{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":59783,"auction_id":186,"set_id":220,"lot_number":"68","artist":"Fernando Zóbel (1924 - 1984)","title":"Drawing Book and Diary\nContaining a Collection of 56 Sketches  \nin Ink and Pencil","starting_price":1000000,"signed_dated":"Signed and dated 1952 on the frontispiece <br/>\nSigned on the inside cover endpaper<br/>\nHandwriting on the endpapers indicates the sketches<br/> \ncover the period of March to August 1952<br/>\nSpine is embossed in gold with the initials FZM<br/> \n(Fernando Zóbel y Montoya)","medium":"Bound in a single black hardbound volume.","size":"This Lot is accompanied by a photograph of Don  Beniting Legarda at Zóbel’s art opening, with a note,  “Para tu scrapbook. You look highly critical, I must say,  signed Zóbel.”","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Collection of Dr. Benito J. Legarda, Jr.","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"On the face of it, Fernando Zóbel and Benito Legarda could not be more different — but they were united in many things, most especially, their love of Filipino culture.\n\nFernando Zóbel looked at Philippine culture through the lens of art and literature; Benito Legarda, through the lens of economics and the archives. Both loved history, and as revealed in Zóbel’s letters, they both loved the thrill of the chase to uncover the unknown details of Philippine history. \n\nZóbel and Legarda came from the same gilded circle known as ‘de buena familia (of good family)’, moneyed, cultivated, and educated in all the gentlemanly pursuits. Both of Spanish origin, they were among the last of a generation that still spoke and wrote to each other in that language. Both would attend Harvard : Zóbel, the younger one, would graduate after the war with a Bachelor of Arts in History and Literature. He would always consider it a turning point in his life, opening up the road to becoming one of the most influential Spanish modernist masters. \n\nThe letters are all from Zóbel, and in them we uncover a humorous man with mischievous wit and an almost photographic memory. \n\nOn the other hand, Legarda would graduate from its ivy covered halls with a Master of Arts in Economics in 1950 and a Ph.D. in the same subject in 1955. It would lead him to a path of scholarship in the galleon trade and the colonial economy, as well as a position in the Central Bank of the Philippines. \n\nBoth men were legendary collectors with legendary appetites. Legarda, however, would surpass Zóbel as a more thorough omnivore, snapping up rare books, maps, historical prints, coins, as well as paintings and fine art. Zóbel, true to his calling as a painter, would amass an iconic collection of Filipino modernist works, which he bequeathed to the Ateneo de Manila University. \n\nTwo Zóbel sketchbooks are represented in this lot, the first a well-known compendium containing drawings over the course of Zóbel’s Philippine travels; the second, unpublished, features sketches from travels with his close friend Beniting, annotated amply with historical and architectural notes. \n\nThis collection of sketchbooks details a very close friendship, developed even further as they ventured to towns in Pampanga and as far as the Ilocos together to explore the rich Filipino colonial past, its churches and villages, as well as its modern-day inhabitants, both in and out of Manila. \n\nCombined with a dozens of ephemera, photographs, exhibition catalogues, and personal letters where, among other pleasures, Filipino high society is discussed, these form an absorbing record of a bond that spanned several decades and many continents. \n\nThey are not just an insightful look at Zóbel’s artistic process but also a front-row seat to the friendship between two of the most fascinating creatures in Filipino haute culture. \n\nIt is 1952, the year Fernando Zóbel returns to Manila. He plunges immediately into the exciting world of Filipino art. He befriends such influential figures as Arturo Luz and the writer E. Aguilar Cruz — and gravitates naturally to another fellow intellectual, Benito “Beniting” Legrada. \n\nPerhaps the most personal set of artworks are the 56 sketches that chronicle trips taken by both Legarda and Zóbel to explore northern and central Luzon. \n\nThe pair travelled to Ilocos, stalking churches, ancestral houses, farmers’ huts, and newer middle-class structures that Zóbel would teasingly call “sugar baroque” and “Philippine modern.” \n\nThe two culturati traveled to La Union, Tarlac, Pampanga, and Bulacan, stopping at stately homes on the way back, with Zóbel sketching furiously. \n\nThis museum-worthy collection of drawings shines a light on Zóbel in the very first year of his artistic journey in the Philippines and provides an enthralling view of Manila and its environs in the 1950s. \n\nThe drawing book is a trove of studies of what would become among Zóbel’s most famous figurative works, “Siga Siga”, “The Pink House” (which was in the collection of Legarda and auctioned in 2021) and “Lady in a Hat” from the same period. \n\nIt provides an anatomy of Zóbel’s artistic process. He wrote in the essay, “Methods of Contemporary Painters’, \"My approach is slow and deliberate. I draw quick ink sketches of possible motifs, or sometimes in watercolour. I continually do it wherever. If the theme has promise, i draw it, sometimes quite big. In the drawing, i try to resolve, as much as possible, some aspect of what will be the final painting. Its color range, for example, or its composition, or part of it. Generally, i usually accumulate 50 sketches and 30 drawings before starting the final painting. In the case of my Antillean still life, for example , the preparations lasted more than 3 years.\"","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":2400000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":2400000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":15138,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":2883840,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":65278,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/186/220/lot/68.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":67,"next":69,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}