Provenance: Private Collection, Spain

Literature: De la Torre, Alfonso and Rafael Pérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946 - 1984). Madrid: Fundación Azcona, 2022. Listed as "nº 72-54" with full-color photograph and painting description on page 467.

ABOUT THE WORK

Cuenca was part and parcel of Fernando Zobel's creative praxis. His first encounter with the city happened in 1963, underlaid by his idea to establish a museum that would house his collection of paintings in his Madrid abode. After a failed search for a conducive place in Toledo, Zobel fortuitously found Cuenca. On October 4, 1963, Zobel wrote to his American friend, Paul Haldeman: "My big project is a Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in the city of Cuenca—two and a half hours from Madrid. In the renowned "Hanging Houses," which the kindhearted, forward-looking local corporation has let me rent for thirty years at something like 1.50 dollars per annum. How nice for everybody! I have a feeling it is going to turn into one of the loveliest small museums in the world. As I will be owner, director, curator, acquisitions committee, patron, board of trustees and dictator, I rather think I shall have a lovely time." In July 1963, Zobel established his residence at Cuenca. The city would inspire myriad landscape paintings that manifest Zobel's enigmatic yet sublime lyrical abstraction. "Once he has decided to set up the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca, his trips to this city are constant; for years, it will be on the road and in the city that he will find most of his themes for landscapes… Little by little, the city and its surrounding area take possession of the painter, and Cuenca fills his notebooks, his pictures, and also his writing," his biographer Angeles Villalba Salvador succinctly notes. Zobel's brainchild, the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, would be formally established on June 30, 1966. Pervaded with much jubilation, Zobel would elevate Cuenca as the beautiful muse of many of his paintings. Two of these series now form part of Zobel's most coveted and highly imaginative and lyrical works: "El Júcar," or The River Júcar, and "La Vista," inspired by the view from the window in his Cuenca studio. In particular focus in this essay is the El Júcar series, to which the work at hand, titled Júcar XIX, belongs. The El Júcar was born from the 1971 works El lago (lake) and El estanque (pond), which were based on his notes on the lake located at Winchester College in Oxford, where he attended a lunch for the members of the Oriental Ceramic Society. Zobel would start working on the El Júcar in 1971 after carefully deliberating on a large-scale series of works looking into the river ecosystem. Zobel chose the Júcar River, which flows through the towns of Cuenca, Alcala del Jucar, Cofrentes, Alzira, Sueca, and Cullera. As such, Cuenca's essence and landscapes took center stage. Zobel's enthrallment at the sinuous paths of the Júcar and his marvel at the sight of his beloved Cuenca is evoked in the ethereal quality of Jucar XIX. We see in the range of colors, from the siennas to dark browns and even the greys, the ebb and flow of the waters of the Júcar. In an interview in El Pais on March 3, 1982, Zobel shared glimpses of how the varying "colors" of the Júcar are reflected in his paintings of the river. "I have often worked with issues of color, but always in the abstract," Zobel says: "Actually, the starting point is the extremely unusual Júcar River as it flows through Cuenca, where it displays an array of colors the likes of which I have not seen elsewhere." One of the windows on the other side of Zobel's apartment-cum-studio in Cuenca overlooked the mouth of the Júcar. The Júcar passes through the heart of Cuenca, and so the river was enshrined in perpetuity in Zobel's psyche. Once again, Zobel gives prominence to the importance of one's memory and recollections, reveling in the power of lived experiences in rendering works that palpably provide a window into his consciousness and subconsciousness and the power of profound introspection, resulting in pieces that wallow in poetic elegance. (Adrian Maranan)