Zobel and Luna at the Museo del Prado
By Jaime Laya
Published Jan 02, 2023 00:05 am
|
Updated Jan 02, 2023 00:05 am
WALA LANG
Now at Madrid’s Museo del Prado until March is an exhibit on the art of Fernando Zobel, the Filipino-Spanish artist, who pioneered in the study of Philippine religious imagery, founded the Ateneo Art Gallery and the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca, Spain, and masterpieces that the Prado exhibit showcases on the theme, “The future of the past.”
Structured in five sections, the exhibit follows Zobel’s artistic journey. He sought to understand the art of the great masters and applied his insights in his own work. He spent endless hours at museums looking, studying, sketching, and seeking an understanding of the artist’s thinking. He then expressed his reactions and conclusions in his own paintings, using his characteristic modernistic and abstract vocabulary.
PAST PRESENT - Juan van der Hamen’s Still Life and Zobels’s response (from the exhibit catalogue)
The exhibition catalogue introduces the show thus: “In order to know how to paint, first you have to know how to see.” In Zobel’s work, “modernism seeks not to break with tradition but rather to rediscover it: not to forget the past, but instead to reveal the future embedded in the work of the great masters.”
The exhibit consists of 50 sketchbooks, 42 paintings, a collage, 25 drawings, 11 engravings, 13 photographs and other material related to Zobel’s learning and teaching activities.
There are a couple of early works, notably the “Carrosa” from the Ateneo Art Gallery, but proceeds straight to the artist’s retelling of the ideas of artists of long ago. Side by side are several of the old master works that Zobel retold in paint, truly the future of the past.
PAST PRESENT Juan Luna and Esteban Villanueva at Madrid’s Museo del Prado
The artist’s sketchbooks contain drawings and lecture notes from his Harvard courses, drawings of works by painters, including Frans Hals, Hieronymus Bosch, Hans van Aachen, Paolo Uccello, and Lorenzo Lotto, one of whose works at Washington’s National Gallery inspired Zobel’s The Dream of the Damsel. A still life by Juan van der Hamen at the Prado inspired another work, Dialogue with Juan van der Hamen.
Thinking about Picasso, Zobel wrote in a notebook, “Picasso turns out to be a critic rather than a painter. A critic in paint. The first and the best. He invents nothing but he uses everything. He uses what he can, giving it his own personal flavor. That is why, in turn, no other painter can use Picasso. There is nothing to use. (One can always copy but copies are always parodies: a vaguely amusing and quickly exhausted form of entertainment,)”
Zobel was struck by Andrea Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar hanging at England’s Hampton Court Palace. It is a series of nine large panels depicting a parade with Caesar returning victorious from the Gallic Wars. Treasured from the time it was painted in the 1490s, it was in ruinous condition and was being restored when Zobel saw it. He had also seen the copy of one panel made by the 17th century artist Peter Paul Rubens who “dispenses with the severe geometry of the original and imposes his own, winding, nervous, moving, full of color and joy. The triumph becomes a celebration.”
Zobel was moved that so little remained of the 500-year-old painting of an event that took place 1,500 years before, “only an echo of that imperial triumph, a painting in bad condition that includes a half erased poem.” Zobel was inspired to paint his own version in an “ironic mood” that “retains something of Mantegna’s solemnity. Everything is remote and cold. It speaks as one speaks of the dead, in the past tense, in hushed tones, and with a certain emotional respect.”
The exhibit also goes into the artist’s playful side. He did caricatures including one showing what members of other Harvard University Final Clubs thought of Zobel’s club, The Fox. These are undergraduate student by-invitation social clubs but that’s another story.
After viewing the Zobel exhibit, one can check out Philippine Links in the Prado’s permanent collection.
A couple of rooms are on the art of the 19th century, drawn from official Salon prize winners, Juan Luna’s Death of Cleopatra among them. This painting won a silver medal in the 1881 Exposición General de Bellas Artes and was eventually acquired by the Spanish government. The Prado owns four other Luna paintings: a version of Espana llevando a la Gloria a Filipinas, a seaside view, and two portraits, one of the Spanish journalist Victor Balaguer. On exhibit, hung beside Luna’s Death of Cleopatra are two Esteban Villanuevas from the Museo Antropologico, Un Zacatero and India del Campo.
Portraits of Spanish kings and queens of the Spanish Regime are also there, from Felipe II, from whom the Philippines and Filipino, came to Alfonso XIII and the Queen Mother Maria Cristina of Habsburg-Lorraine, King (still a minor) and Queen Regent respectively when the Treaty of Paris was signed. Carlos IV, who stands regally in a monument on Plaza de Roma, is nondescript in several Francisco Goya masterpieces of the royal family. Another Goya of the Marquesa de Santa Cruz is intriguingly like that of Mrs Imelda Marcos’ New York townhouse. Velasquez’s portrait of Jeronima de la Fuente was painted in Seville before she sailed for Manila to found the Monasterio da Santa Clara. Jose Rizal might have seen the very same Correggio painting Noli me Tangere depicting Maria Magdalena about to touch the risen Christ on Easter Sunday.
