By John Seed
johnseed@gmail.com

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To better understand Fernando Zóbel’s Still Life, Variation II, 1953 it is helpful to examine the 17th Century Spanish painting that inspired him. Still Life is one of several variations he made based on Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, a rare work by Juan Sánchez Cotán, a Spanish Baroque master known for his austere still-life paintings. Quince is a well-known painting in Southern California where it is the centerpiece of a fine collection of Spanish Baroque paintings in the collection of the San Diego Museum of Art Painted in 1602, two years before Sánchez Cotán shuttered his Toledo studio to become a monk in a Carthusian Monastery, Quince is a bodegón or still-life depicting food items. Many European still-life paintings of this era carried hidden messages, meant for educated viewers who enjoyed the hunt for esoteric symbols. The messages of Baroque still-life paintings, which have their roots in Medieval iconography, could be moral, spiritual and sometimes erotic.

Juan Sánchez Cotán, Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602

27 1/8 x 33 1/4 inches (69 x 84.5 cm), Oil on Canvas

Collection of the San Diego Museum of Art

Sánchez Cotán’s painting contains five items, two of which, a quince and a cabbage, are suspended on strings in front of a deep, dark space. Three other items, a partially carved melon, a slice from the melon and a cucumber, rest on an illusionistic ledge. If viewed literally, as a realist image of common food items, the painting delights the eye with its crisp effects of light and dark and deeply shaded depictions of form and space.  Of course, the particular group of items portrayed would make an odd meal, and that is because they were chosen for narrative, not culinary reasons.

Fernando Zóbel, a highly educated and deeply intellectual man must have been attracted to the painting for more than its visual clarity. Profoundly  interested in culture and ideas, Zóbel would have attempted to search for deeper meanings, just as erudite viewers in the 17th century would have. In the fruits and vegetables, for example, he would have noted strong symbolic suggestions. The cucumber and melon, which are at the lowest level of the painting, remind us of male (the cucumber) and female (the melon) presences. They may represent what a 17th century preacher would have viewed as the lowest form of love, sexual love. The open melon may even represent a kind of confession on the part of Sánchez Cotán that he has enjoyed the sexual relations. Part of the attraction of the bodegón tradition was that it allowed painters to paint erotic subject matter in a repressive era that did not permit overt sexual imagery.

Levels in Baroque painting often suggest hierarchies. Suspended in darkness about the melon and cucumber is a head of cabbage, a symbol of the human mind and all of its layers and complexities. It reminds  us that thought – including meditation and deep contemplation – help us to rise above lust, a very Baroque message. The highest image of the painting is the quince, which represents the highest form of love: the love of God. The quince, often shared by couples in Medieval marriage ceremonies, represents a symbolic union with the Holy Spirit. It should be noted that in the Baroque era entering a convent of monastery or convent and taking a vow of chastity was often considered a kind of marriage to God and Christ.

Sánchez Cotán and Zóbel paintings: a side by side comparison

To personalize the play of symbols in his own bodegón, Fernando Zóbel made some alterations to the original composition.   Zóbel’s restatement of the Sánchez Cotán does not include the cucumber. This may be the artist’s clever way of joking about his own apparent asexuality, something often noted by his friends. He also put the cabbage and the quince at the same level, and moved the quince to the right side of the painting. Placing the quince and the cabbage at the same level Zóbel may be making the witty suggestion that his love of thought and love of God were on the same plane.  Or perhaps he didn’t mean that at all: after all Zóbel may have only been interested in making formal variations on Sánchez Cotán’s original.

Part of the charm of  bodegóns is that they don’t come with instruction manuals written by the artist. They are meant to keep us all guessing.

Pablo Picasso, Large Still-Life with Pedestal Table, March 1931

Oil on canvas, 195 x 130.5 cm

Collection Musée national Picasso, Paris

The style used by Zóbel in painting his bodegón reflects the influence of another Spanish master: Pablo Picasso. Picasso's influence appears in two striking ways. First of all, Picasso had made several important series of works inspired by earlier masterpieces, so in a sense he gave permission to other modern artists to consider artistic dialogs with earlier painters. In the late 1960’s Zóbel would go on to create an entire series of “Dialogos” in which he responded to works by Degas and others. Commenting on this series, Zóbel noted: "Drawing the pictures is a way of seeing them. It cleanses the eyes and leaves the most unexpected things in the subconscious.”

 Secondly, the style of Zóbel’s bodegón is very much like Picasso’s in its use of bold flat colors and modified space. Zóbel greatly admired Picasso, and sometimes signed his letters to friends with Picasso’s signature.  He may have also been aware that Picasso had created bodegóns in the 1930s. The best known of these is “Large Still-Life with a Pedestal Table” of 1931. This painting contains sensual forms – including a very sexy pitcher and a platter of voluptuous fruit – inspired by the 50 year old artist’s love affair with 21 year old Marie-Thérèse Walter. In portraying his lover’s body as a pitcher, Picasso was making a parody of the Catholic iconographic tradition of symbolizing the purity of the Virgin Mary with images of pitchers and other “pure” vessels. Picasso, according to his biographer John Richardson, wanted to paint his erotic love for Marie-Thérèse in a way that would not arouse the suspicions of his wife Olga. Making bodegóns, in Picasso’s case, was a way of keeping an affair secret.

Fernando Zóbel also valued personal privacy, and when he later turned to abstract painting he found a way to display strong emotions without giving away the particulars behind those emotions. Clearly, his artistic engagement with Sánchez Cotán and Picasso tells us that although he was still living in the Philippines, he was thinking hard about Spanish art and culture, readying himself for the next stage of his life as an artist.

During the second half of his life, when he lived semi-permanently in Spain, two artists who shared studios with Zóbel, Gerardo Rueda and Carmen Laffon, created series based on the bodegón tradition, something Zóbel must have appreciated, or even suggested.

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For information about the author's book project on Fernando Zóbel, click here.

Zóbel’s “Still Life, Variation II” will be on display at the Ayala Museum as part of the exhibition “Fernando Zóbel in the 1950s: The Formative Years, from June 3, 2009 through January 17, 2010.