How Eduardo Chillida, a sculptor feted by the world, remained devoutly Basque, belonging ‘to the dark light of the Atlantic coast’
Evocative of the ancestral megaliths found in his native northern Spain, Chillida’s art adorns important buildings in Paris, Berlin and Washington, D.C. Alastair Smart celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of the footballer-turned-artist, whose sporting prowess, he said, helped him forge ‘the ability to control space’
Eduardo Chillida photographed in the 1980s next to the Peine del viento XV (Comb of the Wind XV), 1976, in San Sebastián. Photo: Eduardo Chillida Archive. Artwork: © Zabalaga-Leku, DACS, London 2024
As a young man, Eduardo Chillida went by the nickname of El Gato (‘The Cat’). It was given to him by the fans of Real Sociedad football team — for whom he played as goalkeeper — because of his agility and impressive reflexes. It’s said that the mighty Real Madrid were interested in signing him, only for a knee injury at the age of 19 to force him into early retirement.
Football’s loss was art’s gain. Chillida went on to have a successful career as an abstract sculptor, winning countless awards (including the prestigious Praemium Imperiale arts prize in 1991 from Japan’s imperial family) and installing works in major public spaces worldwide, such as outside UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris, the Federal Chancellery building in Berlin, and the World Bank offices in Washington, D.C.
Forever on guard against repeating himself, he developed the artistic motto, ‘I have yesterday’s hands, I’m missing tomorrow’s.’
Chillida’s works invite extended viewing. They are characterised by intriguing hollows, hooks and curves. He established a style that managed to look modernist and ancient at the same time. The variety in his abstract forms was cutting-edge, yet those forms also hark evocatively back to the ancestral megaliths found in his native region, the Basque Country, in northern Spain.
The 16th-century Zabalaga farmhouse at Chillida Leku. The restoration, by Eduardo Chillida, enabled the original structure to be showcased, but also turned the building into a contemporary work — a modern space that incorporates the artist’s philosophy. The granite sculpture in the foreground, Lo profundo es el aire, Estela XII (How Profound is the Air, Stele XII), 1990, is suggestive of the ancient megaliths left by the region’s Neolithic inhabitants. Photo: Mikel Chillida. Artwork: © Zabalaga-Leku, DACS, London 2024
Among his best-known works is the Peine del viento, a trio of huge, pincer-like sculptures in Corten steel, which protrude from the rocks at the western end of La Concha bay in his home city, San Sebastián. Installed in 1977, they look out over the sea, are frequently sprayed by it, and are occasionally even battered by it.
This year is the centenary of Chillida’s birth, and it’s being marked by a host of exhibitions. In San Sebastián, one can see Topalekuak, a show at the Tabakalera cultural centre, in which seven contemporary artists have responded to his work; and A Conversation: Chillida and the Arts 1950-1970, at the San Telmo Museum, in which pieces from early in his career are shown alongside those by peers such as Barbara Hepworth, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti and David Smith.
An installation view of Chillida in Menorca at Hauser & Wirth Menorca. © Zabalaga Leku. San Sebastián, VEGAP, 2024. Courtesy of the Estate of Eduardo Chillida and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Damian Griffiths
Fifteen miles west, the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum in the town of Getaria is hosting Chillida/Balenciaga. Plying Form, an exhibition exploring links between the artist and the eponymous fashion designer (a friend of his and a fellow Basque). Farther afield, Hauser & Wirth Menorca is staging Chillida in Menorca, a show about the sculptor’s connection with the Balearic island where he spent several summers.
‘Me, here, in my Basque country, I feel at home. Like a tree planted firmly in its terrain, tied to its territory but with its branches open to the world’
The centre of attention, though, is Chillida Leku, a 27-acre sculpture park dedicated to the artist in the verdant rolling hills of Hernani, outside San Sebastián. Chillida purchased the erstwhile country house and estate in the early 1980s, opening it to the public only after a lengthy makeover, in 2000, two years before his death. He described it as a ‘utopia’ that he had long ‘dreamed of’, where his ‘sculptures could rest and people could walk among them as though in a forest’. Its name translates simply as ‘place’ (leku in Basque).
Sculptures in the grounds of Chillida Leku. From left: Buscando la luz I (Seeking the Light I), 1997; Harri IV (Stone IV), 1993; De musica III (On Music III), 1989; and Lotura XXXII (Bond XXXII), 1998. Photo: Iñigo Santiago. Artworks: © Zabalaga-Leku, DACS, London 2024
Forty monumental works by Chillida, in Corten steel or granite, are spread spaciously across the park. There is no particular order in which to see them, no prescribed route to follow — just some unobtrusive QR codes to scan, for those wishing to learn a little about each piece. We’re informed that Lotura XXXII, for example, weighs 64 tonnes, is named after the Basque word for bond or union, and features four knotted arms emerging from a single block of steel.
