{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":61591,"auction_id":209,"set_id":242,"lot_number":"13","artist":"Fernando Zóbel (1924 - 1984)","title":"El Recreo III - Estudio","starting_price":16000000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower left and verso), dated, titled, and inscribed \"Zóbel / EL RECREO III/ (ESTUDIO) / 81-57\"","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"40\" x 60\" (100 cm x 150 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Galería Theo, Madrid
\nPrivate collection, Spain","exhibited":"Galería Juan Gris, José Guerrero y Fernando Zóbel, Madrid, 3 - 31 March 1992","literature":"José Guerrero y Fernando Zóbel. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same title at the Galería Juan Gris in Madrid in March 1992. Fullcolor reproduction on page 9.
DE LA TORRE, Alfonso (Director). In collaboration with Rafael Pérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel. Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946-1984)-Catálogo Razonado de Pinturas de Fernando Zóbel (1946 - 1984). Madrid-Manila: Fundación Azcona, Fundación Juan March, Ayala Foundation and Fernando Zóbel Heirs, 2023. Nº cat. 81-57, pp. 624 - 625.","write_up":"The name Fernando Zóbel is undoubtedly a household name in Philippine art history. He was a globally acclaimed artist known for his highly restrained, non-objective, lyrical abstraction, which blended modern influences with Asian elements. The man behind a career spanning four fruitful decades (from the 1940s to the 1980s) and a multitude of works that decorated numerous galleries, exhibitions, office and residence walls, as well as private collections.
Zóbel's art contains traces of the people he met along his journey, the places he visited, and the art movements he was exposed to. But there is no denying Cuenca's vital role in his works. Since he permanently resided in Spain in the 1960s, this picturesque town has been his home. The window from his apartment-cum-art-studio frames the enthralling Júcar River. Entranced, he made the river the central theme of his subsequent paintings, giving rise to multiple series that earned him further recognition in the art world. Among these series were the El Júcar, Las Orillas, La Corriente, and El Recreo.
After his prolific decade of the 1970s, when he produced some of his best-known and acclaimed series, like La Vista and Serie Blanca, among others, Zóbel suffered a Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis while visiting Manila in 1980. More commonly known as Cerebral Thrombosis or CVST, this occurs when a blood clot forms in the brain's venous sinuses, preventing proper drainage and obstructing normal blood flow, which can lead to swelling and/or bleeding.
Fortunately, he recovered and promptly went back to Spain. However, the aftereffects were detrimental. Not long after his return to Cuenca, Zóbel was struck with depression, and it gravely affected him. His biographer, Angeles Villalba Salvador, noted how cerebral thrombosis and the eventual depression affected Zóbel's art:
\"This crisis shook his work, and he returned more strongly than ever to colour. Drawing now lost the prominence it had had in previous periods and he became fully focused on colour. He also began to use new materials, such as pencil for the basic drawing and pastel.\"
While his last series, Las Orillas, had been in the works since 1979, it is evident that more color and graphite lines appeared in the latter works of the series, following his recovery. In this collection of works, painted between 1979 and 1982, Zóbel once again brings our subconscious to the captivating Júcar and its riverbanks. His lyrical abstraction stimulates people's minds and invites everyone to imagine the whole landscape and supplement its every detail with their memory of the river—whether from personal experience or from photographs—using his strokes of color and graphite.
Zóbel's pursuit of art is a continuous process of research and experimentation. As part of developing a new art series, he constantly creates sketches and studies first before executing them on canvas. \"In such a way that the effect is that of a coherent whole, trained (as when writing) and articulated from the minutest detail to the unified whole, every element subject to order and a rare sense of proportion, considering the degree of exactitude and sustainability,\" Magaz Sangro writes in the catalogue of the artist's first exhibition of abstract works in Spain.
Between series, Zóbel also created several standalone works and miniseries. Painted in 1981, El Recreo sits at the midst of his revered Serie Blanca and Las Orillas. While the former has already been concluded and the latter had already begun at the time of its creation, El Recreo still serves as a transitional work, a bridge connecting the two series.
Zóbel's El Recreo III provides a study of the structure of his beloved Júcar—the riverbanks and their surroundings, the volume and movement of the water. On the one hand, it follows Serie Blanca's white principle, in which the white of the canvas smoothly merges with the tans, beiges, and greys that depict the colors of the landscape: the ground, the mud, and the shadows. While on the other hand, it bears Las Orillas' intensity in colors and darker, vigorous graphite lines, tracing the skeleton of the vegetation, stone walls, and rock formations along the riverbank.
How Villalba Salvador described the El Júcar series can also be said in El Recreo: \"Those [El Júcar series] were paintings in which the colors of the Júcar were the chromatic basis of the series, at the same time an abstract reference to something real. Those colors were woven into the composition by means of a linear framework that gave solid structure to the work.\"
The word \"recreo\" interestingly translates to \"break (from doing something)\" or \"recreation.\" Truly, this series of paintings served as Zóbel's form of leisure and gradual comeback to painting after recovering from serious medical conditions. In March 1992, El Recreo III starred in a joint exhibition with Jose Guerrero held at the Galeria Juan Gris in Madrid.
In numerous interviews and correspondences, Zóbel reiterates the importance of memory in his paintings. His landscapes, despite the similarity in subject and theme, were still different to an extent. He was not fond of on-thespot painting. Instead, his final pieces heavily relied on his memory of what he saw and how it felt.
Zóbel's background in literature enabled him to see and depict things differently from what others usually considered \"normal\". His canvases provide a poetic delineation of his subjects and an abstraction that entails movement, expressed metaphorically through line and color placement.
Furthermore, in 1958, Zóbel enrolled in Chinese calligraphy lessons. \"I am learning to read (not speak) and write Chinese (...) It is an ideal exercise for a painter; if you manage to control a Chinese brush, you can control anything,\" Zóbel said in a letter to a friend. Hence, his fine, controlled brushstrokes could be attributed to this new venture.
Therefore, Zóbel's recollections, coupled with his understanding of color and space, resulted in abstract works that showcase a great sense of control and offer a meditative quality. Indeed, his oeuvre provides a comforting respite to the viewers' psyche, just as the Júcar and the act of painting healed his inner woes.
As Zóbel once said, \"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.\" Truth be told, his health problems and his old age could not (and certainly did not) stop him or his relentless pursuit of the arts, so even under these conditions, he still devoted his time to researching, painting, and exhibiting around the world.
Fernando Zóbel's life and career give us an insight into the artist's undying love for Cuenca and the arts. Regardless of the challenges he faced and the sickness he suffered from, Cuenca, especially that of the spellbinding Júcar, always soothes his mind. And from the moment he set his mind on becoming an artist, he taught himself the ways of the art, researching and experimenting to develop his own art style and identity. What started as a pastime activity for a bed-bound teenager unknowingly became the start of a lasting career and legacy","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":22000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":22000000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":24694,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":26435200,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":68492,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/13.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[],"prev":12,"next":14,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}