{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":61645,"auction_id":209,"set_id":242,"lot_number":"67","artist":"Fernando Zóbel (1924 - 1984)","title":"Saeta 82 - Filadelfia (Blanco sobre gris)","starting_price":16000000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower right)
\ndated 1958","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"24\" x 36\" (61 cm x 91 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"A gift from the artist to Carl Steele in 1958
\nPrivate collection, Madrid","exhibited":"Galería Cayón, Fernando Zóbel, circa 1959, Madrid, 17 December 2015 - 6 February 2016","literature":"DE LA TORRE, Alfonso (Director). In collaboration with Rafael
\nPérez-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. 58-25 (239), p. 158.
\nPerez-Madero, Rafael and Francisco Calvo Serraller, Fernando Zóbel,circa 1959. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same title at Galería Cayón from December 2015 to February 2016. Full-color reproduction on page 37 and painting description on page 36","write_up":"A Highly Important and Exceptionally Rare Saeta: A Gift from Zóbel to a Friend and Fellow Modernist, Carl Steele by Adrian Maranan
A mile away from the historic Old Pine Street Presbyterian Church, which once counted among its faithful parishioners John Adams, a Founding Father of the United States and 2nd President of the American nation, stands a centuries-old townhouse built in the 1800s. In its penthouse once lived Carl L. Steele, who became a close friend of Fernando Zóbel.
This highly important Saeta 82 - Filadelfia, from Steele's collection, is now unveiled to the public after being immaculately kept in his private collection for more than sixty years. Saeta 82 - Filadelfia is also exceptionally rare, as it is the only Saeta painted in the United States; all Saetas were either painted by Zóbel in the Philippines (the early Saetas of 1957) or in Spain (the later Saetas). Zóbel gifted this Saeta Filadelfia to Steele as a token of their friendship.
Saeta 82 - Filadelfia was painted in September 1958 in the penthouse of Steele's townhouse at 1606 Pine Street. Zóbel himself presented the idea that he wanted to paint a work just for Steele. According to the collector, Steele said that Zóbel personally asked him to buy the necessary materials for his painting, then proceeded to paint the work in a small makeshift studio set up in Steele's penthouse.
The painting evokes a frenzied scene of Philly at dusk, with skyscraper lights beginning to dot the cityscape like fireflies, mercury-vapor streetlights illuminating the city's urban arteries, and headlights flickering and dancing as cars drive along the highways. Saeta 82 - Filadelfia is a painting of pictorial tension and pulsating rhythms. Cool, crisp whites inspired by skyscrapers and streetlights clash with flashy oranges evoking car headlights, mapped across dusky grays that echo twilight's curtain call, blurring the boundaries of line and color.
In the whites of the painting can be conjured the imposing skyscrapers of Philly. Imagine the nighttime radiance of the ornate Second Empire Style Philadelphia City Hall; the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS) Building, the US' first modern skyscraper, built in the International Style; the art deco Philadelphia National Bank (Lincoln-Liberty) Building; and the beaux-arts Fidelity-Philadelphia Trust Company Building, all illuminating the historic city where America's independence was first declared.
Much like Philadelphia's moniker as \"The City of Brotherly Love\" (from the Greek \"philos,\" meaning love, and \"adelphos,\" meaning brother), Saeta 82 - Filadelfia encapsulates Zóbel and Steele's enduring brotherhood, forged by a shared passion for modern art and the endless possibilities it can endow to the creative mind.
The Saetas as Zóbel's artistic affirmation
Similar to Philadelphia's moniker as America's \"Cradle of Liberty\" for its role in the nation's freedom from British bondage, Zóbel's Saetas are paintings of emancipation, an artist's declaration of creative assertion and confidence.
Saeta refers both to the traditional Catholic song of Andalusia performed during the Holy Week, lamenting the Passion of Christ and the Via Crucis, and an \"arrow,\" connoting the piercing sorrow reflected and manifested by the mournful devotional song. In Zóbel's paintings, the saeta becomes vibrant linear configurations of calligraphic intensity laid out on a rhapsody of color fields using a hypodermic syringe (needle removed and filled with oil paint), which, interestingly, the artist said was his favorite drawing piece as it was \"easy to handle and very sensitive to differences in angle and pressure.\" He was inspired by seeing a cook write \"Happy Birthday\" in icing on a cake.
In his conversations with Rafael Perez-Madero published in the all-important monograph Zóbel: La Serie Blanca (1978), Zóbel affirmed that the Saetas are \"as abstract as their subject matter.\" \"The spectator never quite knows what he's dealing with,\" Zóbel stated.
\"The Saetas are completely abstract in the sense that they contain no figurative references,\" Zóbel said. \"This series of pictures—some hundreds or so oils that begin in 1957 and gradually turn into something different towards the middle of 1959—constitute my most purely abstract works to date.\" The Saetas, in the visual vocabulary of Zóbel, are not lamentations in the literal sense but a paean to an old life and practice and the birth of something new that is deeper and profoundly introspective. The governing principle of the Saetas is movement articulated in the languages of the plastic elements of line and color. Zóbel aimed to express, in a non-imitative manner, the movement he observed and felt: from people and natural phenomena to urban, industrial, and cultural happenings.
