Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7.

1 (2017): 25–42

Fernando Zobel and the

Making of the Ateneo Art
Gallery: Modern Art,
Postcolonial Statehood, and
the Utopian Imagination in
Twentieth-Century Philippines
Charlie Samuya Veric

ABSTRACT

Fernando Zobel de Ayala y Montojo is a towering figure in modern

Filipino art and criticism. An award-winning artist and an astute
theorist, he founded the Ateneo Art Gallery in 1960. Six years later,
he established the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca, Spain.
Art histories in the Philippines and Spain are certainly unimaginable
without Zobel, yet very little has been written about him. With the
exception of a handful of articles, not much art historical discussion
of Zobel exists, especially in the context of the rise of Filipino modern
art and the development of Philippine postcolonial state as utopian
phenomena. The essay fills this gap. In particular, I will argue that an
understanding of Zobel and his influence must consider the mutual
emergence of modern art and postcolonial statehood, events that
cannot be dissociated from utopian sentiments defining the historical
project of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century.
Moreover, I will argue that Zobel may be considered as a decolonizing
voice, a touchstone in postcolonial Filipino art criticism. This essay not

25
 Veric, “Fernando Zobel and the Making of the Ateneo Art Gallery”

only fills a significant gap in the scholarship on Zobel but also hopes to
reframe our understanding of modern art in the Philippines.

KEYWORDS: Fernando Zobel; Ateneo Art Gallery; Filipino modern

art and criticism; Filipino art history; Philippine postcolonial
statehood; decolonization; utopia

Discontented with art, Fernando Zobel de Ayala y Montojo created the

new. He was too much of a gentleman, too beholden to politesse proper to his
gilded lineage, to put it this way. But the Ateneo Art Gallery (AAG), founded
in 1960 through his donation of delicately curated collection of modern
Filipino art and the best assortment of foreign prints known to the country,
is just that: a utopia born of discontent, touting the new.1
The story goes further back. In 1928, the war of giants broke out upon the
return of Victorio C. Edades. He had joined the Filipino exodus to the United
States where he studied art at the University of Washington, supporting
himself by working in Alaskan canneries.2 He came home triumphantly
after almost a decade, having won the admiration of American critics and the
second highest honor at a competition involving professional painters from
the West Coast. Back in the colony, Edades lost no time in picking a fight
with Fernando Amorsolo, the pastoral painter whose light, in the opinion
of Quijano de Manila, evoked the “rapture of a sensualist” in love with the
Philippine earth.3 Amorsolo, as Winfield Scott Smith wrote in a survey
funded by the Art Association of the Philippines in 1958, “was at this time
considered the most advanced Filipino painter. But he was not to retain this
distinction for long.”4 Edades had come along.
There would be no love lost between the two masters of twentieth-century
Philippine art, what with their adherents scrambling to join the fray like so
many brown angels in heat, most famously Jose Garcia Villa who snorted from

1
“The Ateneo Art Gallery (Renamed Ateneo Art Museum 1980)” (unpublished paper),
typescript, Ateneo Art Gallery, 1980, 1 [The article is printed in this issue of the journal.—EDITOR].
See also Louis S. Acosta et al., Modern Art in the Philippines (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1963).
2
National Museum, A Brief History of the Development of Modern Art in the Philippines
(Manila: National Museum, 1963), 11–13; Winfield Scott Smith, ed., The Art of the Philippines
(Manila: Art Association of the Philippines, 1958), 43–49.
3
Quijano de Manila, “Homage to the Maestro,” in Philippine Modern Art and Its Critics
(Manila: UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines, 1972), 78.
4
Smith, The Art of the Philippines, 43.

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 Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7.1 (2017): 25–42

