Basque
sculptor Jorge Oteiza died on April 9, 2003 in a hospital in the
Basque city of Donostia. He was 94. Oteiza's work marked the
beginnings of abstract art in his native Navarre. He made a
great impact on the artistic world at home and abroad during the
1940s and 1950s. His influence on contemporary sculpture is due
not solely to his body of work but to his extensive
philosophical writings. Alike as sculptor, teacher, writer, poet
and nonparty politician, Oteiza was the most controversial
artist of his generation in Navarre.
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Basque sculptor
Jorge Oteiza. Photo courtesy of
Diario de Noticias, Navarre. |
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A prime example of his power to startle is his complex
and organic sculptures like landscape. Himself a legendary
survivor, Oteiza remembered that a quick and unwilling getaway
was the law of life for many Basques. He also knew that their
knowledge of the landscape is a survival skill that even brought
Charlemagne's powerful army to defeat. Inspired by his
metaphysical understanding of cosmic time and space and the
geometric structure and essence of the natural landscape, Oteiza
executed a series of stone sculptures--his choice of stone was
surely inspired by its familiar natural substance and universal
presence, and its continuity with the eternal past. Taking the
cube as point of departure, these particular sculptures are a
combination of hollowed curves and flat planes in a modified
prismatic structure. The staggering arrangement of lit and
shaded surfaces, echoing the unpredictable contours of the
natural landscape, as well as its reassuring permanence, has
overtones of which no sensitive observer could be unaware.
Was Oteiza shaman or charlatan, sage or pest, saint or
silly? Everyone had an opinion, and everyone gave it. But in the
context of the times, Jorge Oteiza was the inevitable and the
indispensable man, the man who stirred the cultural scene with a
very long spoon and brought it to the boil. And while it would
be too much to say, with W.H. Auden, that when he died on April
9 "the little children cried in the streets", it was undoubtedly
the end of a phenomenon that would never recur in Navarre. Never
again was an artist of his stature likely to go from place to
place, like a wandering friar, and talk to small groups of
people in hopes of saving the world by individual regeneration.
Born in the town of Orio, Gipuzkoa, western Navarre, in
1908, Oteiza had in boyhood an exceptionally vivid imaginative
life in which mythology, theatre and biochemistry all played a
part. He also became conscious of the identification of
prehistoric cultures with their environment, and of the Basque
neolithic cromlech as an archetypal construction that isolates
the outer and subordinate to focus on the inner and essential.
He once characterized the cromlech as the highest point of
creativity reached by prehistoric Basques after a long and hard
learning process that began at Altamira, Lascaux, Ekain and
Trois Frčres--a symbol of human experience that shows the
spiritual identification of a prehistoric culture with the
universe based on an understanding of natural and cosmic laws.
It should be emphasized that Oteiza studied the religious
beliefs, mythologies and artifacts of prehistoric societies in
South America and in his native Navarre not in order to solve
problems of form and content for sculpture, but in order to
understand man's metaphysical relationship to the universe.
Understanding the structure and meaning of the spiritual
(religious or magical) experience was primary. Giving concrete
form to it was secondary.
In 1920 the Oteiza family moved to Lekarotz in residual
Navarre. In 1927 they moved to Madrid where Oteiza studied
architecture and medicine. A year later his father migrated to
Argentina. Oteiza, meanwhile, financed his studies by working as
a waiter, keeping the books for the owner of a grocery store and
working as a linotype operator. In 1929 he abandoned his studies
in medicine and enrolled at the Madrid School of Arts and
Crafts. Two years later Oteiza was awarded first prize in The
Ninth Competition for New Artists from Gipuzkoa with his
sculpture Adam and Eve.
Oteiza's earliest sculptures from the 1930's show
single, sometimes double figures, crudely carved or modeled in
diverse materials. These images seem, like primitive idols,
inhabited by a spiritual energy. Their monolithic silhouettes
may be identified with forms in the natural landscape, such as
the trunk of a tree or an eroded stone. In the 1940s, Oteiza
began to separate the limbs from the body in his figurative
subjects and to create hollowed spaces. Thereafter, the hollow
stayed with him and turned up in a variety of unexpected
contexts.
He had exceptional charisma as a teacher -- so much so
that when he left Peru's Universidad de Trujillo in 1947 (Oteiza
stayed in South America from 1935 to 1948), his students carried
him in farewell across the campus. The expansive personality of
Oteiza sets the tone for much of the most important art that was
produced in Spain in the 1960s. His students include Gerardo
Rueda (co-founder of the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca,
Spain), Eusebio Sempere and Pablo Palazuelo of the Equipo 57
group. They saw art as a form of behavior within society and
advocated the integration of the arts, an end to the commercial
exploitation of the phenomenon of painting and the plastic arts,
and pictorial teamwork.
As a sculptor, Oteiza had a gift for the
unforgettable image that made him a favorite with the commission
of a religious statuary for the Basilica of Arantzazu in
Gipuzkoa in 1950, later banned in 1954 and restarted in 1968.
The large body of figurative work, which Oteiza projected in
1953 and executed in 1968-69 for the Basilica of Arantzazu, is
consistent with his general aesthetic philosophy. "Religious
statuary, by definition, has a timeless, spiritual content and,
in order to be legible, an unchanging or timeless iconography.
Oteiza respected the traditional iconographic conventions of
this subject motifs: an Ascension of the Virgin, a Pietá, and a
frieze of apostles. However, he depersonalized their features
and stylized their forms, translating them into more anonymous
figures or carriers of spiritual content."1
The 14 apostles, including Judas and Matthew, "are
presented with their bellies missing, with great hollows opened
up in them like those produced naturally by ice as it melts,
revealed as beings opening themselves up to others, stripped of
their own selves and, with their powerful monolithic forms,
seeming to be guardians of the temple. Above this frieze,
crowning the crest of the facade, is the dramatic Pietý, with
the Son of God dead at her feet."2
These images were like nothing that anyone had seen
before, and there was heated discussion -- especially among
artists of an envious and ungifted sort -- as to whether they
could be called sculpture at all. But they turned out to last
very well, both as examples of covert autobiography and as
encapsulations of the landscape and the mythology of an ancient
people.
