“I can no longer believe in art as a permanent activity,” proclaimed the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza, in his 1961 essay “The Tree of Gernika Is Born.”1 Instead, he argued, art must be the “means whereby the artist commits himself in an act of existential urgency.”2 The sculptor had recently decided to swear off his medium altogether, in favor of a new mode of artmaking he considered more crucial. Oteiza’s timing was curious, as his star had recently been on the rise. Born in 1908 in Orio, a small fishing village on the north Iberian Coast, Oteiza abandoned medical school at the age of twenty to commit his life to art. A few decades later, he won a bevy of prestigious prizes and commissions in his homeland and, in 1957, was chosen to represent Spain at the fourth Bienal de São Paolo. He submitted a series of twenty-nine steel, iron, and stone abstractions, and, despite being a relative newcomer, took home the grand prize in sculpture. This was no small feat at a biennial that also featured Jackson Pollock, Seymour Lipton, Willem de Kooning, Lygia Clark, Marc Chagall, and members of the Bauhaus, to name only a few. Oteiza’s work was praised for its radical attention to negative space and for its fresh spins on Constructivist and De Stijl geometry. At almost fifty, he was finally gaining recognition on the global stage. Then, the artist announced he was done making work for good. What had become more (existentially) urgent to Oteiza?
It was from this moment in Oteiza’s career that the exhibition “A Place to Think: Experimental Art Schools and Educational Practices in the Basque Country, 1957–1979” embarked. Running from early to mid-2022, the exhibition was the first in a series of three ambitious shows devoted to the history of Basque arts education hosted successively at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, a small yet exceptional contemporary art museum in the Basque Country’s capital, Vitoria-Gasteiz. “A Place to Think” was expertly researched and curated by Mikel Onandia, Rocío Robles Tardio, and Sergio Rubira; the two subsequent exhibitions were assembled just as deftly by Onandia, Rubira, and Leire Vergara.3 This trio of shows spanned one of the most turbulent and protean periods in the modern Basque Country, from the late 1950s to the early 2000s, outlining the essential role that art and its instruction played within the Basque people’s fight to preserve their sovereignty and cultural identity. Art did not merely reflect political ideas; it enacted them. The creation of art schools, workshops, and discussion groups was one and the same as political praxis. This was, largely, Oteiza’s revelation.
“A Place to Think” was organized in collaboration with, and shown concurrently at, the Jorge Oteiza Museum on the outskirts of Pamplona. The show positioned Oteiza as the primary engine behind the rapid development of various unofficial schools, workshops, and other projects in the Basque Country during a time when no formal art institutions existed in the region. This period overlapped with the last two decades of Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime, which ruled Spain after the Nationalists’ 1939 victory in the civil war and stripped the Basque country of its autonomy, suppressing its language and culture and executing dissidents.
The second exhibition, “edonor denok inor ez: Institutionalisation Processes of Art Education in the Basque Country, 1978–1991,” which debuted in 2024, picked up at the end of Franco’s reign and the Basque Country’s transition to a self-governing “autonomous community” of Spain. The exhibition tracked the first years of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, on which Oteiza’s ideas had certainly left their mark, as well as the creation of several other cultural institutions, such as the Bilbao Municipal Savings Bank Cultural Hall and the San Sebastián Video Festival. The third and final exhibition in the series, “Artelekun zehar, 1987–2002: An Exhibition about Arteleku Through the Archive,” closed this month; it documented the earliest years of Arteleku, an experimental art school that drew artists, thinkers, and curators from around the globe to its facilities in San Sebastián.
Although the Basque Country has been designated an “autonomous community” of Spain since 1978, its history of self-governance goes back several millennia. Stretching from the center of Spain’s northern coast over to the western edge of the Pyrenees, its territory has been home to the Basque people, a genetically distinct ethnolinguistic group, since prehistory. Research suggests that the Basques descended from Neolithic farmers who remained isolated from other groups for generations upon generations, surrounded on all sides by forbidding mountains and coastline. The Basque language, or euskara, has no relation to other known languages; linguists suspect it evolved from ancient dialects in the third century BCE. It is older than Latin, Old English, and Proto-Germanic by a long shot. Although the Romans conquered and controlled the Iberian Peninsula for centuries, the Basques maintained their language and many of their own laws during the Empire’s rule.