his Greenwich Village apartment at professors of fine arts with uncultivated

imagination and parochial taste.5 Was Villa referring to Amorsolo? It is
anyone’s guess.
Thus, Edades saw fit to mount a one-man show at the Philippine
Columbian Club, challenging Amorsolo at the height of his popularity among
art lovers in the archipelago, the latter a keeper of the gate as a professor at
the University of the Philippines (UP). With Edades’s signal exhibition, the
first shot of modern art was fired, and it would resound well into World War
II and long after the last Japanese soldier had laid down his arms.
Losing none of his spunk, Edades engaged the artistic orthodoxy once
again in a debate in 1948, especially the professors at the School of Fine
Arts at the UP. Amorsolo, as Rod. Paras-Perez wrote, “would rather paint
than prattle about art,”6 but not the classical sculptor Guillermo Tolentino,
who took Edades to task for what he perceived to be Edades’s monstrous
aesthetic distortions.7
Such a battle would divide the emergent artistic community of the period.
Consider the founding of the Art Association of the Philippines ten years prior
to the publication of the Smith survey. The members of the association showed
no qualms about wearing their loyalty on their sleeves, dividing themselves
into coteries. By all means, it was a proxy war between the conservatives,
who valued figuration, and the moderns, who promoted experimentation.
Things came to a head in 1955 at the association’s annual show, when its
conservative members, with Antonio Dumlao at the helm, angrily took
down their paintings from the wall and walked out of the Northern Motors
showrooms to protest what they felt was the undue preference of the judges
for the modern.8 The conservatives might have gotten the headlines, but the
moderns won the day.
Zobel appeared right at this moment, the 1950s, when modern art in
the country was coming into its own.9 It was in 1952 when he, fresh from his

5
National Museum, 13; Smith, 44.
6
Rod. Paras-Perez, Edades and the 13 Moderns (Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines,
1995), 13.
7
Guillermo Tolentino, “Distortions in Art,” in Edades and the 13 Moderns (Manila: Cultural
Center of the Philippines, 1995), 33–34.
8
Dominador Catañeda, Art in the Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines,
1964), 136–38.
9
Fernando Zobel, interview by Cid Reyes, Conversations on Philippine Art (Manila: Sentrong
Pangkultura ng Pilipinas, 1989), 49–118. For a more in-depth discussion of what art in the 1950s
and the 1960s was like, see Leo Benesa, What Is Philippine about Philippine Art? and Other Essays

27
 Veric, “Fernando Zobel and the Making of the Ateneo Art Gallery”

education at Harvard, first exhibited his work at the Philippine Art Gallery,
the epicenter of modern art whose practitioners by then included H. R.
Ocampo and Vicente Manansala. Zobel’s appearance, in other words, was
shaped by the looming triumph of modern art. The Philippine capital in
particular was a modern artist’s utopia. “Manila in the 50s,” Zobel would
recall, “was incredibly exciting for a painter. Beginnings are always exciting.”10
Yet the excitement was more than personal. It was also art historical,
representing the confluence of global events that Zobel had the great fortune
to witness in the city that saw his own birth in 1924, when the islands were
ruled straight from Washington, DC. Zobel had in mind the rise of abstract
expressionism in America, the dawn of modern painting in the Philippines,
and the emergence of the abstract school in Spain, in which he would play a
formative role with his founding of the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in
Cuenca, six years after the establishment of the AAG. To have found oneself
in the 1950s, leading all the way to the 1960s, smack in the middle of an
inimitable convergence of three art historical flags in a single city, was, for
Zobel, “like winning first prize in the lottery.”11
The modern in Zobel may be construed, then, not simply as a formal style
but, rather, and perhaps more important, as an aesthetic sensibility inseparable
from the profound hope that he felt as a young man. In many ways, the future
beckoned to him as a time he could invent, and will into shape using his art.
But Zobel’s optimism was not unique. He was, in fact, simply expressing
the international spirit of the times. As Zobel was studying philosophy and
letters in Cambridge in 1948, where he also realized for the first time that
he seriously wanted to be a painter, Barnett Newman, a leading American
figure in abstract expressionism whose color field paintings made him a poet
of space and presence in equal measure, was busy trumpeting to anyone who
cared enough to listen that the present is sublime.12 “We are freeing ourselves,”

(Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2000); Antonio Manuud, “The Arts:
1960,” Philippine Studies 8 (October 1960): 814–22, and “Zobel at the Tate,” Philippine Studies 10
(April 1962): 312–14; and Emmanuel Torres, “The Arts in the Philippines,” Philippine Studies 10
(January 1962): 127–33, “Nationalism in Filipino Art ‘Hot’ and ‘Cold,’” in Philippine Modern Art
and Its Critics, ed. Alice Coseteng (Manila: UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines,
1972). Zobel, interview by Cid Reyes, Conversations on Philippine Art, 54.
10
Zobel, interview by Cid Reyes, Conversations on Philippine Art, 54.
11
Ibid.
12
Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now,” in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B.
Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 552–53.

