Provenance: Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

Exhibited: Bertha Schaefer Gallery, Fernando Zobel: Recent Paintings, New York, March 26 - April 13, 1968

Literature: De la Torre, Alfonso and Rafael Pérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946 - 1984). Madrid: Fundación Azcona, 2022. Listed as "nº 67-66" with full-color photograph and painting description on page 361.

ABOUT THE WORK

This piece encapsulates the friendship between Fernando Zobel and Bernard Childs, the American painter, printmaker, and pioneer of engraving metal plates using industrial tools. Zobel's biographer, Angeles Villalba Salvador, writes, "Childs is the friend to influence him the most." While he had previously ventured into engraving beginning in his Harvard days, Zobel learned from Childs the "secrets and problems of inks, plates, papers, etc." Childs mentored Zobel in engraving, as evidenced by their frequent exchanges of letters. Zobel even visited Childs in October 1962 in his Paris studio, where the eminent engraver gave private sessions to him and companion artists Antonio Lorenzo and Gerardo Rueda. In his personal notes in Madrid in 1962, Zobel writes of his admiration towards Childs. "The time Bernard spends from inking the plate to finally passing it through the screw press is two and a half hours. He wastes no movements," Zobel recalls. "...There is nothing more pleasurable than watching somebody do something he knows how to do really well. When inking a plate, Bernard uses his head more than most of the painters that I know use theirs when they're painting a picture..." Zobel painted the work at hand during one of his visits to Childs and his family in Paris in 1967. Childs was simultaneously working on Zobel's portrait—a memory he immortalized on this canvas. We see in this piece glimpses of Child working in his Parisian studio, interpreted through Zobel's own vision of lyrical abstraction that is Delphic yet meditative and shows his keen observation and understanding of art's diversity and the world around him. In Zobel's sketchbook, we can even see Zobel's creative process; how he rendered Child painting his portrait. We see in the spectral-like whites Child's bodily contours and him in the act of painting. The sharp lines forming a rectangle with the blots of dark browns and siennas represent Child's canvas mounted on an easel. The remaining lines and shades, ranging from ochre to grey, give us a peek into Child's studio. "Bernard Childs pintado mi retrato" forms part of Zobel's Dialogos, his sublime conversations with art and the artists themselves. He described this series as follows: "I think this series will last all my life until the day I depart this world. The idea behind Diálogos is to speak of art with art but with the brushes at the ready." The Dialogos is Zobel's "own way of seeing." Villalba Salvador writes that the years between 1963 and 1975 were the longest phase in Zobel's career, characterized by the artist's "return to color," with "the siennas, dark browns, ochres, and greys" appearing in Zobel's canvas. Previously, Zobel had ventured into his Serie Negra—monochromatic canvases characterized by black lines on a white background. The Dialogos was the first series borne from this revival. Zobel captures the colorful history of art by studying and contemplating various elements integral to an artist's process—light, movement, color, gesture, and intention, and "disarranges and rearranges so as to build in his own way," as Villalba Salvador puts it. But this work at hand veers from Zobel's typical Dialogos, opting instead for a lighthearted, casual, and to some extent, warm and sentimental conversation (mainly due to its delicate and ethereal textures) with his friend, Childs. Unlike other works from his Dialogos series, in which he converses with the masters of yore and their masterpieces he saw at the various museums he visited, "Bernard Childs pintado mi retrato" is Zobel's dialogue with a fellow artist, who also happened to be one of his dearest friends. Memory became integral to Zobel’s praxis beginning in 1963, with his lived experiences becoming the basis of his subjects. Thus, the work is a cherished experience immortalized on a canvas, a visit not to the museum but to the hallowed bastion of platonic intimacy. It can also be Zobel's dialogue with himself, what he sees and thinks of himself while Childs paints his portrait, imbuing in this piece a multi-dimensional quality, a portrait within a portrait. In many ways, Zobel and Childs mirrored each other. Both were interested and keenly aware of the sublime interplay between light and shadow and color, line, and space, producing works with a distinct kind of poetic clarity and lyricism and varying and rich textures. Both also delved into deliberate construction and logical spontaneity; Childs would repeatedly modify and alter his plates for months until satisfaction filled him, while Zobel would draw numerous preliminary sketches and drafts and write notes before working on his canvas. But both still gave free rein to their creative instincts. Zobel and Childs also weaved hints of figuration into their overtly abstract works. In one way or another, we can see Childs' influence on Zobel's return to color in his Dialogos since the former was known for using the unbridled movement and potency of colors to evoke recollections. Zobel then unleashed a refined lyricism that enshrined his memories of personal experiences in his altar of consciousness, wedding the spiritual and corporeal, in the same manner that Child put his stories of survival during the Second World War as the foundation of his art. (Adrian Maranan)