Industrial Culture

Eduardo Chillida Juantegui (1924–2002) was a Spanish Basque sculptor notable for his monumental abstract works. He received the prestigious Wolf Prize in Sculpture in 1985. Before becoming a sculptor he had been the goalkeeper for Real Sociedad, San Sebastián's football team. Chillida's earliest sculptures concentrated on the human form (mostly torsos and busts); his later works tended to be more massive and more abstract, producing many monumental public works. Chillida himself tended to reject the label of "abstract", preferring instead to call himself a "realist sculptor". At their best his works, although massive and monumental, suggest movement and tension. For example, the largest of his works in the United States, "De Musica" is an 81-ton steel sculpture featuring two pillars with arms that reach out but do not touch. Much of Chillida's work is inspired by his Basque upbringing, and many of his sculptures' titles are in the Basque language Euskera. A large body of his work can be seen in the Basque city, San Sebastián (Donostia), including El peine del viento (The comb of the wind) installed in the (often stormy) sea in La Concha bay at San Sebastian. His steel sculpture "De Música III" was exhibited at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK, as part of a retrospective of Chillida's work.

"The Poetic Vision of Eduardo Chillida" by Stanley Meisler was originally published in the July 2000 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine. A short abstract is available on the Smithsonian Magazine website. Part of the article is published here (copyright © 2000 Stanley Meisler, all rights reserved).

Eduardo Chillida, the renowned 76-year-old Spanish sculptor, wants to climax a long and distinguished career by carving out a massive space 11 stories high and just as wide inside a mountain on one of Spain's Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The tall and soft-spoken Chillida, who often sounds more like a poet than a sculptor, is awed by the idea of standing within the enormous emptiness of a mountain and looking upward at shafts of light from the sun and the moon.

Chillida (pronounced Chee-YEE-dah) may never realize the work. Although the provincial government of the Canary Islands has approved the project, and promoters are already urging tourists to visit the anointed mountain, a small group of environmentalists has denounced the venture, castigating Chillida for meddling with nature. On top of this, engineers have not yet finished a study to determine whether Chillida's plan is structurally sound, and other problems have arisen. Whether successful or not, the grand ambition of the mountain project has not surprised anyone who knows the work of Chillida well. The artist, who has created both monumental and smaller pieces out of iron and steel and wood and alabaster and cement and clay and paper and stone and plaster, has come to look on space itself as material to mold. To sculpt an immense, mind-boggling space inside a mountain makes artistic sense to him.

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Chillida studied architecture in Madrid but soon shifted to drawing and sculpture, and in 1947 at age 23, like so many Spanish artists before him, left for Paris. He married his teenage sweetheart, Pili Belzunce, in 1950, and they set up home outside Paris.

In France, Chillida worked in plaster and stone. A critic, seeing several of his pieces in a show, wrote that the world was witnessing "the dawn of Chillida." But Chillida felt troubled. He had modeled his work after the magnificent Greek marble sculptures that he had seen in the Louvre. "Suddenly, it became clear to me that I did not belong to the white light of Greece," he told a Spanish interviewer recently. "I was lost because I belong to a land with dark light. The Atlantic is dark, the Mediterranean is not." The sculptor and his wife returned to Spain in 1951 and settled in San Sebastian.

There Chillida searched for a material that would fit the Basque mood. Iron was an obvious candidate. It has been mined from the Pyrenees for centuries. Spinners of legend, in fact, insist that the first Basque blacksmith emerged in 3000 B.C. Chillida happened upon a blacksmith's forge in a village outside San Sebastian and pondered whether iron was the material he sought. "When we entered the forge," he recalled, "it became clear to me that I was right. Everything was black. There I discovered iron."

Read full article @ Stanley Meisler