I did better because I didn't know him and was full of doubts and surprises", thought Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), for whom sharing his ideas, uncertainties and hesitations with other artists was one of the engines that feed his art. The right time to do it was the summers, when, accompanied by his wife Pili and their eight children, he settled in the foundation of his gallerists, Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence , where he spent his holidays working and, in his free time, he could converse with other great artists such as Calder, Miró, Braque, Léger or Giacometti, with whom he maintained an almost family relationship. Chillida, who would have turned 100 on January 10, was the youngest of them all (the gallerist affectionately called him mon petit and now they have come to the call of a new reunion to celebrate his birthday party. This once the appointment is at Chillida Leku (the place of Chillida), an outdoor sculpture museum among beech trees, oaks and poplars, which the sculptor must have dreamed of since he began to frequent that center surrounded by pines the Costa Blava, between Antibole and Nice, designed by Josep Lluís Sert in 1964.
Univers Maeght, an exhibition that is above all a tribute to the friend and merchant who projected Chillida's work to the world, gathers in the village and the 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", remembers Isabelle Maeght, granddaughter of the merchants and administrator of the Maeght Foundation. His grandparents decided to create the center following the advice of their painter and sculptor friends, to try to ease the pain caused by the death of their 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 the 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 thought for Miró, until passing the roller the shape of a bird appeared) lives with the painting given to him by the creator of Cubism. "Choose one of my paintings", he said. "But how can I 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 related by his grandson Mikel, who adds that the "hard core" of Chillida was made up of Miró, Palazuelo, Tàpies and Calder. "But is it a boy or a girl?", he mocked Chagall because of his hair, and Giacometti kept a certain distance because of his "more difficult character". From the latter, Homme qui marche II is exhibited in a room with a view of the countryside where, for the first time in many years, Morning cobweb (1969), weighing seven tons, can be seen; Le pépin géant by Jean Arp, and Figure by Barbara Hepworth, next to the iron colossuses of Chillida, who confessed to measuring herself daily "to know if I have grown, not to know my height".