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 Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7.1 (2017): 25–42

Barnett wrote, “of the impediments of memory.”13 That is to say, he thought

of the past as a burden and looked instead to the future as a moment open
to discovery.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Michel Tapié, proponent of the
European brand of abstract expressionism, echoed the same notion just as
Zobel was launching his first exhibition in Manila in 1952.14 For Tapié, as
it was for Zobel, the artist’s place is not in the past but, rather, in his own
becoming. “[A]rt is other,” he wrote, a statement which essentially means that
art is utopia, a term whose Greek origins literally denote “no-place.”15 “Art,”
Tapié aptly suggested, “is made elsewhere,” yet to become, in a word, utopic.16
But the utopianism of Zobel, his belief in the future and its immanence
in the present, had a special resonance absent in Newman and Tapié. For
Zobel imagined the future having seen a beloved city brought to its knees
by World War II. He would recall, for instance, how the family house was
destroyed by fire, which gutted the sketchbooks from a supportive father that
Zobel had used for his drawings as a seven-year old child.17 Elsewhere, the
losses had been as massive. Carpet bombing had flattened the city so that
one could stand on Taft Avenue and get an unimpeded view of Manila Bay,
smoke lines rising to a vacant sky.
Santiago Albano Pilar and Regalado Trota Jose would estimate that
“about 90 percent of Filipino artwork perished due to the devastation.”18
Government sources corroborate their assessment. They indicate that most
of the collections of the National Art Gallery, now the National Museum,
were reduced to ashes with the shelling of the Legislative Building, the crown
jewel of all the public buildings constructed during the American colonial
period.19 “Spiritually,” as Pilar and Jose put it succinctly, “Filipinos suffered
severely from the War.”20
Such a cultural holocaust would influence Zobel in that it would throw
an enduring light on his legacy, infuse the meaning of the modern with a

13
Ibid., 553.
14
Michel Tapié, “A New Beyond,” in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 603–5.
15
Ibid., 603.
16
Ibid.
17
Zobel, interview by Cid Reyes, Conversations on Philippine Art, 52.
18
Santiago Albano Pilar and Regalado Trota Jose, “Philippine Secular Art,” in Discovering
Philippine Art in Spain (Manila: Department of Foreign Affairs, 1998), 111.
19
Republic of the Philippines, “The National Museum,” Official Gazette, http://www.gov.
ph/the-the-national-museum/.
20
Pilar and Jose, “Philippine Secular Art,” 111.

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 Veric, “Fernando Zobel and the Making of the Ateneo Art Gallery”

distinct power, and reveal the utopic vision that propelled his desire to collect
art as a form of recollection, the same body of work that would comprise the
heart of the AAG. How so?
On the face of it, war seems to have given artists like Zobel an opportunity
to proceed without the burden of memory. In the words of an American song
that must have floated across the city after liberation, they picked themselves
up, dusted themselves off, started all over again. And start they did with a
clean slate, literally. Following this narrative, one would suppose that war
severed the modern artist from the past, its traces almost obliterated. This is
the modern understood in its purest form: a new start with no sense of debt
or obligation.
To think this way, however, is to proceed in bad faith because it paints
artists like Zobel as craven opportunists who reveled while Manila lay still
smoldering. No artist, whatever the persuasion, can stand the thought of art’s
destruction, except perhaps when it is intended.
There is, then, another way of viewing modern art after the war. And
it suggests a good deal else, namely, the post-war period allowed Zobel to
imagine a new future, but the duty and responsibility that came with it
became even more urgent. For a new artistic time needed to be inaugurated
given how the war had laid waste to the history of an entire people. The
future, in other words, became a site of cultural reconstruction for Zobel.
This, perhaps, is the root of his modernity. He was modern not because he
set himself apart from the past. He was modern because his sense of debt was
located in the future, seeing it as an unrealized place of redemption. Amid a
ruined past, Zobel saw the future as an ongoing site of cultural reconstruction,
a place to come in which one could countenance the modernity of Filipino
artistic becoming.
Such future sense may explain the utopic vision that shaped the founding
of the AAG. For how else can one explain the profound sense of purpose with
which Zobel collected his trove of modern art from his arrival from Harvard
to the founding of the AAG? How else to explain his resounding emphasis
on the modern and the Philippine in his collection? More than a matter of
taste, the choice was a philosophical vision that sought to rebuild the aesthetic
artifact of the country, a reconstruction that began not with historical relics
but, rather, with contemporary works that enabled robust imaginations of the
future. Put differently, Zobel’s reconstruction emphasized the new idiom of
seeing, one that identified abstraction as the guiding medium and message.
Thus, he emphasized the unfolding of Filipino artistry as a future event, a
kind of futurity in the present. The utopian dimension of Zobel’s founding

