{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":147,"auction_id":1,"set_id":1,"lot_number":"110","artist":"Fernando Zóbel (1924 - 1984)","title":"Study of Cafetera Exprés (II)","starting_price":2400000,"signed_dated":"signed (upper right) ca. 1954","medium":"gouache / graphite","size":"16” x 13” (41 cm x 33 cm)","property":null,"coa":"León Gallery wishes to thank Georgina Padilla Zobel for confirming the authenticity of this lot","provenance":"Sur Galeria de Arte y Liberia, Santander","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"By 1954, almost three years after returning to Manila from Harvard, Fernando Zóbel had earned that rightful spot in the burgeoning Philippine art scene of the post-war period. He had been elected President of the influential Art Association of the Philippines (AAP). Zóbel had also just won the coveted first prize for his now-iconic painting Carroza at the AAP’s semi-annual painting competition.<br /><br />In 1953, Zóbel mounted his debut solo exhibition at the storied Philippine Art Gallery (PAG), where he showcased “a series of works in which he abandons his Bostonian symbolic and romantic themes for Philippine themes revolving around local customs and manners. Here, he addresses intimate, street themes on the one hand and religious themes on the other,” writes his biographer Angeles Villalba Salvador.<br /><br />Salvador continues, “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 characterized by a glossy texture where thick, black strokes prefiguring the gestural content of later works are sometimes superposed on the masses of color.”<br /><br />The Filipino theme would carry over to Zóbel’s second solo exhibition, 12 paintings by Fernando Zóbel at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in Manila. Sponsored by the AAP, the show was a critical success, with both the public and the critics warmly receiving the exhibition and hailing Zóbel “as being at the forefront of the current of renewal in Philippine art,” as Villalba Salvador notes.<br /><br />One of the works that were exhibited in the show was titled Cafetera Exprés (II), painted in Manila and is now in the collection of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. A rare and vivid study of that painting, done in gouache, is present in the work at hand.<br /><br />Zóbel’s entire artistic career is one characterized by a relentless search for artistic identity, one of constant reinvention and transformation. As Manila was a city rising from the ashes of war, so was Zóbel, who aligned himself with the Neo-Realists who captured a new image of a post-war nation, away from the overt sentimentality and sweetness of the Amorsolo tradition. (Zobel was close friends with the neo-realists, Luz, H.R. Ocampo, and Manansala, all of whom he met at the PAG.)<br /><br />Keeping in line with his artistic vision during this period, Zóbel immersed himself in the culture of his people; he was interested in their ways and means, their individuality. So much so that Zóbel even wrote articles concerning Filipino cultural expression and identity and the new generation: Pintura moderna en Filipinas, Art in the Philippines Today, and Filipino Artistic Expressions.<br /><br />Coupled with the search for a unique identity (both on the personal and cultural level) in the face of post-war reconstruction, Zóbel found a leading light in the person of the French painter Henri Matisse, who was a significant influence on Zóbel during the early 1950s. Zóbel saw Matisse’s heightened use of vivid colors as evocative of that recognizable Filipino sense of color: expressive and arresting. Yet, Zóbel also saw in Matisse’s employment of a flattened perspective, the use of less sophisticated shapes, and the outright rejection of visual conventions of the human form that breaking point with the traditional romantic-realist approach of the conservatives.<br /><br />We see in the Study of Cafetera Exprés (II) the profound influence of Matisse. The work possesses a flat, vertical rhythm emphasized by the interwoven lines representing the floors and the walls of the setting and Zóbel’s rendering of the human figure in a lengthened form. In essence, the work at hand expresses such a naïve sincerity that encapsulates a sheer divorce from the conservative style that once dominated Philippine painting in the pre-war years. Thus, the work is an insight into the earnest cultural and artistic genius of a man whose 100th birth anniversary we will be celebrating on August 27, 1924. (Adrian Maranan)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":5000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":5000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":6008000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":120,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/1/1/lot/110.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":109,"next":111,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}