Gallery on the edge The revolutionary museum born under the shadow of Franco

In July 1966, as the Beatles were preparing to release Revolver and Spain was approaching the 30th anniversary of the coup that birthed the Franco dictatorship, a Spanish-Filipino artist called Fernando Zóbel threw open the doors of an improbable but visionary cultural outpost.

- Sam Jones

Based in a clutch of 15th-century houses overhanging a gorge in the small city of Cuenca, the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, or Museum of Spanish Abstract Art, had a simple if daunting mission. As Manuel Fontán del Junco, the director of museums and exhibitions at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid and one of the curators of a new exhibition about the institution puts it: "It was a museum for artists in a country of artists without museums." 

When Zóbel, who was born to a wealthy and powerful family in Manila, arrived in Spain after studying philosophy and literature at Harvard, he was struck by two things. "When he got here, he realised that the Spanish abstract artists were very good, but that they had nowhere to show their works when they came back from international exhibitions," said Fontán. "He also realised that he could collect their works."