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 Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7.1 (2017): 25–42

of the AAG was therefore clear: he was building a dream archive that would
contain visions of Filipino modernity.
That is to say, the founding of the A AG was a utopic cultural
reconstruction that aspired to house nothing less than the spiritual future of
modern Filipino art. Zobel was consequently setting up not just a gallery. Most
important, he was creating, by collecting the works of his contemporaries,
a history of the future as decidedly modern. Ramon E. S. Lerma, former
curator of the AAG, has hinted at this when he commented that the neorealist
pieces in the permanent collection—a term popularized by E. Aguilar Cruz
in 1951 to denote a take on reality distinct from Amorsolo’s approach—are
engaged in imagining new beginnings, “futurist landscapes or ‘futurescapes’
unfettered by convention.”21
Here lies the uniqueness of the modern as conceived in Philippine art
history, one that departs from its Western understanding. Largely understood
as an offshoot of the Industrial Revolution, the modern in Western art is
inseparable from historical developments that transformed human life because
of innovations in economy, transportation, and technology. In the context of
museums in the twentieth century, the modern explicitly meant contemporary
art. Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City, whom Zobel had met in Cuenca when the former visited
the latter, made no bones, for example, about his preference for the present.22
“I do think,” he said, “that our own period in art history urgently needs and
should be given more thorough and critical study and more thoughtful and
extensive exposition.”23 Why? Because the twentieth century, Barr explained,
“happens to be the period in which we are living. It is our century: we have
made it and we’ve got to study it, understand it, get some joy out of it, master
it.”24 Zobel’s vision for the AAG, however, was more than just about the
present. It was, most of all, a conception of the modern as future-oriented.
The founding of the AAG was, in a word, a utopian project that generated
a distinct conception of the modern where the future, not just the present,
took precedence.
And what auspicious beginnings the AAG had. How serendipitous they
would also be. From one of the rooms in Bellarmine Hall, now occupied by

21
Ramon E. S. Lerma, In the Eye of Modernity: Philippine Neo-Realist Masterworks from the
Ateneo Art Gallery (Quezon City: Ateneo Art Gallery, 2009), n.p.
22
Alfred H. Barr Jr., “Modern Art Makes History, Too,” College Art Journal (November
1941): 3–6.
23
Ibid., 6.
24
Ibid., 3.

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 Veric, “Fernando Zobel and the Making of the Ateneo Art Gallery”

the university press, the first modern art museum in the country moved to
the then newly constructed Rizal Library. Emmanuel Torres, first curator
of the gallery and Zobel’s former student, observed in 1980 that from the
start the Rizal Library had always been perceived as the ideal location for the
collection that “would some day be of great cultural and historical value to
the country.”25
Indeed, no better choice existed, and the move revealed even more the
AAG’s utopian underpinnings. For the national hero after whom the building
had been named, an Atenean himself, was a reader of Thomas More, whose
Utopia served as a direct inspiration for the former’s landmark essay, “The
Philippines a Century Hence.”26 In fact, Rizal built a utopian community
in Dapitan where he had been exiled by the Spanish colonial authorities
following his European return in 1892, which coincided with the publication
of Friedrich Engel’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.27
Today, a hulking statue of More, brought from Manila to the Loyola
Heights campus of the Ateneo, stands like a forgotten watchman behind what
is now known as the Old Rizal Library. What is More doing in Katipunan,
keeping guard next to the structure that houses Zobel’s legacy?
That More, Rizal, and Zobel meet in space in ways they never did in
time is telling, suggesting the strange yet compelling unions of pasts at once
local and planetary.28 Recall, for example, the following. Five years after More
had published Utopia in 1516, a place that he would in fact imagine as an
island in the Antipodes, Ferdinand Magellan would “discover” the island of
Cebu in 1521, launching European imperial expansion into the four corners
of the globe. Three hundred years later, political upheavals transformed an
archipelago into a nation of islands, a reality that began in the minds of
Filipino revolutionaries and intellectuals like Rizal. After World War II, Zobel
would leave for Harvard in 1946 just when the United States granted formal

25
“The Ateneo Art Gallery,” 1.
26
Thomas More, Utopia, trans. John P. Dolan (New York: New American Library, 1967);
Jose Rizal, “The Philippines a Century Hence,” trans. Austin Craig, 1912, Internet Archive,
https://archive.org/stream/philippinescentu00riza/philippinescentu00riza_djvu.txt.
27
Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling, 1892, Marxists
Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/.
28
The Ateneo Art Gallery is set to move into a new space at the Arete sometime in the summer
of 2017. Such a move may signify nothing less than a new era for the study and development of
modern art in the country.

