{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":58420,"auction_id":121,"set_id":155,"lot_number":"53","artist":"Fernando Zóbel (1924 - 1984)","title":"Tarraco","starting_price":18000000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower left and verso), dated 1960, and inscribed\n\"Tarraco / #369 / Dec 17/60\" (verso)
dated 1960","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"32\" x 48\" (81 cm x 122 cm)","property":"PROPERTY OF AN OLD MANILA FAMILY","coa":null,"provenance":"Luz Gallery","exhibited":"The Luz Gallery, Fernando Zóbel: Exhibition of Paintings, Manila, 14 - 31\nJanuary 1961","literature":"Torres, Emmanuel. \"Calligraphy, space, black & white.\" The Sunday Times\nMagazine. January 29, 1961. Black-and-white illustration on page 14.
DE LA TORRE, Alfonso (Director). In collaboration with Rafael\nPérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel. Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings\n(1946-1984)-Catálogo Razonado de Pinturas de Fernando Zóbel (1946 -\n1984). Madrid-Manila: Fundación Azcona, Fundación Juan March, Ayala\nFoundation and Fernando Zóbel Heirs, 2023. Nº cat. 60-24, p. 200.","write_up":"Presented in this lot is a pivotal masterpiece by Fernando Zóbel that captures a significant turning point in his life and career. Titled Tarraco, it is among the works showcased in Zóbel's final exhibition in the Philippines before settling in Spain for good. Held at the then-newly opened Luz Gallery, many visitors were shocked upon seeing Zóbel's stark black-and-white paintings. The Luz Gallery show was the first time that Zóbel mounted on a large scale in Manila his Serie Negra, that elusive series, painted within three years (1959 – 1962), with many now residing in museums, many others still in private collections. Zóbel had inaugurated his \"black paintings\" in 1959 at Madrid's Galería Biosca, his first solo exhibition in Spain, which earned critical praise from both Spanish artists and critics alike for his refined, orderly, and sensitive abstraction and powerful forms, contributing to Zóbel's decision to settle permanently in the country.
Visitors, especially members of the press, were left with more questions than answers as to why the artist known for his vibrant figurations and the pulsating quality of his spirited Saetas had suddenly abandoned the world of color. Even more puzzling was getting the answers from Zóbel himself, who, as reported by Nati Valentin, cultural writer for the Manila Times, \"good-naturedly throws up his hands when asked what his new canvases mean.\"
The February 10, 1961, issue of the Weekly Women's Magazine noted the mixed reactions that Zóbel's exhibit drew from its visitors. The article wrote, \"Startling in its originality and stark elegance, the Luz Gallery…one-man show of [Zóbel's] paintings…drew varied reactions from visitors.\"
Despite the confusion among its visitors, the exhibition was nonetheless a remarkable success; it was Zóbel's most successful show up to that point.
Newspapers noted its near sold-out feat, with half of the exhibit snapped up by Manila's who's who in just its first week, among them Arch. Ariston Nakpil, Leandro Locsin, Carlos Arguelles, Aurelio Montinola, Jr., and Col. Andres Soriano. The preview of the exhibition was also attended by noted personalities, including Lee Aguinaldo, Robert Ebersole of the US Embassy's cultural section, Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, and Oscar Lopez. Bernard Childs, the American painter and printmaker, a pioneer in engraving metal plates using industrial tools and Zóbel's dear friend, also visited the exhibition, attracting media attention.
The exhibit had become the talk of Manila’s art circle by the time it concluded its run, with The Manila Times writing, “People are talking about…the Zóbel exhibit at the Luz Gallery, which came to a close yesterday and remarking on how wonderfully knowledgeable Fernando Zóbel is with modern painting and on how persuasive are his interpretations with the growing breed of art lovers in this city.” The show’s curator, Eric Torres, Ateneo Art Gallery’s founding director, lauded Zóbel's transition to black and white, writing in The Sunday Times Magazine that “With this style, he achieved a measure of international recognition last June when three of his paintings were included in an important show of contemporary Spanish art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and in another similar show earlier in 1959, at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro.”
The inspiration behind the painting
Tarraco is the old name of the modern-day city of Tarragona in Catalonia, Spain. The ancient Roman city of Tarraco, the oldest Roman settlement on the Iberian Peninsula, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000 as an exemplar of Roman urban planning. Zóbel finished the painting on December 17, 1960. Juan Manuel Bonet noted in his essay \"Fernando Zóbel: Revisited\" that from 1960 to 1962, Zóbel titled his works inspired by the towns and localities of Spain. Thus, the title alludes to Zóbel's longing for Spanish soil at a time when he was suffering from the climactic throes of a full-blown identity crisis: whether to continue living the business life he had inherited or pursue painting as his lifeblood. He had spiraled into depression, burdened by corporate responsibilities, teaching at the Ateneo, and having very little time to paint.
