the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in 1975. It contains a note by the author, an index of photographs and is designed by Zóbel and Jorge and Jaime Blassi.

55.  “Eusebio Sempere”, in Cuadernos Guadalimar, nº 1, Madrid, 1977.

56.  Ediciones Rayuela, Colección Maniluvios, Madrid, 1977. 132 pages, 14 color plates, 54 in black. The book contains a text by the author, alternating with some comments from Zóbel, originally answers to a prior survey, and also personal photographs and a biography by Silvia Cubiles.

57.  Ediciones Rayuela, Madrid, 1978. 112 pages, 86 illustrations in black and color. The book contains a prologue and conversations with Fernando Zóbel by Rafael Pérez-Madero and a chronology and bibliography by Silvia Cubiles. There is also an English translation of the text. The design is by Zóbel and Pérez-Madero and the photographs are by Melli Pérez-Madero, Fernando Nuño and Luis Pérez Mínguez.

58.  Ediciones Rayuela, Colección Fábula y Signo, Madrid, 1978. The bookcontains a prologue by José Miguel Ullán, “Manchas nombradas/ Líneas de fuego”, a technical description by Zóbel and 47 color plates of watercolors produced by Zóbel from 1971 to 1977, divided into themes. The photographs are by Melli Pérez-Madero. A normal edition and a special edition of 30 numbered copies, complete with an original watercolor.

59.  Ediciones Theo, Colección Arte Vivo, Madrid, 1978. 133 pages, prologue, 50 color plates, curriculum vitae and biography. Photograph in black by Cristóbal Hara and in color by Melli Pérez-Madero.

         

1980 In Manila, he becomes ill on account of a brain hemorrage. Although he manages to recover, he continues to suffer from some of the effects. On returning to Spain, he sinks into a depression, which naturally also affects his painting. Drawing now loses its central role of previous stages to fuse completely with color. He also starts to use new materials, such as the pencil for drafts and pastel. As a result of this depression, Zóbel destroys many of these pictures and devotes more time to photography, focusing once more on the River Júcar and its banks on the outskirts of Cuenca. These photographs are the starting point of his last series of paintings, Las orillas (Variaciones sobre un río) (1979-1982). This year, despite problems with his health, he exhibits in several Spanish cities: Tenerife, Gerona, Pamplona and Valencia.

Trips to Italy (Milan, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Brenta, Ferrara, Florence, San Gimignano, Siena, Orvieto, Rome) with the Vallejo-Nájera family.

The Council of Europe grants the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español a Special Mention as Museum of the Year and the Ministry of Culture awards the museum the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts.

In December of this year, he donates the Museo de Arte Abstracto to Fundación Juan March. In 1980, the collection totals about 700 works, 180 of which are paintings and 16, sculptures. The rest is made up of drawings, watercolors, gouaches and graphic work.

The Cuenca School of Secondary Education officially adopts the name of Instituto Nacional de Bachillerato Fernando Zóbel.

Lecture: Zóbel. Una forma de pintar, given in December at the Faculty of Humanities, Valencia.

1981 Official ceremony for the donation of the Museo de Arte Abstracto of Cuenca to Fundación Juan March.

Trips to London, New York, Washington, Boston and Portugal.

Zóbel attends the music course, III Curso de música barroca y rococó. En torno a Calderón y la memoria de Telemann, held at Universidad de María Cristina, El Escorial (Madrid)

1982 Exhibition of the series, Las orillas (Variaciones sobre un río) at the Galería Theo, Madrid and at Sala Celini. He simultaneously displays the watercolors, graphic work, notes and photographs which he has used in the development of the series.

Trips to London and Madeira (Portugal) to attend the Bach Festival at Funchal.

He publishes his second book of photographs, this time on the theme of the river El Júcar en Cuenca ⁶⁰.

He writes a text about painter Daniel Quintero ⁶¹, and another about Ricard Giralt-Miracle, titled Amor por la letra, published in the catalogue for the exhibition of the Catalonian designer’s work, organized by Fundación Joan Miró, Barcelona.

In the Televisión Española programme, Mirar un cuadro, Zóbel explains Velázquez’s The Tapestry Weavers at the Prado.

He attends the International Course in Instrumental Music in Cuenca.

Lecture about Chinese and Japanese painting, Técnicas de la pintura china y japonesa, The Granada Arts and Crafts School

1983 First retrospective exhibition of Zóbel’s work, organized by Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Sevilla.

The Ministry of Culture awards him the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts.

Fundación Juan March appoints him member of the foundation’s advisory committee.

He takes part in the exhibition, 259 imágenes. Fotografía actual en España, held at Madrid’s Fine Arts Circle, Círculo de Bellas Artes. The catalogue includes, amongst others, his text, Para mí la fotografía es el recuerdo.