32
 Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7.1 (2017): 25–42

independence to the Philippines, turning it into a new postcolonial state that

beheld the flourishing of modern art.29
To be sure, Zobel can reveal much about the astonishing confluence
of the Philippine postcolonial state and modern Filipino art, both of which
are deeply utopian projects. But Patrick Flores prefers to regard Zobel with
suspicion. Zobel’s abstraction, the former argues, is coextensive with the
“foreignness of the modern, its alienation from the poverties of the masses.”30
Put differently, Zobel’s abstract art stands in ironic contrast to the destitution
of most Filipinos. Yet Flores has his blindness, too, failing to see how the
abstraction of Zobel’s art also stands in ironic contrast to the sheer clarity of
his art historical essays, especially where they involve the Filipino. What to
make of this?
It may suggest that Zobel’s abstraction is not incompatible with the
Filipino question. That the twin rise of the Philippine postcolonial state
and modern Filipino art demands abstraction, that is, they both require the
deepest kind of reflection. This gives us pause for thought in that it lends
another layer to the notion of the modern in twentieth-century Philippines,
one that locates the formal birth of the nation in the matrix of experimental
art. Viewed from the vantage points of the AAG’s founding and Zobel’s ideas,
the modern, quite apart from its future orientation, is inextricably linked to
the uncharted destiny of the new postcolonial nation.
This understanding of the modern wherein the Filipino and the new
become one allows us to grasp the emergence of modern art differently.
In particular, it provides an alternative narrative for the genesis of artistic
modernity in the country, one that varies from the dominant account that
identifies the rise of Filipino modern art either with the formal debate between
the conservatives and the moderns, a battle royale according to Purita Kalaw-
Ledesma and Amadis Ma. Guerrero, or with avant-garde coteries in the

29
Angeles Villalba Salvador, “Chronology,” in Zobel (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofia, 2003), 276. For a discussion of Zobel’s time at Harvard, see John Seed,
“Fernando Zobel de Ayala: Brief Life of a Peripatetic Man of Arts: 1924–1984,” Harvard
Magazine, March–April 2009, http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/03/fernando-z-bel-de-ayala.
30
Patrick Flores, “The Zobel Nexus,” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 182–205, http://journals.
ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/kk/article/view/2036/2034. Part of the suspicion with Zobel may have
to do with his Spanish citizenship, but as Pilar Cabañas shows in her article, the question is far
more complex. See Pilar Cabañas, “Fernando Zobel: In Search of an Identity, First Notes of a
Travel to Japan,” Philippine Studies 56 (June 2008): 213–37. For other essays looking into Zobel’s
identity, see these articles in Fernando Zobel in the 1950s: The Formative Years (Manila: Ayala
Foundation, 2009): Arturo Luz, “Reflections of a Friendship,” 8–10, and Benito Legarda Jr.,
“Fernando Zobel: A Personal Memoir,” 11–13.

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 Veric, “Fernando Zobel and the Making of the Ateneo Art Gallery”

Art Association of the Philippines and the Philippine Art Gallery in the
1950s.31 Thinking through the AAG and Zobel, one sees another story
appearing, in which the modern emerges from the larger development of
the Philippine postcolonial state. In this narrative, the modern coincides
with decolonization, in which art and politics shape each other in dynamic
ways. In short, the modern arises, like Ocampo’s fabled Sarimanok, from the
historical convergence of the new postcolonial state and experimental art,
putting aesthetic innovation at the heart of nationalism.
To appreciate the far-reaching implications of such an idea, one must
revisit Zobel’s art historical essays. As early as 1953, for instance, he had
meditated on what he termed “Filipino artistic expression” in a journal that
became the nerve center of post-war intellectual development, Philippine
Studies.32 In it, Zobel contributed to the elucidation of a phrase that frequently
appeared in art competitions but that no one, he bemoaned, really understood.
So Zobel proceeded with vigor in pondering Filipino artistic expression
and, in the process, displayed tremendous rigor in clarifying the case,
indicating that the likes of Luna, Hidalgo, and Amorsolo provided clues on
what constituted Filipino contents but proved inadequate in determining what
counted as Filipino in execution. Zobel accordingly considered the question of
theme quite apart from the question of expression. But where to find Filipino
artistic expression? Rather than give a final answer, Zobel left the question
open, “in the hopes that it may spur someone else into investigating what lies
so near at hand.”33