Note: The Zobel exhibit was organized by the Prado in collaboration with the Comunidad de Madrid and support from the Fundacion Juan March and the Ayala Foundation.
PAST PRESENT - Juan van der Hamen’s Still Life and Zobels’s response (from the exhibit catalogue)
The exhibition catalogue introduces the show thus: “In order to know how to paint, first you have to know how to see.” In Zobel’s work, “modernism seeks not to break with tradition but rather to rediscover it: not to forget the past, but instead to reveal the future embedded in the work of the great masters.”
The exhibit consists of 50 sketchbooks, 42 paintings, a collage, 25 drawings, 11 engravings, 13 photographs and other material related to Zobel’s learning and teaching activities.
There are a couple of early works, notably the “Carrosa” from the Ateneo Art Gallery, but proceeds straight to the artist’s retelling of the ideas of artists of long ago. Side by side are several of the old master works that Zobel retold in paint, truly the future of the past.
PAST PRESENT Juan Luna and Esteban Villanueva at Madrid’s Museo del Prado
The artist’s sketchbooks contain drawings and lecture notes from his Harvard courses, drawings of works by painters, including Frans Hals, Hieronymus Bosch, Hans van Aachen, Paolo Uccello, and Lorenzo Lotto, one of whose works at Washington’s National Gallery inspired Zobel’s The Dream of the Damsel. A still life by Juan van der Hamen at the Prado inspired another work, Dialogue with Juan van der Hamen.
Thinking about Picasso, Zobel wrote in a notebook, “Picasso turns out to be a critic rather than a painter. A critic in paint. The first and the best. He invents nothing but he uses everything. He uses what he can, giving it his own personal flavor. That is why, in turn, no other painter can use Picasso. There is nothing to use. (One can always copy but copies are always parodies: a vaguely amusing and quickly exhausted form of entertainment,)”
Zobel was struck by Andrea Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar hanging at England’s Hampton Court Palace. It is a series of nine large panels depicting a parade with Caesar returning victorious from the Gallic Wars. Treasured from the time it was painted in the 1490s, it was in ruinous condition and was being restored when Zobel saw it. He had also seen the copy of one panel made by the 17th century artist Peter Paul Rubens who “dispenses with the severe geometry of the original and imposes his own, winding, nervous, moving, full of color and joy. The triumph becomes a celebration.”
Zobel was moved that so little remained of the 500-year-old painting of an event that took place 1,500 years before, “only an echo of that imperial triumph, a painting in bad condition that includes a half erased poem.” Zobel was inspired to paint his own version in an “ironic mood” that “retains something of Mantegna’s solemnity. Everything is remote and cold. It speaks as one speaks of the dead, in the past tense, in hushed tones, and with a certain emotional respect.”
The exhibit also goes into the artist’s playful side. He did caricatures including one showing what members of other Harvard University Final Clubs thought of Zobel’s club, The Fox. These are undergraduate student by-invitation social clubs but that’s another story.
After viewing the Zobel exhibit, one can check out Philippine Links in the Prado’s permanent collection.
A couple of rooms are on the art of the 19th century, drawn from official Salon prize winners, Juan Luna’s Death of Cleopatra among them. This painting won a silver medal in the 1881 Exposición General de Bellas Artes and was eventually acquired by the Spanish government. The Prado owns four other Luna paintings: a version of Espana llevando a la Gloria a Filipinas, a seaside view, and two portraits, one of the Spanish journalist Victor Balaguer. On exhibit, hung beside Luna’s Death of Cleopatra are two Esteban Villanuevas from the Museo Antropologico, Un Zacatero and India del Campo.
Portraits of Spanish kings and queens of the Spanish Regime are also there, from Felipe II, from whom the Philippines and Filipino, came to Alfonso XIII and the Queen Mother Maria Cristina of Habsburg-Lorraine, King (still a minor) and Queen Regent respectively when the Treaty of Paris was signed. Carlos IV, who stands regally in a monument on Plaza de Roma, is nondescript in several Francisco Goya masterpieces of the royal family. Another Goya of the Marquesa de Santa Cruz is intriguingly like that of Mrs Imelda Marcos’ New York townhouse. Velasquez’s portrait of Jeronima de la Fuente was painted in Seville before she sailed for Manila to found the Monasterio da Santa Clara. Jose Rizal might have seen the very same Correggio painting Noli me Tangere depicting Maria Magdalena about to touch the risen Christ on Easter Sunday.
Note: The Zobel exhibit was organized by the Prado in collaboration with the Comunidad de Madrid and support from the Fundacion Juan March and the Ayala Foundation.