“My mother was essential in Eduardo Chillida's life, and he knew it”

She was the shadow of Eduardo Chillida. Pilar Belzunce, the wife of the brilliant sculptor, met the artist when she was fifteen years old. At that time, this teenager did not want strong commitments; she aspired to have fun and dance. But over time, she became his factotum, his right hand, the person who encouraged him and supported him without hesitation. She was the one who took care of the accounts, the money, safeguarding his work, and taking care of practical details.

"At first, no one wanted to deal with a woman on many matters such as exhibitions, material and economic aspects, and logistics. But soon they realized that if they wanted something from Chillida, they had no choice but to talk to her," says Susana Chillida, daughter of the couple and author of the book 'A Life for Art. Eduardo Chillida and Pilar Belzunce, My Parents' (Galaxia Gutenberg), which has just hit bookstores after an arduous documentation effort.

Susana Chillida, a psychologist, photographer, and filmmaker, is not addressing her parents' lives for the first time. She first did so as the author of several documentary films and now delves into her memories in writing about her parents' lives. For this purpose, she has dusted off old papers and photos to recount with depth and feeling the vicissitudes of that relationship, which she conceives as a great love story. "It all started with a pact when they were both very young. My father decided to leave his architecture studies and pursue his life as a sculptor. 'If you follow me...'. Two years later, they got married and embarked on an intellectual and artistic adventure that made them inseparable. Chillida, who never wanted to know anything about money and never carried a penny in his pocket, delegated the management of his affairs to Pilar Belzunce. He always wanted art and money to remain confined in separate compartments."

This role of always being by the genius's side never meant disgrace for Pilar Belzunce. "She never played a vicarious role. She was fundamental. My father was very innocent and conventional in many things." Proof of this leading role is that together they built Chillida-Leku, the farmhouse-museum where the sculptor wanted his works to be housed. Belzunce also understood that anything drawn by her husband should be preserved; thus she rescued many of his works that would otherwise be unknown today.

According to their daughter, Chillida never understood the acrimony with which his project to hollow out Mount Tindaya in Fuerteventura was received—a project in which he intended to install a kind of secular cathedral inside in the shape of a 50-meter-high by 50-meter-wide cube. The initiative clashed with bureaucratic indifference and opposition from environmental movements. "Everything was misunderstood here. He was accused of terrible things like wanting to kill the mountain. Such things can deeply hurt innocent and sensitive people, and it did hurt my father."

In Paris in the 1950s, he became interested in primitive art and viewed avant-garde art with suspicion. At the same time, he always maintained a lively intellectual curiosity that led him to engage with thinkers like Heidegger or Cioran; poets like Clara Janés or Jorge Guillén; creators like Calder, Chagall, Braque, Giacometti or Wifredo Lam; patrons like Aimé Maeght; although it was with Joan Miró that he maintained an intimate friendship that went beyond art.

He had a fierce confrontation with Jorge Oteiza that only faded when Oteiza's wife Itziar Carreño died—an occasion Pilar Belzunce used to send a letter to Oteiza trying to seal a reconciliation. "She told him that he was the only person Chillida had truly hated and that he didn't want to die with that burden."

For Susana Chillida, if her father chose materials like concrete and iron it was because he never liked easy things. "When people realized he was very good at what he did, they thought maybe it wasn't art. That's why he started sculpting with his left hand so that emotion would come first."