The “Tree of Guernica,” alluded to by Oteiza in his essay, is the most sacred symbol of the Basque Country and a monument to its enduring spirit of self-determination. The original tree was planted in Guernica in the fourteenth century and served as the meeting place for one of Europe’s only, and earliest, democratic systems during the Middle Ages. At the time, representatives from the region’s small cities and towns would routinely gather in the region’s many oak groves to discuss municipal matters. Ultimately, they settled on one tree as their regular meeting site. Drawing upon local oral traditions and rules that had been passed down for generations, these delegates developed a group of laws—or fueros—designed to uphold ancient traditions, establish civil rights, and assert political sovereignty. All future lords and leaders were required to pledge adherence to the fueros. King Ferdinand of Castile visited the tree in 1476, just twelve years before launching his ruthless Inquisition, and made an oath to honor the Basque codes and privileges. Today, the president of the Basque Government, or Lehendakari, takes his or her oath of office under the tree.
The original, “father” Tree of Guernica was replaced by its descendent in the seventeenth century; the descendent of that tree, planted in 1860, survived the brutal aerial bombing of Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The blitz was executed by the fledgling Nazi Luftwaffe, eager to test out their aerial bombardment techniques and to lend a hand to Franco, then the generalissimo of the right-wing Nationalist faction. Hundreds of civilians died, and the historic town was almost completely razed. Earlier that year, the Spanish Republic, whose Soviet-backed Republican forces of communists, anarchists, and separatists were struggling to stave off Franco’s Nationalists, had commissioned Pablo Picasso to represent Spain at a large art exposition in Paris. When Picasso received word of Guernica’s devastation, he started on the twenty-five-foot-wide tableau that became widely known as his magnum opus. Guernica (1937) immortalized the small Basque town and its devastation, evoking the merciless horrors of modern war in a way that only art can.
Several decades later, the Basque Country firmly in Franco’s unforgiving grip, Oteiza became fixated on art’s liberatory potential. Sculpture had reached its conceptual terminus, he believed; its ultimate goal was to signal a sense of supreme emptiness to its viewer. “It is no longer possible to add sculpture, as expression, to man or to the city,” he declared, in a 1960 essay he titled “The End of Contemporary Art.”4 Man-made matter was bogged down by its clunky, irreparably man-made-ness; it had no power to alleviate the “existential uneasiness of contemporary man.”5 Overseas, postwar nihilism was prodding artists towards abstract expressionism—a similar collapse of faith in representational meaning.
But Oteiza’s instinct was a bit more absolute. As the curators of “A Place to Think” describe, Oteiza began to “consider artistic activity from another perspective, giving the public a privileged position.” The artist’s duty is to the people, he concluded; his or her product is relational, not material. Space, in civilization, is inherently social. In 1963, Oteiza published the book Quosque Tandem—“and finally” in Latin—a manifesto of sorts that proved hugely influential on his contemporaries and of Basque artistic traditions to come. Oteiza identified, in his fellow Basques, “a unique style that manifests itself in our popular tradition, not so much to let us inhabit our individual solitude as to let us to live together politically, to play, to feel, or to think.”6 Fostering places for the Basque people to gather, think, and learn—not unlike the Basques’ cherished tree—became Oteiza’s primary ambition. “I insist on translating my activity on the problems of the projection of art into education,” he avowed.7
Though several small arts associations and informal academies existed, albeit tenuously, in the Basque Country at the time, there were no distinctly Basque institutions or art schools in the entire region. “A Place to Think” and its three-hundred-plus-page catalogue assembled a remarkably thorough chronicle of the art academies, collectives, and other projects that sprang up, like daisies, after Oteiza planted the first seeds. Scores of photographs, documents, artworks, diagrams, texts, and other artifacts—many of which had never been displayed or published before—and a dozen-plus essays provide an unabridged account of arts education at its most organic. Schools and workshops and meetings were organized by and for the people; they gathered, taught, performed, and put up exhibitions in dining clubs, town halls, theaters, and furniture galleries. The objective was not to confer degrees, advance careers, or generate profits, but to “enable the sociopolitical, cultural, and intellectual growth of people in the Basque Country,” as the curators describe.8