In the same month as this work, Zóbel would resolve this existential dilemma by deciding to live permanently in Spain, drawing the curtain on his life as an Ayala business heir.
Zóbel, the restless artist
Zóbel was a soul both joyful and restless: insatiable in learning, tireless in discovering and gathering influences. Having lived in a war-torn country with derelict state support in the cultural arena, Zóbel found the Philippines underwhelming for his intellectual and creative growth. In 1955, when he went to Madrid on a three-month European tour, Zóbel encountered Spanish abstraction, primarily through Gerardo Rueda, who would become his friend, with whom he would share an apartment they would fill with paintings by their artist friends.
Also in 1955, Zóbel serendipitously discovered the modest bookstore-cum-gallery of Fernando Fe in Puerta del Sol in Madrid, where the young Spanish abstractionists— Antonio Saura, Rafael Canogar, Guillermo Delgado, Luis Feito, Antonio Lorenzo, Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chilida, and Rueda himself, would congregate (It was Spain's own avant-garde space, much like the Philippine Art Gallery). There, the group held a small show, whose poster that read “Exhibition on Spanish Abstraction” attracted Zóbel. Going up the gallery, Zóbel instantly became enamored with their works, acknowledging “the extraordinary level of quality in this generation that was more or less my own..” He purchased one of Delgado's paintings and praised his work as \"uncompromisingly abstract…a process completely under control,\" establishing affinity with the young painter as Zóbel also practiced sketching numerous times before arriving at the final painting, as evidenced by his numerous extant sketchbooks.
Upon returning to Manila before the year ended, Zóbel would constantly keep in touch with his newfound friends. He would completely abandon figuration and experiment further with abstraction, identifying himself with this generation of avant-garde Spanish abstractionists.
Zóbel's sojourn in Madrid proved so impactful that by October 1958, he had set up his first apartment in the city at 98 Calle Velázquez. It doubled as a studio he shared with Rueda, describing it as \"a point of departure.\"
Spanish abstraction under the Franco dictatorship
The Spanish informalistas utilized the style as a protest against Francisco Franco's regime, particularly on the stagnation of the country's culture. In the decades prior, the Franco dictatorship's cultural policy centered on Spanish nationalism influenced by national Catholicism, militarism, and conservatism. It did not tolerate any excursions outside the accepted \"Spanish tradition.\"
In the post-war years, the Franco regime used the avantgarde to present a \"liberal\" face to the international arena. Crippled and isolated after supporting the Axis during the war, Franco sought aid, as well as US recognition of his rule, to ensure his continued stay in power. The US then eyed Spain's strategic Mediterranean position to complete its consolidation of Western Europe, thereby encircling its communist rival, the Soviet Union. Spain would then join the prestigious São Paolo and Venice Biennales, sending young informalistas, such as Antoni Tàpies, to show an image of aperturismo or openness. But beyond this projection, the informalistas were neglected in their own country. Spain did not extend support and infrastructure to foster these artists in their motherland, as the national situation was still overall conservative, something Zóbel would address with the establishment of the future Cuenca Museum of Spanish Abstract Art.
El Paso, vanguards of Spanish informalism and freedom
The group El Paso (The Step) rose to prominence as vanguards of Spanish abstraction. Its founding members— Manolo Millares, Antonio Saura, Manuel Rivera, Rafael Canogar, Luis Feito, Juana Frances, and Manuel Chirino— all sojourned (and some studied) in Paris in the years preceding their formation in 1957, becoming influenced by art informel, which had become the artistic lingua franca of the post-war world, conveying the era's psychological turmoil and social uncertainty and destruction.
By forming El Paso, Millares and his colleagues openly expressed their opposition to Franco's dictatorship. Their manifesto detailed their move \"towards a revolutionary practice (in which our dramatic tradition and our direct expression are present) that responds historically to a universal activity…to find the expression of a 'new reality'… towards an anti-academy, in which the spectator and the artist become aware of their social and spiritual responsibility.\"
The El Paso artists were bound by a monochromatic presentation, echoing the classical, dramatic tenebrism and sobriety of Diego Velázquez, as well as the haunting force of Goya's \"Black Paintings.\" Furthermore, these artists looked to Joan Miro's unwavering commitment to experimentation and his stand against artistic conventions, and to the poignancy of Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica, connecting the continuing repression of the Franco regime with that of its violent beginnings in the bombing of Guernica in 1937 by Hitler's troops in support of Franco.