31
Purita Kalaw-Ledesma and Amadis Ma. Guerrero, The Struggle for Philippine Art (Manila:
Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, 1974). Kalaw-Ledesma and Guerrero depicted the debate thus: “The
moderns came under attack; they were pilloried for painting ‘unrecognizable objects,’ for
having ‘no perspective’ and ‘not knowing how to draw.’ Their use of distortion was criticized;
ditto with their predilection for painting unpleasant themes like old age and poverty. A typical
comment was ‘my child can draw just as well as the moderns, if not better.’ Another observation
was, ‘I don’t understand what they’re trying to say. Who are they to improve over nature, the
handiwork of God? Are they better than He?’ In short, paint what you see. This was the credo
of the conservatives. The moderns, however, believed otherwise. Having gone through a war and
having known the meaning of suffering, they asserted that it was impossible for Filipino artists
to paint idealized pictures of the masses toiling happily in the fields. Ugliness was part of life,
and one should not avoid interpreting unpleasant realities for these things—like old age and
suffering—can be made beautiful. Painting was not an escape from our daily problems; it was an
interpretation of life, a mirror of all its beauties and sordidness” (15).
32
Fernando Zobel, “Filipino Artistic Expression,” Philippine Studies 1 (September 1953):
125–30.
33
Ibid., 130.

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 Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7.1 (2017): 25–42

Five years later, Zobel would return to the same concern in his study of
Philippine colonial statuary, trying to ascertain what was indigenous about
it. Still, the answers he provided remained tentative, admitting that it would
require more work for them to be conclusive.34 In another study of silver ex-
votos in Ilocos, decorative pieces donated as religious offering, Zobel noted
the foreign influences on the design, ex-votos being equally popular in Spain
and Latin America, yet he duly emphasized the distinctness of local motifs.
But how distinct were they?35 “To try and pinpoint where the difference lies,”
he wrote, “is, for the present, beyond my powers.”36 In study after study, Zobel
would, indeed, show his remarkable prudence, careful to know the limits of
his own judgment.
Beyond the evenhandedness of his approach, however, what distinguished
Zobel’s inquiry was the earnestness with which he sought to answer questions
about Filipino identity when it was unfashionable to do so given the context
of a culture still reeling from centuries of colonization. More important, he
never saw his art to be incompatible with his attempt to grasp the Filipino.37
Quite to the contrary, he brought modernity and indigeneity together. His
may therefore be counted as a decolonizing voice, a touchstone in postcolonial
Filipino art criticism, possibly a pioneer in the local study of material culture
from an aesthetic angle. In fact, Peter Soriano would argue that Zobel
may be considered as “one of the original and most important contributors
to contemporary Philippine art and culture.”38 No less than Paras-Perez,
himself educated at Harvard, called Zobel a “seminal figure in Philippine
modern art of the Fifties and early Sixties.”39 Astoundingly enough, his ideas
preceded by two years the landmark conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where
decolonization would officially become an international movement. Even
more surprising, Zobel had already created a decolonizing theory of Filipino
artistic expression long before the publication in 1972 of Philippine Modern

34
Fernando Zobel, “Philippine Colonial Sculpture: A Short Survey.” Philippine Studies 6
(August 1958): 249–94.
35
Fernando Zobel, “Silver Ex-Votos in Ilocos.” Philippine Studies 5 (September 1957): 261–67.
36
Ibid., 266.
37
See also Zobel’s other essays, “The Seventh Annual AAP Art Exhibition,” Philippine
Studies 2 (March 1954): 40–49, and “The Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice at the University of the
Philippines,” Philippine Studies 5 (March 1957): 1–8.
38
See Peter Soriano, “A Biographical Sketch of Zobel’s Formative Years,” in Zobel (Madrid:
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2003), 262.
39
Rod. Paras-Perez, Fernando Zobel (Manila: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1990), 1.