He travels to Amsterdam to attend the music festival and to Utrecht.

1984 Trips to London and Holland. In June, he goes to Rome with his nephew, sculptor Peter Soriano, and his wife. He dies in Rome from a heart attack. His remains are sent to Spain and he is buried in the highest part of Cuenca, in the San Isidro burial ground, a cemetery perched on the narrow pass overlooking the River Júcar.

At the end of May, the Painting Commission of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando) proposes Fernando Zóbel as candidate for a vacant painter’s seat. His unexpected death prevents him from reading his inaugural address as academician of the Fine Arts.

He is posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of the City by the Local Corporation of Cuenca. Likewise, heis awarded the Medal of Honour by the Universidad Internacional Menéndez y Pelayo, Santander.

Exhibition: Zóbel, held in September by Fundación Juan March in the Madrid exhibition room in honour of the painter’s memory. ⁶². In 1984, 1985 and 1986, the same exhibition was put on show at museums and public rooms in various Spanish cities.

         

NOTES

60.  Edited and designed by Fernando Zóbel, it contains a note by the author. A total of 2,000 copies were made. Printed by Gráficas Cuenca, Cuenca, 1982.

61.  Guadalimar nº 29, Madrid, 1982.

62.  Catalogue for the exhibition, Zóbel. Contains 43 color illustrations, a text by Francisco Calvo Serraller, “Fernando Zóbel: la razón de la belleza”, biography and bibliography. Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 1984

         

1985 Publication of a book of photographs of Seville, Mis fotos de Sevilla, which Fernando had been working on a few months before his death. The book was edited by Rafael PérezMadero and Manuel Alonso ⁶³.

1987 Exhibition: Creative Transformation. Drawings and paintings by Fernando Zóbel, at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. Organized by his nephew, sculptor Peter Soriano ⁶⁴.

1991 Exhibition: Fernando Zóbel. Cuadernos de apuntes y portfolios. Una visión de Cuenca, held at the Old Carmelite Convent in Cuenca. Organized by Rafael Pérez-Madero under the auspices of Fundación Juan March to commemorate the XXV anniversary of the foundation of the Museo de Arte Abstracto. In this exhibition, some of the notebooks bequeathed by Zóbel to the foundation are displayed for the first time. A cycle of conferences about Zóbel and Cuenca is also organized

1994 Exhibition: Zóbel: el río Júcar, held at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español of Cuenca, and, one year later, at the Museo de Bellas Artes de San Pío V, Valencia. This exhibition focuses on the theme of the genesis and development (photographs, sketches, drawings and notes) of the series, El Júcar. In the catalogue, the exhibition organizer, Rafael Pérez-Madero, publishes an unknown text by Zóbel, Diario de un cuadro (1971). The text is a small diary of the execution of Júcar XII, where the painter comments on the progressive transformation of the work, which is a synopsis of all the pictures depicting this part of Cuenca. The exhibition is inaugurated in the museum’s new exhibition room. This room occupied the space formerly taken up by the museum library, which Zóbel himself had been building up since the museum’s foundation in 1966. After his death, the number of volumes increases when his personal library is transferred to the museum as part of his legacy to Fundación Juan March.

1996 Fundación Juan March donates the library of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, created by Fernando Zóbel, to the Cuenca Local Corporation and its university. Part of Zóbel’s personal library remains at the Museo de Arte Abstracto, together with the rest of the painter’s personal legacy to the foundation.

1998 Exhibitions: Zóbel, at Fundación Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa, Bilbao, and Zóbel, Espacio y color at the Sala Amos Salvador de Cultural Rioja, Logroño, both organised by Rafael Pérez-Madero.

1999 Exhibition: Fernando Zóbel: Obra gráfica, at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español of Cuenca. Publication of the systematized catalogue of the complete graphic work of Fernando Zóbel, prepared by Rafael Pérez-Madero and published by the Diputación Provincial of Cuenca. ⁶⁵.

         

NOTES

63.  Contains an introduction by Rafael Pérez-Madero. Published by Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Sevilla. Printed under the supervision of Joaquín Sáenz by Gráficas del Sur, Seville, 1985.

64.  A catalogue with the same title as the exhibition is published, with texts by Konrad Oberhuber and Peter Soriano. Published by the Publications Department of Harvard University Art Museums. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987.

65.  Rafael Pérez-Madero: Zóbel. Catálogo obra gráfica completa. 264 pages, 231 illustrations in color and black and white, texts by Rafael PérezMadero and Antonio Lorenzo, biography and bibliography. Published by Diputación Provincial de Cuenca, Serie Arte, 15, Cuenca, 1999.