Alfred H. Barr, the first director of MoMA in New York, had just finished his time as head of the museum’s collections when he visited Cuenca in 1967. He who is probably the most influential cultural manager of the 20th century, who invented the contemporary museum institution, found in the La Mancha city, hanging from a cliff, the most beautiful small museum in the world. This is how I defined it during a meal with eThe artist and collector Fernando Zbel, after visiting the spaces of the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art that it inaugurated a year before.
The works that Zbel had been acquiring from artists of his own generation and that were expressed through the informalism and abstractionwere distributed along the walls of the hanging house that the mayor of Cuenca had given him. There was no modern art museum in the late 60s in Spain, That is why it had to be created, explains Manuel Fontón del Junco, director of museums and exhibitions at the Juan March Foundation and who also curated the exhibition dedicated to that great little museum, which borrows Barr’s phrase as its title.
Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tpies, Jorge Oteiza, Pablo Palazuelo, Nstor Basterretxea, Antonio Saura, Jos Guerrero, Gustavo Torner or Eusebio Sempere They were young people between 30 and 40 years old with a very solid language, but little prospect of showing it in a country where an institutional network did not exist. During the Franco regime, the cultural and artistic progress that was latently beginning to take shape in the country was barely visible. Until the Cuenca Museum of Abstract Art sees the light.
It is a project carried out on the margins of the official cultural policy of the regime, which, on the other hand, had a fairly active foreign policy, Fontón insists when referring to the soft-power Francoist regime that showed signs of openness abroad. There were important exhibitions of Spanish art at the Tate and the MoMA, awards at the Sao Paulo Biennial -a Oteiza in 1957 – and critical recognition of the Spanish pavilion at the 1958 Venice Biennale. But in Spain, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, which Antonio Fernández del Amo directed since 1951, did not have an important tour and the artists floated in a nebula until Zbel arrives.
The expression is very reddit renaissance manFontón continues when referring to Zbel, whose centenary of his birth is celebrated in 2024. He is a very read guy, he is a polyglot… He was born into a Spanish family, but on the margins of the Western world, so to speak. , In Philippines. He dedicated himself to traveling through Europe, but then he studied at Harvard.
I learned from the great masters in the best museums in the world, I also bought art. He could afford it since he came from a great family that made a fortune in the former Spanish colony, where he returns after his world training tour. She is also interested in Asian art, from her native Philippines and beyond, such as calligraphic painting from Japan. In 1961 he settled permanently in Spain, which he had visited on several occasions. He met Gerardo Rueda in 1955 and later Saura, Martín Chirino, Eusebio Sempere, José Guerrero and Torner. They are friends and he also buys their work. Not only is he aware of the need to unite this emergence without echo, it is also a way of supporting his fellow travelers.
As a collector, Zbel is playing with his artist’s eye, of deep knowledge of the history of art, literature, philosophy and culture in general. And that can be seen in the collection, according to the museum director of the Juan March Foundation, to which Zbel donated his collection in 1981 as well as his archive. He would say that it is profoundly broad and democratic, in the sense that he is not an artist who is simply carried away by names: there are many works by creators who were not known then and who today remain secondary luxury.
The exhibition of the Juan March Foundation shows how the approach towards the creation of the Museum of Abstract Art of Cuenca had more to do with that of a space self-managed by artists, a artist-run-space like those that were beginning to occur in New York at the time, but with money, rather than with a public institution. The closeness, the friendship, the awareness of being making history is palpable in the enthusiasm that the artists shared as they joined the circle that formed around Zbel. The project was 20 years ahead of its time. It was the main cultural experiment of the Transition.
