PROPERTY FROM THE DON BENITO J. LEGARDA JR. COLLECTION

Exhibited: Philippine Art Gallery, 1953

Literature: Duldulao, Manuel D. Contemporary Philippine Art: From the Fifties to the Seventies. Vera - Reyes, Inc. Quezon City. 1972. p. 44.

ABOUT THE WORK

In the same manner as other artists, Fernando Zóbel experimented with various techniques and styles before progressing into his trademark abstraction. It was at Harvard where he started to paint by himself. This spanned the years 1948 to 1952, during which he was influenced by Hyman Bloom, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Toulous Lautrec. In September 1952, Zóbel returned to Manila and started his professional painting career. He became acquainted with the young Filipino artists who held exhibitions at the Philippine Art Gallery (PAG) in Manila, such as Arturo Luz, Hernando Ocampo, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, and Vicente Manansala. This period also marked his affiliation with the Philippine Art Gallery that hosted several solo exhibitions of his works throughout the 1950s. When Zóbel returned to the Philippines, he would constantly draw figures that reflected his time as the person-in-charge of building the roads in Forbes Park. Zóbel cast aside his Bostonian style and the themes that pervaded his earliest works, and veered his subject matter towards Philippine forms and images inspired by his observations in reality. Zóbel developed an interest in painting figurative subjects including Baroque houses, becoming the new protagonists of his works. He rendered them in warm, eye-catching, and flat colors – surfaces that deviate from the traditional perspective and visually echoing Henri Matisse’s influence on his style during this period. Employing black for his lines, the compositions were similar to colored drawings in children’s books that proliferate with the vivacity of bright hues. In 1953, Zóbel was elected as the president of the Art Association of the Philippines. In the same year, he showcased his works – this piece included – at his debut solo exhibition at the Philippine Art Gallery. Zóbel’s biographer Angeles Villalba Salvador describes the artist’s works in the exhibition in the Catálogo exposición ZÓBEL: “(Zóbel) departed from the more symbolic and romantic themes of his Boston works and used a costumbrista theme. (The works) were conceived as surfaces which were filled with plain and very vivid colors, where traditional perspective sometimes disappeared completely, and in others, used subtle spatial references combined with spaces and two-dimensional figures. Matisse’s influence is important in these figurative works, which are characterized by a brilliant texture where sometimes thick, black lines are superimposed on the masses of color that foreshadow the gestures of later works.” Zóbel himself also detailed in the essay Methods of Contemporary Painters his method in creating these works: “My approach is slow and deliberate. I draw quick ink sketches of possible motifs, or sometimes in watercolor. 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. Generally, I usually accumulate fifty sketches and thirty drawings before starting the final painting.” Be that as it may, Zóbel was less engrossed in thought in capturing the intrinsic nature of his subjects rather than its extrinsic appearance. In Fernando Zóbel: Man and Artist, art critic Ricaredo Demetillo writes: “The subject matter of Zóbel’s paintings generally are of a representational nature, even when he is at his most abstract. You somehow feel that he is concerned with purging the object of its surface features to reveal the form beneath, that he eschews the retinal impression to contemplate purely thing-ness and compositional relationship of objects.”