Provenance: Provenance: A gift from the artist to the educators Charles O. Houston and Flor de Lys de los Santos Houston

ABOUT THE WORK

Fernando Zóbel was born into a family of landowners and industrialists. His father, Enrique, had in fact bankrolled Fernando Amorsolo’s art education at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid—so impressed was he by Amorsolo’s design of the Ginebra San Miguel gin label which is still in use to this day. Zóbel himself would study at Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design and would return to Manila in 1951. He would be immediately accepted as a guru of modernity and would be elected president of the influential Art Association of the Philippines in back-to-back years in 1953 and 1954. Also in 1954, he would participate in the landmark First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala organized by art critic Magtanggul Asa at the already influential Philippine Art Gallery, the only gallery in the country to offer modern art exclusively. He would next devise the Saeta (Arrow) in 1957, brilliantly using a hypodermic syringe to shoot out the lines that, for him, symbolized ultimate “improvisation” and spontaneity. Zóbel next set about developing the magnificent Serie Negra (The Black Series). There are only a very few of these left in private hands, the majority being held in distinguished museums. Zóbel painted these works only for a few years, thus giving them a covetable rarity. Emmanuel Torres, writing about Zóbel’s art, says It is nothing short of phenomenal when a painter, long noted for painting bright and exuberant colors, restricts himself to black and white. In the case of Fernando Zobel De Ayala, one of the most rational Filipino painters, this decision was born out of years of hard work at the drawing board and of inner necessity. Those accustomed to Zóbel’s colorful Abstract Expressionist works will be taken by surprise by the spareness, neatness, and self-control of these pieces. Reductive abstraction is the foundation of Zóbel’s stylistic idiom. The black and white paintings’ stained watercolor effect enhances the transparency of each abstract work, approaching a non-objectivity of the subject matter. This technique of erratic lines and scratches makeup Zóbel’s signature compositions. Here, Zobel renders the landscapes of line, tone, shape, and space into a structured and coherent whole. They are abstractions of direct contemplation of pure forms without any reference to a familiar world. Perales de Tejuña is a small town in the province of Madrid. The points of interest include the ruins of various hermitages, the remains of a tower-fortress, and the fascinating natural wonder the Risco de las Cuevas (Cliffside Caves). (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)