The stooped figure of Frank Auerbach comes to mind, visiting London’s National Portrait Gallery almost daily for most of his life to copy and study the masters. So, too, the refined, deft hand of Fernando Zóbel, committed to his lifelong series Dialogues.
It may also be that through a devoted act of rigour and study, the artist begins to set himself against what was once a formative source of inspiration. Drawn passionately to the Spanish poet, playwright and martyr of the Civil War, Federico García Lorca, Zóbel published Zóbel Reads Lorca, his translation of an erotic play by the poet, accompanied by his own illustrations.
For all his passion for the poet-playwright, what Zóbel ultimately set aside was Lorca’s call to duende — a surrender to that devilish spirit of passion and inspiration. His commitment lay, instead, in the methodical, sustained study and an evolving system of practice. “Order,” Zóbel would state, “is essential.” Essential, especially, for one “born with a complicated mind”.
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A consummate cosmopolitan with a roving aesthetic, Fernando Zóbel de Ayala y Montojo was born in the historic quarter of Ermita in Manila. After a return to Spain, the family moved back to the Philippines to escape the Spanish Civil War. A completely self-taught artist, Zóbel first enrolled in medical school at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila but was forced to abandon his studies because of a spinal condition. It was during this period that he began sketching. Without completing his medical degree, he transferred to Harvard University to study history and literature, where he also began painting seriously, influenced by the Boston School.
Following his time in the US, Zóbel returned to the Philippines and held his first exhibition at the Philippine Art Gallery in 1953. He joined the Ateneo de Manila University and became honorary director of the Ateneo Art Gallery, which became a centre for some of the formative figures in modernist Philippine art. He eventually gave up his position at Ateneo to return to Spain, dedicating himself fully to painting. There, he emerged not only as a painter of remarkable versatility and depth but also as a collector and a prominent figure in leading art institutions.
In 2022, Zóbel: The Future of the Past — a major retrospective — was held at the Prado Museum in Madrid, the institution he considered his artistic home. The exhibition later travelled to the Ayala Museum in Manila, with a special focus on Zóbel’s Philippine experience.
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Fernando Zóbel: Order is Essential — the third iteration of the Zóbel retrospective, currently on display at the National Gallery Singapore with masterful curation by Clarissa Chikiamco and Patrick Flores — unfolds as a series of revelations. While a lucid chronological flow remains, the liminal and mystical intensity of Zóbel’s work is brought forth through a perceptive use of space, as if a landscape of artistic preoccupations is being unravelled.
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors immediately encounter the tone set by an elliptical heading: “Half of this Haunted Monk’s Life”.
Artistic and intellectual restiveness, combined with deliberate method and sustained effort, appears to have defined Zóbel’s progression. Interspersed among the paintings are the contemplations and experiments that gave rise to them.
Etched in his notebooks are exhortations such as a line from the art historian George Kubler: “The precursor shapes a new civilisation; the rebel defines the edges of a disintegrating one.” For Zóbel, rebellion was a continuous exploration of artistic traditions and media — from his study of Chinese calligraphy and the disciplined brush-and-ink work it entailed, to the experimental use of a syringe in his Saeta series, and the gradual shift from figuration to abstraction, a transformation ignited by his first encounter with Mark Rothko, which left him “completely dazzled”.
The clear and steady delineation of an artistic line does not diminish Zóbel’s fascination with tradition and the indigenous, to which an entire section is dedicated.
In discussing Zóbel’s cosmopolitanism, various terms have been used, most notably “transnational”. Yet — and this is one of the cleverest curatorial devices in Order is Essential — it is in his individual obsessions, the search for artistic practices that would serve his own work, that geographical and anthropological definitions fail to make proper sense. A sense of charged curiosity, even innocence, pervades the space.
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A principal attraction of the exhibition is Zóbel’s photography, driven by his impulse to capture the moment. Fine frames are on display here — charged and energetic.
For viewers, the search might be for a Southeast Asian dimension or mark, yet it remains present, if elusive. This amorphous identity is captured well in an essay by Chikiamco: “Having played a significant role in the art scenes of both Spain and the Philippines, Zóbel represents a special case … His dual nationalism has made it tempting for others to look for Spanish and ‘Oriental’, if not specifically Filipino, characteristics in his practice.”
And it is this liminality — the transcendence of easy and convenient categories — that most impresses in Order is Essential. This may be among the reasons for a renewed interest in Fernando Zóbel, one that is likely to endure.
In a period of trenchant identities, it is the fluidity, erudition and even mysticism of Zóbel’s textures and tones, the keen sense of suspension evident not just in his work, methods and paintings but in his lived experience, that might prove most beguiling and enduring.
Perhaps this is what Zóbel himself revealed when he said: “I think that painters paint the world they live in. My world has to do with the history of art.”