Chillida Leku is a Gesamtkunstwerk. According to its director, Mireia Massagué, ‘the sculptures are integrated into the landscape as if they have always been part of it’, and exist ‘in dialogue’ with their surroundings — alongside beech, oak and magnolia trees in the more densely wooded areas, or in open fields that were originally used for sheep pasture.
Interior of the Zabalaga farmhouse. From left: Gurutz VIII (Cross VIII), 2000; Lo profundo es el aire XIX (How Profound is the Air XIX), 1998; Monumento a la tolerancia I (Monument to Tolerance I), 1985; Gravitation, 1988; and Deseoso (Wishful), 1954. Photo: Idoia Unzurrunzaga. Artworks: © Zabalaga-Leku, DACS, London 2024
The house is now used as an exhibition space — to show smaller works — and Spain’s King Felipe VI recently opened 100 years of Eduardo Chillida with the Telefónica Collection there, an exhibition of the artist’s sculptures owned by the titular telecoms firm.
Born in 1924, Chillida was signed by his local club, Real Sociedad, after scouts watched him playing football on the beach. In later life, he said that his first career had helped considerably with his second: as both a goalkeeper and a sculptor, one needs to ‘develop the ability to control space’.
In 1948, Chillida moved to Paris. The works he made there — in plaster — were figurative and inspired by the ancient Greek marbles he saw at the Louvre. He soon came to feel, however, that home is where the art is, and he returned to San Sebastián for good. ‘I did not belong to the white light of the Mediterranean,’ he said. ‘I belonged to the dark light of the Atlantic coast.’
Eduardo Chillida working at Manuel Illarramendi’s foundry in Hernani, 1951. Photo: Gonzalo Chillida
Chillida now discovered the joy of working in local forges, turning to iron, that most Basque of materials, which historically had helped create the region’s shipbuilding wealth.
He was captivated by the darkness of the forge, the heat of the flames, the colours of red-hot iron, and the sound of hammer on anvil. He enjoyed battling with his material, too. Unlike fellow abstract sculptor Anthony Caro, he never welded, preferring to work single blocks of metal, in the belief that any sculpture thus remained true to the material from which it was made.
Success came quickly: Chillida was signed up by the French dealer Aimé Maeght and joined the latter’s impressive roster of artists, including Giacometti, Georges Braque, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder. He was given a solo exhibition at Maeght’s gallery in Paris in 1956, two years before winning the international sculpture prize at the Venice Biennale.
Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), Escuchando a la piedra IV (Listening to the Stone IV), 1996, at Chillida Leku. Photo: Iñigo Santiago. Artwork: © Zabalaga-Leku, DACS, London 2024
He was a visiting professor at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in the early 1970s. A deep thinker about art, he knew Martin Heidegger and subscribed to the German philosopher’s views about bodies and space: in essence, that the latter isn’t, as was traditionally argued, an empty retainer for the former; space is a medium in its own right.
Chillida clearly took such matters seriously. It was over a disagreement about Heidegger’s thinking that he fell out with fellow Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza. The pair didn’t speak again for 30 years.
As his career progressed, Chillida took up work in new materials. First alabaster; then chamotte clay; and finally Corten steel, for the monumental sculptures of the latter part of his career. Thanks to its chemical composition, Corten is largely resistant to corrosion, and therefore suitable for showing outdoors.
Chillida’s Berlín, 1999, in Corten steel, installed in 2000 at Berlin’s Federal Chancellery building, which was designed by Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank. The sculpture’s pair of abstract forms symbolise German reunification. Photo: Eduardo Chillida Archive. Artwork: © Zabalaga-Leku, DACS, London 2024
‘Beyond the art, it’s also worth considering the times Chillida lived in,’ says Massagué. ‘He came of age after the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War. There was a sense that society needed to be reconstructed, and Chillida was a great proponent of freedom, tolerance and peace. This is reflected in the way his sculptures resist a single interpretation.’ They are left open to multiple meanings. (In the case of some of the works at Chillida Leku, such as Arco de la Libertad — ‘Arch of Freedom’ — the openness is literal, with visitors invited to walk through or inside them.)
Massagué’s words surely offer part of the explanation for Chillida’s widespread appeal. Not for nothing was he as coveted as any artist when it came to making public sculpture in the second half of the 20th century. Berlin, his piece from 1999 for the new Federal Chancellery in the German capital, is a rare work with an overt meaning: its two entwined forms allude to the reunification of Germany, after the country’s separation for decades into East (GDR) and West (FRG).
Chillida was married to his childhood sweetheart, Pilar Belzunce, with whom he had eight children and 20-plus grandchildren, and brought Chillida Leku to fruition. Both were proud Basques and lamented the way that, after his victory in the Spanish Civil War, General Franco clamped down hard on the region’s forms of self-expression. It has been suggested that Chillida’s choice to work in abstract amounted to an oblique form of dissent, given the leader’s preference for art of clearly comprehensible figuration. In the more liberal era that followed Franco’s death in 1975, Chillida also designed the logo for the newly established University of the Basque Country.
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