Fernando zobel ayala biography
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Fernando Zóbel de Ayala Brief life of a peripatetic man of arts: 1924-1984
Having fled the Spanish Civil War as a boy and endured the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in his teens, Fernando Zóbel ’49 kept his most valuable possessions portable.
Fernando zobel ayala biography
He once showed his Harvard classmate Ralph Graves an album containing small drawings and prints by master artists. Commenting on one precious image—an anatomical study of a man’s shoulder and arm—Zóbel dryly told Graves, “There wasn’t much left to collect, so all I got were the armpits.”
Remarks like that were a Zóbel trademark; their purpose was to help people forget his background.
The name on his Harvard application was Enrique Francisco Fernando Zóbel de Ayala y Montojo Torrentegui Zambrano, but he was “Ferdie” to his friends.
The son of an industrialist father and an aristocratic mother, Zóbel grew up in Manila and then Madrid, until his politically conservative parents retreated to the Philippines in 1936.
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