35
 Veric, “Fernando Zobel and the Making of the Ateneo Art Gallery”

Art and Its Critics edited by Alice Coseteng, an anthology that Carlos Romulo
hailed as “the first of its kind ever to appear in this country.”40
Consider also how Zobel’s 1953 essay came on the heels of House Bill
Number 2673 filed in the Philippine Congress by Diosdado Macapagal
in 1952, exactly the same year that Zobel had his first exhibition at the
Philippine Art Gallery, which proposed the creation of a national cultural
repository, a vision that would not be formalized as a self-governing entity
until 1998 with the passing of the National Museum Act under the presidency
of Fidel Ramos.41
Back in 1960, Zobel had already created such a cultural repository. This
was how farsighted he was in that he developed critical lenses for understanding
the art of the postcolonial Filipino, collecting its best specimens to secure its
passage into the future, a task that he performed with much panache as a
traitor to his Spanish citizenship, which he kept until his untimely death
in Rome.
But Zobel’s most lasting legacy would have to be his liberation of Filipino
modern art from the tyranny of literalism. The carabao, maidens, and sunsets
over Manila Bay, he argued in his 1953 essay, should hold no monopoly on
what is Filipino. It is not the subject that matters, he added, but rather the
artist’s sensibility. Between a Frenchman who paints a dalaga in Balintawak
costume and a Filipino who paints a dish of apples, the answer should be
obvious as to who possesses Filipino expression, according to him. It is likely
the Filipino. “Why? Because he is one,” Zobel resolved.42
And if theme proves to be an inadequate marker of the local, so is
material, he added. No Filipino, according to Zobel, should be prevented
from using Italian marble. “The trouble with this picking and choosing is
that it limits the field,” he stated.43
In railing at hackneyed vision, Zobel effectively blasted open the future
of Filipino modern art, making it more democratic in unprecedented ways,
allowing for freedom of artistic theme and medium. Indeed, he made Filipino

40
Alice Coseteng, ed., Philippine Modern Art and Its Critics (Manila: UNESCO National
Commission of the Philippines, 1972); Carlos Romulo, preface to Coseteng, Philippine Modern
Art and Its Critics, xi.
41
National Museum, A Brief History of the Development of Modern Art in the Philippines, n.p.;
Republic of the Philippines, “National Museum Act of 1998,” The LawPhil Project, http://www.
lawphil.net/statutes/repacts/ra1998/ra_8492_1998.html.
42
Zobel, “Filipino Artistic Expression,” 126.
43
Ibid., 127.

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 Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7.1 (2017): 25–42

art able to contain multitudes, including, not least of all, a Spaniard like
himself. After Zobel, the purity of Filipino modern art is simply barbaric.
Such robustness of vision would also define his lecture outlines for a
graduate class that he taught at the Ateneo in 1954.44 To describe contemporary
art, he would range from France to the United States, Italy to Mexico. But
what strikes one the most is not how he began with the West, but how he
ended with reflections on contemporary painting in the Philippines, seguing
into the French academic tradition and impressionism before lighting on the
training, finances, public, critics, and opportunity of “the Filipino painter.”45
The last two sections on contemporary art and the Filipino artist are
arguably the most intriguing in his lectures not only for their concern but
also for their pithiness. For the final notes barely occupy the last page. What
actually did Zobel say to his students, who included Leandro Locsin, a man
who would later define the cultural landscape of the Philippines? How did he
see the future of the Filipino contemporary? What difficulties did he observe
in “creating a national style”?46 No one will know for sure.
But clues may lie in one of his works, especially if it is seen in light of his
own art historical essays. Take the art naïf tendency of his prize-winning La
Carroza (1953), from which the elusive face of Filipino modern art may be
gleaned. Take, too, Zobel’s classes at the Ateneo where he noted how modern
abstraction had been derived from African sculpture, child art, and primitive
art.47 Later on, he would devote the final sections of his lectures to the Filipino
question, as if the new postcolonial state were the endpoint of modern art’s
international history. Without a doubt, La Carroza exemplifies not only the
possibilities of a national style but also the international crosscurrents that
make such a style possible in the first place. A work inspired by what Zobel
had seen in a procession in Manila, La Carroza is a burst of bright tropical
colors emanating from the golden crown of the Virgin.48 The brightness
extends outward, spreading from the halo to the lit lamps that seem to hang
in the air, the filigrees adorning the frame spouting like tongues of flame.
In this single picture, one encounters the international history of
modern art in a postcolonial setting, one that countenances the feedback
loop of modern aesthetic movements: a Western brand of abstraction that is

44
Fernando Zobel, “Lecture Outlines for the Course Introduction to Contemporary
Painting” (Ateneo Graduate School, 1954), 1–30.
45
Ibid., 30.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid., 23.
48
Zobel, interview by Cid Reyes, Conversations on Philippine Art, 52.