Together, the overall “roughness” and restrained quality of the El Paso’s works—Canogar and Saura's violent action painting; Feito’s monochromatic oil impastos and the tension achieved by mixing sand and gravel; the \"free and anguished protest\" of Millares' gashed burlaps stained with black, white, and red; the distraught rigidity of Rivera's wire mesh—reflected the bleak and repressive landscape of a nation subsumed under a bloody civil war and the contradictions they faced from their continuing protest against the regime and the dictatorship's propagandistic use of their avant-gardeness for its gains.
Zóbel befriends the El Paso
Zóbel came into the orbit of El Paso, and befriended its members Saura, Feito, Chirino, and Millares, buying and collecting their paintings. In 1959, Zóbel joined the El Paso and other Spanish abstractionists in the show Negro y Blanco. Exposición homenaje a Chillida, Oteiza, Miró-Artigas, Tàpies y Palazuelo, a tribute to the Spanish artists who were recognized in the international biennales and competitions. It was Zóbel's first show with his friends and became a pivotal moment in his life, as this was the exact moment when he identified himself with the Spanish generation of painters, a compelling reason to leave his Philippine era behind.
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,\" Zóbel enthusiastically wrote when he returned to Manila.
Zóbel's restrained palette in his Serie Negra was majorly influenced by his friendship with the El Paso artists. However, Zóbel's Serie Negra veered from the group's political commentaries by focusing on gestural meditation, akin to Oriental calligraphy, and was much closer to Rueda's painterly and lyrical abstraction.
Serie Negra, symbolizing Zóbel's own freedom
Zóbel succinctly described his black paintings as:
\"Painting of light and line, of movement. Pictures of a swift, improvised execution, like Chinese and Japanese painting. Improvisation permitted by...infinite...drawings. Line; trajectory. Imprint of movement. Painting without any fuss, without anguish, without any melodramatics.”
By the time the Serie Negra was coming to fruition, Zóbel had realized that color was beginning to serve merely aesthetic purposes. His introduction to the monochromatic works of El Paso made him discover the infinite expressionism inherent in black and white. For Zóbel, fond references to the Spanish landscape are seen in some works of the Serie Negra, made possible through the seemingly swift movement of black lines. In this case, Zóbel's Tarraco sees him \"departing\" from his hectic Manila corporate life and into the solemn, meditative search for personal freedom and expression, which he found in Spain.
Zóbel's identification with the Spanish abstractionists of his generation was the final key to his freedom, and the Serie Negra became the ultimate symbol of this newfound joy. As Canogar once said, \"In our Spanish culture, black is a symbol of mourning and death, connoting transcendental transit to another dimension, unknown and mysteriously always present on man's horizon.\" What ultimately binds El Paso and Zóbel is a unifying picture of the human spirit yearning to break free from all constraints. For Zóbel, the transition to monochrome meant the end of a former life and the metamorphosis of an existence unbound, one that pursued the creative expressions of the soul.
The connection with Oriental roots
As seen in Tarraco, a heavy concentration of black paint is seen on the left side, likely representing the hilly city of Tarragona and its dynamic confluence of ancient Roman structures (the old terraces the Romans built to adapt to the terrain), medieval Catholic complexes, and modern-day urban planning all overlooking an expanse of white evoking the Mediterranean Sea.
This time, Zóbel's draftsmanship becomes the core, accentuated by the solid, rhythmical blacks applied through a syringe on a field of whites, reflecting the immensity of a landscape through the delicate tension between line and space. The absence of colors allows form and space to shine through, with Zóbel's gestural draftsmanship spiritually drawing the viewer into the setting he evokes, making a certain natural quality (the movement of a bustling cityscape where the ancient meets the cosmopolitan) discernible beyond the plastic forms. Zóbel observed and studied the Spanish landscape, producing countless drawings of its everyday energies and the rhythms of quaint Spanish urban living, meditating on them like an Oriental calligrapher, before translating them onto the canvas. This affirms that for Zóbel, \"order is essential,” emphasizing the need for composition and method. This practice aligned with the Oriental principle of black and white—the yin and yang—the dual-centric perspective on harmony, centered on the balance between unrestrained introspection and outward expression, and the need for disciplined practice to achieve a liberating expression. With this, Nature is esteemed, highlighting our oneness with it, a mark of poetic Oriental elegance.
Zóbel's interest in Oriental art was further fueled by the archaeological discovery of Chinese porcelains at the family's Calatagan estate in Batangas, prompting him to study Chinese painting and calligraphy under Professor Chen Bing Sun, often referred to as the “Father of Chinese Brush Painting in the Philippines.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":30000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":30000000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":36048000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":63678,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/53.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":64128,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/53e.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":63905,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/53d.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":63903,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/53c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":63898,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/53b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":63896,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/53a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[],"prev":52,"next":54,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}