Chillida-Leku reroutes to the Riviera

At the beginning of the 1950s, Aimée Maeght opened the doors of his Paris gallery to the young and as-yet unknown Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) when he had only just started his career - the San Sebastián-born sculptor became the youngest artist to exhibit at the prestigious venue. Now more than half a century later the Maeght Foundation, a spectacular venue situated in the town of Saint-Paul de Vence, on the outskirts of Nice, is once again paying tribute to the sculptor with a sumptuous retrospective that opened to the public on Sunday.

The show is a kind of rescue for the Basque artist's work, which has been somewhat obscured by the closure of the Chillida-Leku Museum in San Sebastián last January. A closure that, by the way, the Chillida family and public institutions are still trying to solve.

The Foundation has reserved the bulk of its space to hold 180 of his works, divided between sculptures and engravings. Around 70 of these come from the Chillida-Leku Museum, another 28 are from private collections, and the rest from the Foundation and the Maeght family's own archive.

Although the show has been in development for two years, the fact that it coincides with the closure of the Chillida-Leku gives it special prominence. "This is a way of reaffirming our loyalty to the work of Chillida, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, to the man and to his family," says Isabelle Maeght, granddaughter of Aimée and Marguerite, the Foundation's creators. "But it is also a way of giving a higher profile to an artist who is not well enough known by the public."

From the very entrance to the mansion's gardens, several of Chillida's big sculptures rub shoulders with those of Joan Miró and Alexander Calder, two of the artists with whom he usually coincided when he spent summers at the Foundation. However, the bulk of the show is set around the interior rooms, which kick off with Chillida's arrival in Paris in 1948. He spent hours in the Louvre admiring the Greek sculptures, an inspiration stressed in his first sculptures, such as Torso from 1948.

But Chillida quickly returned to the Basque Country in 1951 where he felt the need to "unlearn" everything. Throughout the show, you are reminded that he never tired of experimenting with different materials such as wood, earth and concrete, even if iron remained his favorite. "Wrought-iron work fascinated him because of the material and the space, but also because of the sound - the noise of the hammer, for example, was aerial music for him," says Ignacio Chillida, son of the artist and curator of the show.

The exhibition, which runs until November, also reserves a place for the artist's public works - there are studio models of his Peine del Viento in San Sebastián on show, for example - as well as some of the tributes he made throughout his career to friends and personalities he admired, such as Cristóbal Balenciaga, Wassily Kandinsky and Juan Gris.