“I did it better because I didn't know him and I was full of doubts and amazement,” thought Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), for whom sharing his ideas, uncertainties and hesitations with other artists was one of the driving forces that fueled his art. The opportune time to do so was the summers, when accompanied by his wife Pili and his eight children he settled in the foundation of his gallery owners, Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, in Saint Paul de Vence, where he spent his holidays working and, in the moments Free, he could converse with other great artists such as Calder, Miró, Braque, Léger and Giacometti, with whom he maintained an almost family friendship. Chillida, who would have turned 100 on January 10, was the youngest of them all (the gallery owner affectionately called him “mon petit”) and now they have responded to the call for a new reunion to celebrate his birthday party.
This time the appointment is at Chillida Leku (Chillida's place), an open-air sculpture museum among beech, oak and poplar trees, which the sculptor had surely been dreaming of since he began to frequent that center surrounded by coastal pines. blue, between Antibes and Nice, designed by Josep Lluís Sert in 1964.
Universo Maeght, an exhibition that is above all a tribute to the friend and dealer who projected Chillida's work to the world, brings together until April 14 in the hamlet and green meadows of Zabalaga works by Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Palazuelo, Julio González, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Antoni Tàpies, Joan Miró and Marc Chagall. “When an artist entered the gallery, he immediately became part of a large creative family,” recalls Isabelle Maeght, granddaughter of the dealers and administrator of the Maeght Foundation. Her grandparents decided to create the center following the advice of their painter and sculptor friends, to try to alleviate the pain caused by the death of her son Bernard, who died of leukemia at the age of eleven. It soon became a place of dialogue and fun for artists, musicians and philosophers, a true temple of avant-garde creation of the sixties.
Chillida, also a poet and philosopher capable of transforming the deepest thoughts into the simplest forms, maintained a close relationship of complicity with almost all of them, as can be seen in the exhibition, where his monumental Homage to Braque (initially intended for Miró, until the shape of a bird appeared) coexists with the painting that the creator of cubism gave him. “'Choose one of my paintings,' he told her. 'But how am I going to choose one of his works?' 'I'll give it to him.' When he finally decided on one of the paintings he discovered that Braque had already dedicated it to him. The anecdote is told by his grandson Mikel, who adds that the “hard core” of Chillida was the one formed by Miró, Palazuelo, Tàpies and Calder.
“But is it a boy or a girl?” Chagall mocked because of his long hair, and Giacometti kept a certain distance due to his “more difficult character.” Of the latter, Homme qui marche II (1960) is exhibited in a room overlooking the countryside where for the first time in many years it was possible to see Morning cobweb (1969), weighing seven tons, Le pépin géant, by Jean Arp and Figure by Barbara Hepworth alongside the steel colossi of Chillida, who confessed to measuring herself daily to know if I have grown, not to know my height.
