Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
It was Frank Gehry's architecture-as-sculpture Guggenheim Museum that put Bilbao on the tourist map.
But its contents are seldom of that distinction. For contrast, go 105 kilometers, or 65 miles, east to an open-air sculpture park. It holds more than 40 works by one of the finest sculptors of the 20th century: Eduardo Chillida.
Few foreigners, maybe one in five of its 90,000 visitors a year, venture that far. More should.
Chillida, born in 1924 in nearby San Sebastian, worked above all in forged iron and steel, using massive blocks and twisted rods, often square in cross-section, to create his highly formal, nonfigurative pieces.
Some are five or more meters, or 17 feet, high: like one that the hastiest visitor to Bilbao can see, rusting as it is meant to outside that city's airport. Most are heavy. "He never made anything hollow," says his son Luis, who runs the sculpture park. "My father thought space was there to be accessible or not at all." One giant in the Chillida-Leku park ("Chillida's place" in Basque) weighs more than 60 tons.
Chillida used other materials as well: granite, notably, but also concrete, alabaster, terra cotta and briefly in the 1950s wood. But iron was a natural choice. Spain's metalworking industries were built on the ore of the Basque Country, where Chillida lived nearly all his life until his death in 2002. And when he returned in 1950 from two years' study in Paris to marry, the newlyweds' house in Hernani, a village outside San Sebastian, was near the local forge. Chillida got the blacksmith to teach him the craft of ironwork.
One day the smith decided Chillida was distracting his other apprentices from the mundane work they had to do to make a living. "You use the forge at night," he said, "the rest of us during the day." For four years Chillida perfected his art as a solitary night worker.
Recognition came quickly. Chillida won the first prize for sculpture at the 1958 Venice Biennale, and later a flow of public commissions from abroad.
Spain's then dictator, Francisco Franco, was a soldier who knew what he liked in art, and it didn't include nonfigurative sculpture, nor the broad humanity of a man who thought an artist should be "like a tree, with its roots in its own land but its branches open to the world."
The Chillidas bought the first of 12 hectares, or 30 acres, of Chillida-Leku near Hernani in 1984. It is still owned and run by the family: Pilar, the sculptor's 80-year-old widow, four sons and four daughters. A hillside of meadow and trees topped by a 16th-century farmhouse converted to display smaller or less durable works, it is a perfect setting, except for the noise from a busy road nearby. But the costs are large: around 2 million a year, says Luis Chillida, against income of 1.5 million. So far, the family has filled the gap. But public money will be needed.
An exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao will help. "Homage to Chillida," which runs until June 11, includes works made in his honor by artists like Anthony Caro of Britain, another sculptor in iron and an old friend.
Overlapping with the Bilboa exhibit, Chillida-Leku is showing (until late September) "Homage from Chillida," works that he made honoring thinkers, writers, artists and others he admired. Nothing for Picasso, though, Spain's most famous artist since Goya and Velasquez: Chillida admired his art, but didn't think much of Picasso as a man.
Bits of both exhibitions, sponsored by Grupo Urvasco, a Spanish construction company, may tour together later. But those who want to see a great sculptor's work in the setting he chose for it should go Chillida-Leku.
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
