Rediscovering Zóbel

Following its highly acclaimed run at Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid where it attracted 80,000 visitors in 2022, the exhibition Zóbel: The Future of the Past premieres in Asia at the Ayala Museum.

Words Jewel Chuaunsu
Photos courtesy of Fernando Zobel Show and Jewel Chuansu
September 18, 2024

First unveiled at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Spain in 2022, Zóbel: The Future of the Past made its Asian premiere at the Ayala Museum this year—in time for Fernando Zóbel’s birth centenary, the 50th anniversary of the Ayala Museum, and the Ayala Corporation’s 190th anniversary. 

Featuring over 200 works by Zóbel, including his never-before-seen sketchbooks, journals, and photography, the exhibition covers different phases of his artistic development and gathers artworks from private collections and leading art institutions including Harvard Art Museum in North America, the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Europe, and the Ayala Museum in Asia. Zóbel’s sketchbooks were previously donated to the Fundación Juan March in Madrid by his heirs.

Window to Modern Art

Zóbel explored a new language for Philippine modern painting and was a central figure of the Spanish abstract art movement in the 20th century.

A scion of the Zóbel de Ayala family, Fernando Zóbel (1924-1984) grew up in Manila and Madrid. Leaving Manila after World War II, Zóbel went on to study at Harvard University in 1946, majoring in history and literature. During his Boston years, he discovered his talent in painting, drawing, and printmaking, fueled by associations with painters from the Boston School. He was also exposed to the works of Bauhaus artists, eventually meeting the leading Abstract Expressionists in New York. 

When he returned to Manila in 1951, he worked for the family firm but also became immersed with early Filipino Modernists such as Vicente Manansala, H. R. Ocampo, and Cesar Legaspi. Local artists regarded him as a “window to modern art.” Later, he pursued non-objective art with Arturo Luz and Lee Aguinaldo. He studied other artistic forms such as Chinese calligraphy, Japanese sumi-e painting, Philippine colonial religious art and architecture, as well as archaeology. 

Zóbel helped solidify modern art in the country by teaching art classes at the Ateneo de Manila University. Having built a collection of modern art by Filipino artists he admired, Zóbel donated his collection to the Ateneo and founded the Ateneo Art Gallery, the first museum of modern art in the Philippines.  

At the beginning of the 1960s, Zóbel decided to live permanently in Spain to become a full-time artist. There he formed friendships with the Spanish modernists, began collecting Spanish abstract paintings, and later established the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca—the first contemporary art museum in Spain. 

The Spanish government conferred on Zóbel the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise and the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic. In 1983, the Spanish Ministry of Culture recognized him with the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts. He was also posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit by the Republic of the Philippines in 2006. 

Cosmopolitan Sensibility

Zóbel: The Future of the Past, co-curated by Felipe Pereda, the Fernando Zóbel de Ayala Professor of Spanish Art at Harvard University, and Manuel Fontán del Junco, Director of Museums and Exhibitions at Fundación Juan March, Madrid, illustrates the artist’s ability to bridge artistic traditions.   

Born in the Philippines, educated in the Philippines and the United States, and settled in Spain in his later years, Zóbel had always carried with him a cosmopolitan sensibility—manifest in the minimalist Asian aesthetic he would apply to a variety of subjects, his artistic dialogues with canon of Western art, and his canvases featuring the landscapes of the Iberian Peninsula. The exhibition is thus a masterclass in the art of seeing that which is essential.

According to the exhibition notes: “Zobel’s painting offers a singular example of twentieth-century avant-garde art; if not unique, his oeuvre may certainly be considered extreme. For an artist with his deep and dazzling knowledge of the artistic and literary traditions, both of the West and of Asia, modernism entailed not a break with figuration and the history of painting, but rather their rediscovery; not a forgetting of the past, but rather the revealing of a future embedded in the work of the great masters.”

The first section of the exhibition, “The Discovery of the Past,” showcases his early paintings, some of them religious in theme, with surfaces rich in color. Also included are four drawings made by the artist to accompany his own English translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s play, The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa in the Garden.

The next section, “Drawing by Painting: East Asian Calligraphy and Abstract Painting,” features Zóbel’s Serie Negra (“Black Series”) wherein black gestural brushstrokes on white canvases blended the artist’s drawing and painting techniques, owing much to the great Abstract Expressionists, but also Chinese and Japanese calligraphy.

“Conversations with Masters” shows Zóbel’s “conversations” with different artists and their works, which served as the starting point for some of his abstract compositions. Here we see his conversations or dialogues with Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Edgar Degas, Francisco Goya, Diego Velazquez, and more. The artworks are paired with reference materials, as well as Zóbel’s own drawings and notes related to the works of the Old Masters. Shown to the public for the first time is Zóbel’s “El Cristo de Lepanto,” his abstract dialogue with Juan Luna’s “The Battle of Lepanto.”

In addition to making notes, drawing, and sketching, Zóbel later used photography in his work process. A series he developed using photography is Futbol, wherein he painted the movement of football players. The works from the Futbol series are accompanied by Zóbel’s photographs of boys playing football. 

“Landscapes of the Past and of the Future” features Zóbel’s La Vista series, which marked his forays into landscape painting. Here he captured the essence of nature in compositions that reduced landscape to its simple elements. 

Complementing the exhibition are the “Routes of the Cosmopolitan” section containing original documents and graphic material that paint a picture of Zóbel’s life and work spanning three continents, together with an unreleased film about Zóbel’s sketchbooks. The last part of the exhibition reveals other facets of Zóbel as an art collector, educator, museum founder, and draughtsman.

In terms of his contributions to Philippine art, curator Felipe Pereda noted that Zobel had an early intellectual engagement with the Filipino avant-garde of the 1940s, both as a recipient of ideas coming from key figures in the scene, and as someone who built a network that would allow for Filipino modern avant-garde to grow and develop. This is best represented by the founding of the Ateneo Art Gallery, which would host artists and encourage them to participate in the modern art movement. Thus, Zobel was not only an actor or agent, but also provided ground for others to follow in his footsteps.

Pereda added that Zóbel was able to break the frontiers between past and present, if not the present and future, through his dialogue with the Old Masters. He also broke geographical frontiers through his travels across Asia, North America, and Europe. A challenge for this exhibition was to represent Zobel’s polyphonic personality and bring together all these different aspects. These layers of meaning add up, transform, and expand the complexity of his painting to show that he was looking across time and geography, and developing a universal, transhistorical pictorial language through art. 

The exhibition will run until January 26, 2025.