In post civil war Spain, Jorge Oteiza had a unique
situation. No one was ever less on the make than he, and in the
art world of the 1950's he broke the mold of the "career in
art." To the fast-money men who, then as now, were everywhere in
the art world, it was an exasperation that he spent so much of
his time in unmarketable activities, and was ready to spend
unlimited amounts of time in open-ended discussions which,
though searching in content, were invariably pacific in tone.
In fact, Oteiza attracted extremes of admiration and
contempt, with not much in between in the way of objective
assessment. But at all times -- and not less during the illness
that led to his death -- he went his own way, said his own
things, and acted upon the belief in what he called the ethical
function of sculpture.
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Oteiza Museum and
Foundation in Altzuza, Navarre. Photo courtesy of Gara. |
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The essence of his ethical sense was that sculpture
ought to shape the artist to work for her/his society. An
artist without a community to love and serve, an orphan of
community, will always be an incomplete artist, a mutilated and
frustrated artist 3, Oteiza once said.
In 1964 he created, with the financial help of Funcor
Cooperativa, the first public Ikastola (school in which
instruction is carried out in the Basque language) and the
Elorrio theatre. A staunch critic of the Basque nationalist
government for its anemic cultural policy in three Spanish
Basque provinces, Oteiza turned down a proposal to donate his
work to the government of Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. But he
donated his entire estate to "the people of Navarre." The
government of Navarre created the Oteiza Museum and Foundation
in the sculptor's farmhouse in Altzuza "to preserve his work and
extend his legacy."
Oteiza's commitment to art as a way to promote political
conscience, even in times of dictator Franco, made him a
controversial figure. It was also a dream with him that one day
the voice of the unaligned voter would be heard and could have
some effect. This was in essence a formulation of his activity
as a vagabond magus for whom art and political discourse were
one.
His work in sculpture stayed close to his innermost
concerns. Sometimes his own life motivated it, and sometimes the
life of the society in which he had been raised. On the other
hand, Oteiza was not interested in modern technology or modern
utopias but in the unchanging human relationship to the natural
landscape.
His abstract works in stone, iron and steel, like his
earlier figurative work, are guided by the same objective: to
create anonymous forms which express a fusion or identification
between enclosed volumes and open space. Oteiza's
experimentation with concrete form was to express the unity
between the individual spirit and the broader cosmic environment
such as he had observed it in pre-historical sites and
statuettes, but also in the work of Malevitch and Mondrian. His
ultimate goal was to capture the essence of the empty/void
space, defined as spiritual and physical energy.
His most prevalent and best known theme is that of the
Disoccupation of the cube, a series of sculptures that
are a synthesis of all his earlier experiments. The Empty
Boxes and Metaphysical Boxes are the most
representative of this theme. The simple four-sided boxes
reflect no ambition on the part of the artist to create
"original" or "expressive" forms. Yet, despite the attempt to
express universal laws, these works, in their multiple
variations, are neither neutral, anonymous nor impersonal."
"Although Oteiza's work developed somewhat independently
from the mainstreams of modern art, one might venture to say
that, almost despite of the artist, he arrived at a sculptural
solution which is a synthesis of contemporary preoccupation and
a paradigm of modern sculpture."4
Oteiza created the experimental political
theatre in Santiago de Chile, and taught ceramics at several
schools in South America. He took part in numerous exhibitions
and symposiums, and he was also commissioned for several
architectural projects. He defined his art and wrote Proposito
Experimental between 1956 and 1957 when he reached his greatest
activity. He was awarded the Diploma of Honor at the IX Trienale
of Milano in 1951 and the International Prize for Sculpture at
the IV Biennial of Sao Paulo in Brazil in 1957. In 1959 he gave
up his activity as an sculptor, publishing "El final del arte
contemporaneo: Razones por las que abandono la escultura" (The
end of contemporary art, reasons for abandoning sculpture), in
1960. He developed his theories in the following years. He gave
lectures and carried out several projects and even made some
documentary films. He founded artistic centers and groups and
published manifestos, such as Quosque Tandem...! (1963), in
which Oteiza not only questioned Art but also Anthropology and
Linguistics as a consequence of his detailed studies in
Navarre.
Nevertheless, Oteiza took part in
exhibitions in Europe since 1960 and in 1972 he resumed some of
his incomplete works based on his "Laboratorio de Tizas" (Chalk
laboratory). He participated in the Venice Biennial in 1976 and
in many other exhibitions in European museums. Oteiza, who was
once described by American architect Frank Gehry as the Picasso
of modern sculpture, turned down an offer to mount a solo
exhibition at the Guggenheim-Bilbao.
He also contributed significantly to
monumental public art in public buildings, squares and churches
throughout Navarre and Spain.
Oteiza was big, generous and tireless. He served society
as a cross between a seer, a safety valve, an inventor of
spirited boxes and an untamed Pyrenean red skin. In
Navarre, which had the need for all these things, he was an
irreplaceable human being, and was regarded as such even by
those who found him most exasperating. He will be missed
immensely.
Navarre, April 2003
Mila Parot Zubimendi is a law student
and freelance writer.
Sources: 1, 4: Margit Rowell, De Varia
Commensuración. 2. Luis Burgos, Arte del siglo XX. 3.
Eusko-Ikaskuntza, Ikusgaiak 2, 1997.
