Oteiza against Chillida: the open wound left by the rivalry between the two great Basque artists

The chronicles of the time say that when

front of the ETB cameras, the former demanded that a filmmaker take an overhead shot of both.

When the technician asked him why, Oteiza did not hesitate to answer that this would show that Chillida had less hair than he did.

The anecdote summarizes the

. An enmity of such harshness and disproportion that until the last moment, when both artists were older and with little strength to bury the hatchet, that almost intimate distance between the two totemic figures of Basque culture was maintained.

The public shock that irretrievably alienated them keeps the wound open, 20 years after both died in San Sebastián months apart: Chillida, aged 78 in August 2002, and Oteiza, aged 94 in April 2003. That wound continues somehow festering, as evidenced by the fact that

.

When the idea of ​​the

reached the ears of those responsible for the Jorge Oteiza Foundation-Museum and Chillida Leku, the answer was no. "They did not see being next to each other because the wounds were still open. The technicians of the two foundations get along very well, but it is more in the family environment where the situation still hurt, and where they will have had to swallow several times. ", explains Javier González de Durana, the curator of the exhibition hosted by the Bancaja Foundation at its headquarters in Valencia until next March.

A "milestone in the history of art" to which both institutions finally contributed, after months of spinning the idea and with the exhibition directly on the air during all that time. Today, Oteiza and Chillida present their

. Because yes, long before signing one of the great rivalry stories in the art world -together with that of Picasso and Matisse, that of Tiziano and Tintoretto ...-, the two sculptors not only cooperated, but were friends and became friends. supported. If someone had forgotten, it is what this

aims to rescue

.

An example: in July 1962, Chillida and Oteiza signed "on behalf of Spanish artists" a letter addressed to the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, requesting the release of "a close friend" such as the Bilbao painter Agustín Ibarrola: "We two We allow ourselves to subscribe this request and make it precisely to the vuecencia of whom we received in different occasions a cordial congratulations for our behavior representing Spanish art abroad ... ".

Of that complicity there was nothing left when

. Those who knew them point out that in the background of their rivalry the struggle to see who held the leadership of the artists and the Basque school and who won the greatest international recognition emerged. Their global importance was already evident in the 1950s when both won the most prestigious awards in Europe and America.

If Oteiza won the Diploma of Honor in the IX Triennial of Milan in 1951, Chillida achieved it in the next call, that of 1954. If Oteiza was the Prize for the Best International Sculptor in the IV Biennial of Sao Paulo in 1957, one year then Chillida won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the XXIX Venice Biennale. Was it a battle of egos that came next?

The accusations of all kinds that Oteiza made against Chillida were collected in the book

, by Miguel Pelay Orozco: "Chillida has wanted to be alone. He has not only been unable to name us the artists of his country, to talk about our cultural movement, but has missed opportunities in which international attention would have turned to our country ". Oteiza's anger rarely found a response in his particular

, except for the one who advised him to follow "the biblical advice that says you will honor your father and mother."

"What I think happened is that the social and political polarization [of the Basque Country] instrumentalized both for ideological and not aesthetic confrontational interests," González de Durana affirms today.

. Or are you with the nationalist world ... "Oteiza was very politically involved, and it was better not to talk about that issue," the commissioner said, for whom the very idea of ​​plagiarism is absurd.

"Ideas in the artistic world flow and enrich the debate," he insists. In the case of both artists, "formally they distance themselves a lot in the execution of the work, although both drink from the light, the spirituality, the hollow and the completed". According to this expert, Oteiza is "more rational and logical", as he seeks to demonstrate a certain theory with his sculpture, while Chillida is in some way "more romantic", more given to playing with nature.

But if both had a predilection for the study of the human body, disfiguring its naturalistic representation, from the 1950s on, their strong personalities led them down different paths:

to display his own abstract nature. , while

.

The paradox is that surely at this point they do not understand each other without the other. There is a photo, taken in 1965, in which the two of them appear talking in a gallery in San Sebastián. Chillida had just received an award and never before had a major exhibition been dedicated to her in her city. Commissioned by the booksellers (and sisters) Ramos, Oteiza delivers a speech in which he assures that San Sebastián owes Chillida a tribute, a space for a great public monument, and claims a kind of

cultural

of the Basque artists themselves.

Those words of Oteiza were the germ of

, whose founders included Oteiza and Chillida himself to lay the foundations of an alternative model of cultural organization.

So that 1965 conversation between the two of them not only changed Basque cultural history, but also laid the seed for the later installation of the famous

at the end of Ondarreta beach.

La Concha Bay was definitely open to Chillida's sculpture.

Today, on the other side, on Paseo Nuevo, is the

of Oteiza.

As if their destiny were to be faced for life, but together.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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