Lightness and Rightness: Eduardo Chillida and James Johnson Sweeney in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Museum Lecture
Beatriz Cordero, Professor, Saint Louis University, Madrid

This lecture will focus on Chillida’s exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1966, the first show of the Spanish artist outside Europe. In this exhibition James Johnson Sweeney, then director of the MFAH, offered an insightful view of Chillida’s sculpture. He underlined the “lightness and rightness” of Chillida’s works, as well as the artist’s roots in Spanish artistic traditions. Sweeney’s consideration of Chillida as a “tastebreaker” and as “the foremost sculptor of his generation” anticipated the later understanding of the qualities of his works.