Eduardo Chillida

Baronne Alix de Rothschild, Paris
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 24 June 1993, Lot 35
Acquired directly from the above

Zurich, Kunsthaus, Eduardo Chillida, 1969, no. 27, pl. 4, illustrated
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art, Chillida, 1979-80, no. 75, illustrated

Claude Esteban, Chillida, Paris 1971, pp. 61 and 81, no. 19, illustrated in colour
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, La Sculpture, L'Aventure de la Sculpture Moderne-XIXe et XXe Siècles, Paris 1986, p. 210, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly brighter. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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The earliest work from the eponymous series remaining in private hands, Peine del Viento II (Wind Comb II) from 1959 is a work of major historic importance to the revered sculptor's canon. Executed almost twenty years before Peine del Viento XV of 1977 (fig. 3), the famed monumental sculpture that marks the threshold between land and sea at the Basque artist's native San Sebastian, the present work stands at the head of a remarkable journey of creative innovation that occupied Chillida until 1999. Indeed, in the catalogue for the major Pittsburgh exhibition of 1979-80 the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz singles out this sculpture as a highlight of the cycle: "Peine del Viento: a surprising metaphor. Generally we see the wind as an invisible hand that combs the sea and the woods as well as the hair of men and women...Peine del Viento II, one of his most powerful scuptures, is a sort of terrible hand opening its fingers to let the wind of the open seas pass through them" (Octavio Paz in: Exhibition Catalogue, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art, Chillida, 1979-80, p. 13). The epic eponymous series that ensued in the wake of this work has been widely lauded by critics and public alike: while Peine del Viento I of 1952 resides in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Peine del Viento VI of 1968 was installed outside the UNESCO building in Paris in 1970; and Peine del Viento XIV of 1976 is housed in the Sprengel Museum, Hanover. The six long iron fingers of the present work strike a complex interplay between solid and void that would of course become fundamental to and defining of Chillida's subsequent art. Their poetic dance in space, continually adjusting as our perspective evolves around them, evokes the whistling air of the negative void, and implicitly references the northern coast of Spain and San Sebastian, where the wind is rarely quiet.

Having moved with his family in 1957 to Villa Paz in Hernani, close to San Sebastian, where he established his studio and a forge in the caretakers' house, the execution of Peine del Viento II was at the heart of a period of sensational success for the artist, then in his early thirties. In 1958 Chillida had been awarded the Gran Premio Internazionale for sculpture at the 29^th Venice Biennale; the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh had purchased his sculpture Aizian (In the Wind); and his work had been showcased in major exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Graham Foundation in Chicago; while in the year of this work he was included in European Art Today at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Furthermore, with the creation of his first sculptures in wood and his first etchings, 1959 marked the inception of innovative approaches to new materials that characterised much of his later output.

The public sculpture of 1977 that this work prefigured held profound importance for the artist. Asked in 1999 to reflect on fifty years working in sculpture, the artist declared: "I'm proud of the Peine del viento in San Sebastian. It's one of my first pieces open to nature. Additionally, my first vision as a sculptor is that place, and what the place produced is the vision that I came from it, as a child and from my home" (the artist in conversation with Kosme de Barañano, cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Bilbao, Guggenheim, Homage to Chillida, 2006, p. 112). At the confluence of the Bay of Biscay and the foot of Mount Igledo, three corten steel sculptures, each occupying about two cubic metres, are anchored onto limestone rocks: two horizontally facing each other from opposing cliffs and the third standing vertically on a reef out to sea. The result is one of the most recognisable sculptural phenomena of the later Twentieth Century, the crescendo of a lifetime's inspiration where sculpture does not merely inhabit a space but rather creates a space of its own. Peine del Viento II was the conceptual and physical genesis of this spectacular achievement, and stands today as the vestige of Chillida's unprecedented artistic vision.

Kosme de Barañano has observed that Chillida's realm of sculpting "is the world of the forge, the active world of the blacksmith, not that of bronze and casting" (Exhibition Catalogue, Valencia, IVAM  Centre, Eduardo Chillida: Elogio del Hierro, 1998, p. 180), and the artist himself admitted "For me, the most important material has been iron. It's hard, but obedient. To be obedient, it has to be hot." (the artist in conversation with Kosme de Barañano, Op Cit). The charred and oxidised mottled surfaces of the lyrical metallic form in the present work retell the story of its creation, and are immediately evoked by Pierre Volboudt's narrative in the first monograph devoted to the artist: "the tortured [metal] becomes an adversary; the flame leaves it at its mercy. Measuring the strength of the former, forseeing and following every reaction of the latter, spying on its changing colour, selecting the precise point of attack, figuring out the violence of the blow that is to be struck, above all eliminating chance, seizing the moment when the material which has been delivered up to the ordeal by fire gives in, takes on new life and lives out the ephemeral cycle of its total metamorphosis"  (Pierre Volboudt, Eduardo Chillida, Paris 1967, cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Valencia, Op Cit, p. 179).