Fernando Zóbel is one of the key artists of twentieth-century Spanish abstraction. Creator of an extremely personal non-figurative vernacular, he was also a noted philanthropist and patron of the arts.

Following an earlier figurative period, the impact of discovering the work of Mark Rothko (1903-1970) in 1955, motivated Zóbel to take the path of abstraction. From that moment, his painting began to draw from highly diverse sources of inspiration, ranging from Eastern calligraphy and philosophy to American and Spanish Informalismo, and it was the mix of those influences that gave his work such a highly personal quality.

For a proper understanding of his work, we ought to bear in mind that Zóbel was a tireless traveller. On his countless journeys, during which he visited galleries and museums, he accumulated experiences that he began to reflect in his notebooks in 1950. This support would prove essential for his creative process. His works were the outcome of a minute observation of reality, to which he later applied a process of formal reduction. This working method is grounded in the traditional academic painting scheme of outline-drawing-sketch-painting. As such, his sketchbooks are an extremely valuable tool to explore the artist’s iconographic and visual universe, while at once evincing the analytical underpinnings of his painting.

This way of working is precisely what lies behind the spontaneous appearance, charged with lyricism and refinement, of this particular painting from the BBVA Collection. "The Drawing Lesson" is dated in the artist’s mid-career period, starting around 1963, which was defined by the introduction of colour and an openness to new subject matters.

Painted in Madrid in 1976, this work evokes the memory of an everyday situation: a drawing lesson. A month before he painted it, Zóbel had travelled to Seville. In point of fact, in his sketchbooks we can find a reference to a drawing lesson in that city, suggesting that the work at hand could recall that event. The scene was subjected to a profound process of reduction that led to the suppression of all superfluous motifs, making it a work of great visual simplicity. Zóbel organised the painting with fine pencil lines and splashes of colour that subtly illuminate the space. The artist did not literally reproduce a scene as such: rather, he renders his memory of it, emphasising the elements that most caught his attention.