These organizations were determined to modernize artistic traditions and discourse, get up to speed with Europe’s burgeoning avant-gardes, and reject the rigid, traditionalist aesthetic policies of the Franco regime. “A Place to Think” recounts the formation of these fledgling schools and their not-infrequent demises. Academia Errante, or “the Wandering Academy,” founded in 1955, held “informal meetings of intellectuals”—Oteiza included—at provisional locations to discuss Basque culture; it folded in 1963 after its founder received threats from Franco’s Tribunal of Public Order.9 In San Sebastián, the Artistic Association of Gipuzcoa flouted the government’s conservative arts programming and prizes, choosing instead to hold its own independent exhibitions, organize art-seeing trips to Paris, and host events about Pop art, contemporary cinema, and poetry. In 1964, the City Council pulled the Association’s funding and diverted the money to a dining club. Several of the Association’s members staged a protest at a city-sponsored lecture on Impressionism, interrupting the lecture by eating a steak in front of the audience. (As curator Mikel Onandia writes, this gesture is “considered to be the first Basque art happening.”)10
Two years later, Oteiza and seven of his contemporaries—Amable Arias, Rafael Ruiz Balerdi, Néstor Basterretxea, Eduardo Chillida, Remigio Mendiburu, José Antonio Sistiaga, and José Luis Zumeta—formed the Gaur group, an artist collective dedicated to cooperative work and de rigueur modernist abstraction. Though the collective only lasted a year, its 1966 exhibition at the Barandiarán Gallery in San Sebastián and the artists’ accompanying manifesto spawned what became known as the Basque School movement.
Oteiza and his peers had grand visions for a Basque “total school” that would amalgamate a range of creative disciplines, including architecture, industrial design, cinema, and theater. All fields of study would maintain an emphasis on collaboration, free expression, and an individual’s relationship to city and society, with the express goal of ushering in social transformation through the arts. Reforming children’s education also became a matter of great importance. In 1963, Esther Ferrer and José Antonio Sistiaga, former members of the Artistic Association of Guipuzcoa, founded the Thursday Academy and Free Expression Workshop, or Taller de Expresión (TEL) for children ages four to fourteen. Inspired by Arno Stern’s Académie du Jeudi in Paris, Ferrer and Sistiaga’s weekly workshop encouraged its participants to paint freely, without strict guidance or instruction.
A year later, Oteiza planned an experimental ikastola—a Basque-language school—based on similar principles in the town of Elorrio, designing an outdoor children’s playground, sculpture museum, and theater. This was one among many of Oteiza’s continuously evolving and expanding ideas for new schools and institutions, which included a network of thirty training centers across the Basque Country, a “Basque Institute for Artistic Research,” regional “culture halls,” an anthropology museum, and a “New People’s University of Basque Artists.” Although many of these initiatives did get off the ground, few of them sustained for more than several years. Oteiza nonetheless aspired towards more permanent academies, dreaming up dozens of plans for open-air educational compounds with playgrounds, ceramic studios, foundries, libraries, and teachers’ residences. But big ideas are rarely all that one needs. In her essay on Oteiza’s many architectural plans and ambitions, Fátima Sarasola Rubio discloses that “none of [his] projects ever came to fruition.”11
This is not to suggest that Oteiza, the Basque School movement, and the dozens of informal schools and groups galvanized by these ideas did not leave a permanent imprint on the Basque Country and its future arts institutions. The second exhibition in Artium Museoa’s series, “edonor denok inor ez: Institutionalisation Processes of Art Education in the Basque Country, 1978–1991,” surveyed a new era for the region, its schooling, and its artists, in which each gained authority and governmental recognition. But, as its curators stressed, officialization often comes with constraints. The grassroots network of artists and educators that had been practicing for over two decades now had to fight to preserve their new, and distinctly Basque, ideas and pedagogical methods.