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 Veric, “Fernando Zobel and the Making of the Ateneo Art Gallery”

derived from African sculpture, child art, and primitive art comes to shape
Zobel’s sensibility, who then applies the latter to his modern expression of a
Filipino experience.49 In doing so, he mediates the international movement of
abstraction and accordingly returns it to its indigenous roots in the context of
a newly decolonized nation. In the process, Zobel creates an aesthetic network
that reveals the intersection of abstraction and indigeneity in the history of art
in postcolonial Philippines in particular and in Asia in general. La Carroza,
then, is nothing less than the Filipino embodiment of an artistic event on an
international scale.
But what is Filipino about Zobel? Did he not die as a Spaniard in Cuenca,
buried on a mountaintop overlooking an ancient river? A humble porcelain
may hold the answer. In the final essay he penned for Philippine Studies after
departing for Spain in 1960, which might have well been his swan song,
Zobel spoke about what he called the first Philippine porcelain.50 “The story
of pottery in the Philippines,” he wrote, “reaches back into prehistory, but
to the best of our knowledge porcelain,” distinguished by its translucence,
hardness, and sonority, “was not produced in this country until the early
twentieth century.”51
The porcelain in question is a dish from La Porcelanica, a company
that Enrique Zobel de Ayala, the painter’s father, had founded after meeting
Francisco Quintos, a young Filipino worker in a ceramics factory in Tokyo
in 1903. Upon his return to Manila, Zobel the elder hired three Filipino
apprentices, who were given training in Spanish, English, and Arithmetic,
as Quintos, then newly arrived from Tokyo, built a Japanese-style furnace
made of homegrown materials. The first porcelains were produced in 1904
using equipment from France and China, clay from Laguna and Bulacan,
and silica from Japan. But the business venture proved to be a failure; the
company closed up shop in 1911.52
Then World War II came, destroying ceramics and records alike. If not for
Quintos’s son who gave the only surviving porcelain to the archives of Ayala
y Compañia, and for Zobel’s own tenacity in documenting it, a significant
moment in Filipino material culture would have been lost completely.

49
The example of Pablo Picasso comes to mind, whose cubist forms were ostensibly derived
from African tribal masks. For a postcolonial critique of this lineage, see Hal Foster, “The
‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (1985): 45–70.
50
Fernando Zobel, “The First Philippine Porcelain,” Philippine Studies 9 (January 1961): 17–19.
51
Ibid., 17.
52
Ibid.

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 Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia 7.1 (2017): 25–42

The last porcelain itself is thin and luminous, with high foot and
undulant shoulders. It creates a fine sound when it is touched. On its face are
iris leaves and blooms, their veined petals visible to the eye. On its borders
are twisting lines, the outside covered in white overglaze. There is no potter’s
mark. What can this object tell us? “There is nothing about this piece,” Zobel
would say, “that identifies it as a Philippine product. The motif is a woozy
Europeanized adaptation of a traditional Japanese subject; it could have been
done in France, England, or Germany during the 1890s.”53
Yet in its own way, the porcelain is an allegory of modern Filipino art
after the war. Like the porcelain, Filipino art carries with it the burdened
histories of its making against which it must fashion, in a gesture that taunts
the impossible, an image of its self and future. This, in other words, is the
task of the Filipino artist who must liberate art from the cloying literalism
of the porcelain, its stylized iris blooms and scalloped frames. And thus,
too, the Filipino utopia is born: to make the first universal art by denying its
universal roots.

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53
Ibid., 19.<LFN>

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Poet, critic, and curator, Charlie Samuya Veric holds a PhD in American
Studies from Yale University where he studied with the famed art historian
Alexander Nemerov. His essay on Fernando Zobel is a companion piece
for the 2016 exhibition that he curated for the Ateneo Art Gallery, entitled

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 Veric, “Fernando Zobel and the Making of the Ateneo Art Gallery”

Figuring Filipino Utopia. A widely published scholar, he is also the author of

acclaimed and bestselling poetry collections, entitled Histories (2015) and
Boyhood (2017). He teaches with the Department of English at the Ateneo
de Manila University and may be reached at cveric@ateneo.edu.
<ENF>

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