The Prado Museum launches itself again into contemporary art. And it does so through an unrepeatable figure, that of Fernando Zóbel (Manila, 1924-Rome, 1984). A cosmopolitan artist at the crossroads between East and West who was able to found two museums: the Ateneo de Manila Museum and the Abstract Art Museum in Cuenca, essential for a Spain in the midst of Francoism in which contemporary art museums had not yet multiplied . A creator who did not see tradition as an obstacle to modernity, quite the opposite: in fact, he spent long hours at the Prado making drawings based on the works of the great masters, many of which he would take to his own abstract language, as now shows until March 5 the exhibition Zóbel. The future of the past.
Thus, Zóbel’s painting The Maiden’s Dream appears to be an abstract canvas of diffuse gray and brown forms, plus a brilliant white line, until next to it El Prado exhibits Lorenzo Lotto’s Allegory of Chastity, in which based and in which an angel showers flowers – Zóbel’s brilliant white line – on a young maiden surrounded by two satyrs. Alongside them, there are also reinterpretations of La Santa Faz by Zurbarán, or a still life by Van der Hamen in which the donut in the basket becomes in Zóbel’s painting a hypnotic ocher eye-circle that presides over a kind of pyramid.
“He was a profoundly cosmopolitan man open to all knowledge, who shared wherever he went”, summarized Manuel Fontán, director of Museums and Exhibitions of the March Foundation -of which the Cuenca Museum of Abstract Art is a part- and curator of the exhibition together with Felipe Pereda, who occupies the Zóbel chair of Spanish art at Harvard. Fontán points out that “no artist of the second half of the 20th century has maintained such a continuous and profound conversation with two traditions, Western art and that of Asia, as Zóbel, a man who travels with a kind of portable studio, his notebooks, in which he talks page by page with Rembrandt, Goya, Ribera, Zurbarán”.
He was born in Manila into a Spanish family, he will study at a Swiss school, then at Harvard, he will liven up the Philippine scene, he will visit the Rhode Island School of Design as an artist-in-residence, he will have dinner with Pollock and will cross paths with Rothko in one of his exhibitions, will arrive in Spain with the great pictorial and contemporary tradition and the great Asian tradition and that, determined to become an abstract artist, will create in 1966 with his own means a museum in the hanging houses of Cuenca “on the margins of the official culture of the regime, a place to attend to modern and contemporary art in this country until the emergence of modern art museums”, recalls Fontán.
That gives an image that helps to understand Zóbel’s painting like few others: “His notebooks help to understand that his great abstract work is produced almost by evaporation, by sublimation, by the direct passage from the solid to the gaseous, from a solid landscape to that kind of lyrical, spiritual and evanescent abstraction that Zóbel’s paintings are”. Some paintings in which the western abstraction of Kline, Rothko and Pollock merges with the heritage of Asian art, especially Chinese-Japanese calligraphy and artists such as Shiko Munakata.
Felipe Pereda remarks that Zóbel is the author of”a very original proposal on how to understand modernity not as the rupture of the avant-garde with tradition, but as a form of reinvention of the past, not as something to forget, but to re-imagine”, and emphasizes that “art is for Zóbel a way of learning to see and teaching to see”.
The director of the Prado, Miguel Falomir, reasons that the one he directs is not “a museum of contemporary art, but it cannot and should not ignore the contemporary artists for whom the Prado determined their way of thinking and conceiving their art”. And he warns that “among the misnamed ancient art museums, the Prado is the one with the most timid relationship with contemporary art, the
The Kunsthistorisches of Vienna has an exclusive curator for contemporary art, at the National Gallery there is now an exhibition of Lucian Freud and at the Louvre of Miquel Barceló. No one considers the legality, but there were people here who were scandalized when announcing Zóbel’s exhibition”
