Provenance: Christie's, Asian 20th Century Art (Day Sale), Hong Kong, 27 May 2018, Lot 367
Private collection, Manila

Exhibited: Sala de Exposiciones El Monte, Fernando Zobel (First Retrospective Exhibition),
Organized by the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain, October 1983

Literature: De la Torre, Alfonso and Rafael Pérez-Madero.
Fernando Zóbel: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946 - 1984). Madrid: Fundación Azcona, 2022. Listed as "nº 78-83"
with full-color illustration and painting description on page 584.

ABOUT THE WORK

Cuenca and its River Jucar were Zóbel’s saving grace. I n 1984, Zóbel succumbed to a heart attack. He was buried in the San Isidro Cemetery in Cuenca’s highest point overlooking the Jucar. Forty years later, Zóbel has become one and the same with his cherished river, reveling in an eternal ode of honor and indebtedness. (Adrian Maranan) pastel oranges represent the River Jucar and its environs. Zóbel painted this work on November 16, 1978, during autumn, when the leaves of the river’s surrounding trees (particularly the poplar tree) turn orange, creating unique colorations reflecting on the waters. The shades of brown heavily concentrated on the work’s right portion evoke the captivating reflection of the orange leaves on the Jucar’s green waters. Zóbel once noted in a March 3, 1982 interview with El Pais that the Jucar “displays an array of colors the likes of which I have not seen elsewhere.” Cuenca has soaring cliffs and mammoth walls of rocks that seemingly guard its mother Jucar, from which medieval castles and hanging houses eventually sprang forth. And so did a perpetually meditative Zóbel. Interestingly, the Jucar became Zóbel’s quintessential muse during his creative peak of the 1970s, in which physicality and spirituality are wedded to form a lyrical expression of meditative luminosity and passionate remembrance. The Jucar would become the subject of Zóbel’s last series, Las Orillas, which he made after a wrenching depression that caused him to destroy many of his paintings. He would also publish in 1982 a book of photographs, El Jucar en Cuenca. As the Jucar became Cuenca’s lifeblood, so was the river’s role in Zóbel’s lyrical virtuoso, giving him the dynamic strength and life-preserving spirituality to pursue his own lifeblood—painting.'