{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":91,"auction_id":1,"set_id":1,"lot_number":"55","artist":"Fernando Zóbel (1924 - 1984)","title":"Recreo con Raya Roja","starting_price":6000000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower left); signed and inscribed ‘82-10 / Recreo con Raya Roja (verso)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"27” x 35 3/4” (69 cm x 91 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private collection, Spain","exhibited":"Art Fair Philippines, The Internationalists: Zóbel / Joya, <br />\nThe Link, Ayala Center, Makati City, February 17 - 19, 2023","literature":"\nDe la Torre, Alfonso and Rafael Pérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946 - 1984).\nMadrid: Fundación Azcona, 2022. Listed as “no 82-10”\nwith painting description on page 634.\nThe Internationalists: Zóbel / Joya (Exhibition Catalog).\nMakati City: León Gallery, 2023. Published on the occassion of the exhibition of the same name at the Art Fair Philippines 2023. Full-color photograph and painting description on page 8.","write_up":"On the eve of Fernando Zóbel’s 100th birth anniversary on August 27, 2024, León Gallery offers one of the artist’s last works, painted in his\nfinal decade before his untimely death on June 2, 1984. <br /><br />\nAfter his prolific 1970s, his golden age comprising the series El Júcar, La Vista, and the highly acclaimed Serie Blanca, Zóbel unfortunately welcomed the 1980s with affliction.\nIn 1980, Zóbel returned to Manila after successive trips in the preceding year to London, New York, Boston, Singapore, and Berlin. Also, in 1979, Zóbel held a lecture titled De Kooning: expresionismo y color at the inauguration of the Willem de Kooning exhibition at Fundacion Juan March in Madrid. <br /><br />\nZóbel’s biographer, Angeles Villalba Salvador, writes in the artist’s chronology: “In Manila, he becomes ill on account of a brain hemorrhage. Although he manages to recover, he continues to suffer from some of the effects.” <br /><br />\nHowever, Villalba Salvador also notes that “this year, despite problems with his health, he exhibits in several Spanish cities: Tenerife, Gerona, Pamplona, and Valencia.” Due to his fragile health, Zóbel, in December 1980, donated to Fundacion Juan March his own Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, whose collection had already amassed 700 works by that time, including 180 paintings and 16 sculptures. <br /><br />\nVillalba Salvador further notes: “On returning to Spain [in 1980], 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. <br /><br />\n“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).” <br /><br />\nZóbel found therapeutic solace in his beloved hometown of Cuenca and the sinuous trail of its majestic River Júcar that is the town’s lifeblood, making them the protagonist in many of his works throughout his final years. (Interestingly, even his apartment-cum-studio in Cuenca overlooked the mouth of the Júcar.) <br /><br />\nOne of those works with Cuenca as the central character is Recreo con Raya Roja, which Zóbel painted in Madrid, around the time of his 1982 exhibition of his Las orillas at the Galería Theo, Madrid and at Sala Celini. The work’s subject is an allusion to two things: the Júcar River and the Recreo Peral, the latter of which the Spanish art and literary critic Juan Manuel Bonet describes in his essay Fernando Zóbel, Revisited as a “modest eatery near the river, surrounded by trees, and easily accessible downhill from the Plaza Mayor.” <br /><br />\n“There, on more than one occasion, I observed the joy that so filled Zóbel and radiated from him,” Bonet reminisces in writing. “He strove to understand himself as a painter of waterscapes and relied on the mechanisms of memory to figure out what would lead him to devote an entire series of paintings to the Júcar in its flow through Cuenca.” \nRecreo con Raya Roja is pervaded with varying shades of dark brown, likely representing the ebb and flow of the Júcar as seen from the Recreo Peral’s viewpoint. Colors are dynamically and instinctively applied, suggesting an invigorated Zóbel. “Recreo” also means “recreation,” and it is in the very act of painting that Zóbel had always found consolation, a reason for breathing, being, and existing. Recreo con Raya Roja inherently possesses the lyricism and poetic clarity that Zóbel exalted: painting as a sweet and perfect balsam that alleviated his physical pains and soothed his sublime creative soul. <br /><br />\nIt can be remembered that in 1942, Zóbel suffered from a spinal problem and was taken to the National Orthopedic Hospital, where he started 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,” said Zóbel in a March 24, 1972 interview with Armando Manalo in Manila. <br /><br />\nAnd towards the end of his earthly life, as the call of death became more imminent, Zóbel had again turned to painting as his saving grace.\nIn all his life’s struggles, painting carried the torch of consolation. As Zóbel once said in 1974: “Painting for me is a way of seeing, feeling, learning, teaching, sharing, conversing, discovering, organizing... in a word: painting can be quite a complex and complete way of existing, or rather, of living.” (Adrian Maranan)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":10000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":10000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":12016000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":55,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/1/1/lot/55.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":54,"next":56,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}