Fernando Zobel
by Dr. Rod. Paras-Perez
11-1/2" x 9", 202 pages, hardbound,
ISBN 971-1005-29-8, 1990

Like a brilliant comet passing through the Philippine art firmament, Fernando Zobel dazzled everyone. But he was gone before anyone knew what was happening.

It was a dark, but a most lively night for the arts: by Zobel's generous definition then—an artist was a professional if he had sold at least one work. Artists stole time from work to paint or make sculptures very few bought.

ARTISTS were happy enough to have one gallery—the Philippine Art Gallery, a portable gallery rolling on unpaid rent. But it survived to become the biggest little room on Manila's art circuit.

CUT OFF from their roots by centuries of colonial misrule and from the rest of the world by the aftershocks of a world war, Filipino artists were talking about modern art, albeit from media sources—a few books, news reports, magazines, and perhaps a few transient lecturers. But no one had really seen a Cezanne, a Matisse or a Picasso, or any of the much publicized Abstract-Expressionist pieces.

THE PHILIPPINE ART GALLERY group was talking: of the artist's right to paint his own reality; to paint his green sunset or blue or black sun; or to rearrange reality the way he felt it should be. But in New York they no longer spoke of that reality. Painting was for them paint: juicy, squeezed from tube, slapped or dripped on the canvas—a handwriting, sensitive, whispering or shouting of unknown feelings.

THEN Fernando Zobel came—from New York where things were happening, and from Harvard no less, a magna cum laude graduate. He was very articulate. Young. Talented. Simpatico. Everyone was captivated. He did not study painting but showed a painiting of the Three Kings which deeply impressed Cesar Legaspi because he had never seen a painting like it before. And H.R. Ocampo was also impressed enough to make it promptly, part of his collection.

FOR Leandro Locsin, Zobel was an artistic genius, but above all, an extremely considerate and gentle person, the embodiment of nobility. And at Ateneo, to students such as Tessie Ojeda-Luz, he was not only a mentor worshipped like a deity but also a person remembered for his infinite humanity—one who could walk down a street and, like a Pied Piper, gather people and childern along the way.