\"You might say that the underlying theme is movement. Movement stated in terms of line. The movement of leaves, of vegetation, of birds, of people; movement observed and felt, never intimated, yet, I hope, clearly expressed,\" Zóbel shared with Perez-Madero.
Zóbel had been fiddling with abstraction since the early 1950s, when his art centered on Filipino themes that closely aligned with the Filipino modernist movement spearheaded by his artist-friends at the Philippine Art Gallery: Vicente Manansala, H.R. Ocampo, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, and Arturo Luz.
In 1953, Zóbel first presented his abstract paintings to the public at the First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala, in which Steele also participated. Aside from the paintings that he presented in that landmark show of pure abstraction, Zóbel destroyed many of the works of this period, finding \"such endeavors to be lacking in meaning and also somewhat incoherent,\" therefore, \"abandon[ing] the idea,\" as articulated by his chronologist Angeles Villalba Salvador.
It took Zóbel two years to come full circle with abstraction, fully realizing his vision and immersing himself in the process. In October 1954, Zóbel was invited as an artist-in- residence at the Rhode Island School of Design, courtesy of his close friends and fellow artists, James and Reed Pfeufer. At the time, Zóbel's main pursuit was to study engraving techniques, with James, an engraving instructor at the school, teaching him lithography and engraving.
Providential enough was the moment for Zóbel in Providence, as this was exactly the time when abstract expressionism was the lingua franca of the American art landscape, a rousing time of experimentation and innovation in the post-war world. He visited an exhibition of Rothko, who had entered the most successful years of his artistic career, at the Providence Museum, titled Recent Paintings by Mark Rothko. Rothko's works left an indelible impact on Zóbel, who visited the exhibition every single day, attempting to understand how, in the mere language of color and the blurring of boundaries between the plastic elements of painting, a work can become so impactful and eloquent despite the absence of any observable reference to real- life elements.
In the Saetas, we see how Rothko's color fields profoundly inspired the color-laden backgrounds of Zóbel's Saetas, which he applied by superimposing one layer of color after another to create an expanse of spatial depth.
Zóbel recalled this exact moment in his talks with Perez- Madero.
\"I was trying to learn graphic techniques at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1955 when two things happened that changed the whole course of my painting. First, I saw an extraordinary exhibition by Mark Rothko that completely dazzled me. In a theoretical sense, I knew it was possible to paint abstractly, but Rothko's demonstration convinced me completely. Almost at the same time, I discovered photography's ability to preserve the image in a manner I felt far superior to the resources of painting. I felt obliged to paint, but I had abandoned the need to 'represent.' This left me in a kind of vacuum. A vacuum turned into two years of experiments and into a huge pile of destroyed paintings, until I found my theme in the technique that led to the series of Saetas.\"
Furthermore, Zóbel's discovery of Spanish informalism (the Spanish counterpart to American abstract expressionism) and the young Spanish informalistas espousing artistic freedom in a repressive cultural landscape under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, fueled his desire for abstraction. After visiting one of their exhibitions in April 1955 at the modest bookstore-cum-gallery of Fernando Fe (this was Madrid's own \"PAG\") in Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Zóbel wrote in his diary, \"I met Guillermo Delgado during his show at Fernando Fe...His pictures, uncompromisingly abstract, show a process completely under control, completely 'worked out,' unlike the abstract expressionists.\" Zóbel found affinity with the young Delgado, since he also espoused the practice of sketching prodigiously before arriving at the final painting, as evidenced by his numerous extant sketchbooks.
In 1956, Zóbel also went on a business trip to Japan to fulfill obligations for his family business. He encountered Japanese aesthetics firsthand at the Temple of Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, where he saw \"all those lines meticulously drawn with a rake [that] produce an unsettling effect.\" When he returned to Manila, Zóbel even refurbished his Forbes Park home along traditional Japanese aesthetics, recruiting the young Lindy Locsin as architect. The renovated house incorporated a low ceiling and matted floors and featured a moon-watching bridge, a bamboo garden, and even a sand garden like that at the Temple of Ryōan-ji. Profoundly inspired by the calligraphic lines drawn with a rake in the sand gardens of Kyoto that symbolize the rhythm of meditation, Zóbel's Saetas are born of logical spontaneity. The calligraphic lines, as spontaneous and dynamic as they are on the surface, are actually controlled and contemplated upon, not hastily laid out on canvas, with Zóbel \"rehearsing\" his lines through numerous preparatory drawings, similar to how the Chinese and the Japanese would experiment systematically and extensively through sketches and studies, exhibiting their mastery of draftsmanship.
When Zóbel arrived at his idea for the Saetas, the throes of artistic and existential dilemma had been alleviated—even for only a while. By the time Zóbel debuted his Saetas at the Philippine Art Gallery in July 1957, the perfect melding of the Oriental and the Occidental, bridging the two worlds he lived in, had materialized; a wedding of the unbridled expression found in Western abstract expressionism and the meditative and refined practice of Eastern calligraphy.
Zóbel said in an interview with critic Leo Benesa in January 1958: \"After all, the vocabulary of art has become international in almost every respect.\"","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":26000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":26000000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":25032,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":31241600,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":68544,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/67.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[],"prev":66,"next":68,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}