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Lot Essay
Fernando Zobel de Ayala y Montojo is known largely for his minimalist abstract expressionism that characterised his later periods, producing his famous Saeta and Serie Negra series with their delicate and pale washes, contrasted with the strong use of blacks. It is for this reason that Christie’s is proud to present an extremely rare and chromatic early work, Puente de Manila (Manila Bridge) (Lot 6) by the Spanish- Filipino Master this season. Painted in 1956, the semirepresentational and highly expressionist Puente de Manila bears the early hallmarks of his Saeta series, despite its prismatic use of cobalts and ochres; the expressive intersecting black lines point to his later technique of creating a lattice of thick impasto using a hypodermic needle to apply oil paint to his canvases.
Puente de Manila, is a semi-figurative work with highly expressionist colours and bold lines, much like El Charles IV that currently hangs in the Ayala Museum Collection and is the earliest work by the artist currently in the Collection. El Charles IV is a painting based on the Charles River found in Massachusetts, and was painted during the time that Zobel was a student at Harvard University. After graduating magna cum laude, the artist stayed on for a couple of years as an assistant curator in the graphic-arts section of Houghton Library, where he undoubtedly developed his keen eye for the visual and imbuing him with a keen eye for balance and structure.
Executed in 1956, Puente de Manila already displays the influence of colour field painting in his work with its focus on colour and the way in which it could communicate a range of emotions. Indeed, in 1954, while at the Rhode Island School of Design, Zobel visited a major exhibition of one of the most noteworthy proponents of colour field painting, American artist Mark Rothko. Looking at Puente de Manila, one becomes acutely aware of how important this exhibition was to the work, the blues and greens of the river emphasised using complementary colours within the architecture of the bridge, which was likely a form of experimentation inspired by Rothko’s colour palettes. Employing complementary colours is a very fundamental technique of colour theory, in which dynamism and vibrancy is achieved through colours that contrast with each other to create maximum stability and an especially striking quality to the composition. The effect is a dazzling plane, capturing the way in which sunlight hits the water and dances across the surfaces around it.
Dividing up the composition so boldly, like Zobel has in Puente de Manila would normally render the work flat and devoid of depth. However, being an artist of great innovation, Zobel has managed to create an atmospheric perspective in the work by modulating his colours to mimic the way in which things are seen in the distance, creating an illusion of depth. The way in which the canvas is fragmented into kaleidoscopic jewels of colour brings to mind the Byzantine-inspired mosaics that cover the walls of Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba in Spain, to which the artist frequently travelled to, and even where he rented a studio during the period that he painted Puente de Manila.
Interestingly, Chinese calligraphy was also extremely influential to Zobel’s work, taking classes since the early 50s Eastern calligraphy was crucial to the way he appreciated and executed his own brand of gestural expressionism. For Zobel what was so attractive about Chinese calligraphy was the way in which it “had a unique capacity to capture visually the speed with which the artist manipulated the brush…it was possible to see the pauses and rhythms or musical meter of such art.” It would be in his later series that we truly see how this became the raison d'être behind his own art. However, in Puente de Manila, we already see this in its infancy; the scaffolding of onyx brush lines across the canvas applied using what appears to be a very dry brush achieves a similar result, capturing the various points at which he applied pressure to the brush, with some areas of black being darker than others.
Puente de Manila and its sumptuous use of colour is an example of Zobel’s genius and unparalleled ingenuity. At the same time, this work is highly significant to Zobel’s oeuvre: it is an amalgamation of all his influences in their most nascent states, signalling the critical point in his body of work and the beginning and of what will come to be one of the most historically significant Modern Filipino artists and important contributors to the art and culture of The Philippines. In Puente de Manila Zobel did not merely seek to paint of a bridge, but to inspire an emotional intensity and to bring to fore our own emotions as part of the human condition, which he has achieved in this work.
Puente de Manila, is a semi-figurative work with highly expressionist colours and bold lines, much like El Charles IV that currently hangs in the Ayala Museum Collection and is the earliest work by the artist currently in the Collection. El Charles IV is a painting based on the Charles River found in Massachusetts, and was painted during the time that Zobel was a student at Harvard University. After graduating magna cum laude, the artist stayed on for a couple of years as an assistant curator in the graphic-arts section of Houghton Library, where he undoubtedly developed his keen eye for the visual and imbuing him with a keen eye for balance and structure.
Executed in 1956, Puente de Manila already displays the influence of colour field painting in his work with its focus on colour and the way in which it could communicate a range of emotions. Indeed, in 1954, while at the Rhode Island School of Design, Zobel visited a major exhibition of one of the most noteworthy proponents of colour field painting, American artist Mark Rothko. Looking at Puente de Manila, one becomes acutely aware of how important this exhibition was to the work, the blues and greens of the river emphasised using complementary colours within the architecture of the bridge, which was likely a form of experimentation inspired by Rothko’s colour palettes. Employing complementary colours is a very fundamental technique of colour theory, in which dynamism and vibrancy is achieved through colours that contrast with each other to create maximum stability and an especially striking quality to the composition. The effect is a dazzling plane, capturing the way in which sunlight hits the water and dances across the surfaces around it.
Dividing up the composition so boldly, like Zobel has in Puente de Manila would normally render the work flat and devoid of depth. However, being an artist of great innovation, Zobel has managed to create an atmospheric perspective in the work by modulating his colours to mimic the way in which things are seen in the distance, creating an illusion of depth. The way in which the canvas is fragmented into kaleidoscopic jewels of colour brings to mind the Byzantine-inspired mosaics that cover the walls of Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba in Spain, to which the artist frequently travelled to, and even where he rented a studio during the period that he painted Puente de Manila.
Interestingly, Chinese calligraphy was also extremely influential to Zobel’s work, taking classes since the early 50s Eastern calligraphy was crucial to the way he appreciated and executed his own brand of gestural expressionism. For Zobel what was so attractive about Chinese calligraphy was the way in which it “had a unique capacity to capture visually the speed with which the artist manipulated the brush…it was possible to see the pauses and rhythms or musical meter of such art.” It would be in his later series that we truly see how this became the raison d'être behind his own art. However, in Puente de Manila, we already see this in its infancy; the scaffolding of onyx brush lines across the canvas applied using what appears to be a very dry brush achieves a similar result, capturing the various points at which he applied pressure to the brush, with some areas of black being darker than others.
Puente de Manila and its sumptuous use of colour is an example of Zobel’s genius and unparalleled ingenuity. At the same time, this work is highly significant to Zobel’s oeuvre: it is an amalgamation of all his influences in their most nascent states, signalling the critical point in his body of work and the beginning and of what will come to be one of the most historically significant Modern Filipino artists and important contributors to the art and culture of The Philippines. In Puente de Manila Zobel did not merely seek to paint of a bridge, but to inspire an emotional intensity and to bring to fore our own emotions as part of the human condition, which he has achieved in this work.