Catalogue of Zóbel: The Future of the Past exhibition first held in Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

How can we appreciate the work of the great masters without being mere passive receptors of their appeal? How do we submerge ourselves in the art of the past without renouncing our commitment to the modern and contemporary avant-gardes? The answer according to Fernando Zóbel (Manila, 1924-Rome, 1984) was both simple and enormously sophisticated: study them in order to understand them and then reinvent them.

Forty-two paintings, fifty-one sketchbooks and eighty-five drawings and graphic works loaned from collections in Spain, the Philippines and the USA make up this survey through which the Museo Nacional del Prado, with the collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid, pays tribute to Fernando Zóbel, a key figure in Spanish painting of the second half of the 20th century. Born into a Spanish family in Manila, Zóbel focused intensively on the paintings in the Prado and was the founder of the Museo de Arte Abstracto in Cuenca. He was an artist who saw his painting as an instrument with which he could navigate the complex routes traced by the history of art in order to both admire and understand them.

Zóbel: The future of the past explores the painter’s work through two themes that are essential for appreciating his unique contribution to contemporary abstract painting. The first revolves around the space between modern art and the legacy of artistic tradition, bringing together the studies that the artist made in museums around the world, in particular the Prado, with the aim of reconstructing his creative process. In addition, the exhibition charts Zóbel’s work through a second theme of a geographical and international nature, showing how drawing was the tool that allowed him in, an original and different way, to access the modernity that he encountered in Asia in the vernacular tradition of the Philippines and in Japanese and Chinese painting. Both themes arise from Zóbel’s own identity: born in Manila, he trained in the United States and then moved to Spain. Possessed of enormous intellectual curiosity and erudition, Fernando Zóbel was also a tireless traveller and an exceptionally cosmopolitan artist.

Zóbel: The future of the past recreates this modern artist’s long dialogue with the great Old Masters, a dialogue established in museums around the world but perhaps above all in the Prado. Zóbel not only spent countless hours drawing and studying the paintings in the Museum but also generously donated to it a number of important drawings by 16th- to 18th-century Spanish masters.

Structured into five sections, the exhibition reconstructs Zóbel’s poetic and artistic journey, which was bounded by the two ends of a single principle: leaning to look in order to understand the art of the great masters, and applying what he learned to his own work in order to share that knowledge.

Published in 2022 by Museo Nacional del Prado