“edonor denok inor ez”—which means “anyone everyone nobody” in Basque—begins with the formation of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Bilbao in 1978. This was a fragile moment in the Basque Country, which had been rife with political violence for years. The far-left separatist group Euksadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) was warring with the Francoist police and military, as well as the far-right, pro-Franco factions Triple A and Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey. Kidnappings, shootings, and bombings were common, and over eight hundred people were killed. When Franco died in 1975, his chosen successor, King Juan Carlos I, unexpectedly dismantled his government and converted Spain into a parliamentary democracy. Four years later, the Basque Statute of Autonomy was ratified in Guernica, and the Basque Country became a “self-governing community,” gaining significant political and fiscal autonomy from Spain. This did not satisfy ETA’s aims for full Basque independence and a Marxist-Leninist class revolution, and their violence intensified.
Arts education in the Basque Country was also making halting progress towards its own self-rule. In 1969, the Spanish Council of Ministers approved the creation of the Bilbao School of Fine Arts. It was seen as a significant victory for the industrial port city and for the Basque Country at large, particularly during the Franco regime; for the first time since the post–Civil War period, Basque artists could receive formal training and accreditation. But the curriculum was far from the avant-garde experimentation occurring outside the academy’s walls. The School of Fine Arts implemented Franco’s educational and aesthetic program, which taught drawing, painting, and sculpture using old-fashioned, conservative methods. Students were required to draw reproductions of sculptures from Classical Antiquity and study “Liturgy and Christian Culture.” Technical skill was valued over theoretical inquiry; if students completed the program, they could become drawing teachers. Predictably, students and several members of the faculty rebelled, staging their own independent exhibitions and workshops.
After nearly a decade of disputes, the Bilbao School of Fine Arts became a “Faculty” that was incorporated into the University of Bilbao. Now, students could receive degrees on par with other university programs, and they held assemblies—often inviting artists from the Basque School movement—to determine how to shape their courses of study. However, many of the established Basque artists from whom they wanted to learn lacked the degrees needed to teach at this new Faculty. It was none other than Oteiza who intervened, visiting the school in late 1978 to “demand a change of direction … with self-management by the students [and] also to create a faculty that was welcoming and incorporated into Basque cultural life.”12
Several years later, the Basque artist Pedro Manterola became dean of the Faculty and several other local artists were hired to teach. The Basque sculptor Ángel Bados joined the faculty in 1983, and his approach to artmaking would become, as the exhibition brochure noted, “one of the main points of reference for students in the decades that followed.”13 Many of the other artists who were hired—some of whom had studied at the Bilbao School of Fine Arts— were “key players of a new era in Basque art,” distinguished by an interest in “abstract sculpture with post-minimalist postulates that were linked to the thinking of Oteiza.”14
These affinities were clear to see in the selection of sculptures and paintings on view in “edonor denok inor ez,” made by teachers and students alike. While their bold colors and sharp geometry might seem intensely familiar to any viewer with a passing knowledge of modernist abstraction, the works nevertheless felt electrifying. Surrounded by scores of newspaper clippings, protest posters, and wall texts that detailed the Basque students’ struggles for a modern arts education, one could see the sharp, resolute defiance embedded in their aesthetic choices. There was nothing classical about their industrial yellow hues and angular, metal forms. The radicality of these choices—of postwar modernism itself—was unmistakable. Oteiza’s own theories about art’s death drive towards “emptiness” had been absorbed into every opaque surface. It is to the curators’ credit that these revelations could unfurl, legibly, from the murky morass of a lesser-known history.
“edonor denok inor ez” also featured several other institutions that were founded not long after the Faculty of Fine Arts. These organizations looked past the plastic arts and focused on the frontiers of new media and technology. In addition to hosting the first solo exhibitions of Fine Arts graduates, the Bilbao Municipal Savings Bank Cultural Hall staged ambitious group exhibitions of work made with new technologies. The San Sebastián Video Festival, which took place from 1982 to 1984, was largely responsible for proliferating new video art and experimental film in the region and became, as Artforum testified, “one of the most important events on the video circuit.”15 The Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council’s Centre of Image and New Technologies, which opened in 1988, trained participants in audiovisual technology, computer graphics design, and media theory.
New cultural institutions such as these were able to thrive in part due to larger shifts in the Basque—and world—economy. For most of the twentieth century, the Basque Country had been one of the wealthiest regions of Spain due to its robust iron, steel, and shipbuilding industries and its ports’ proximity to the United Kingdom. Though Franco repressed Basque cultural practices and stripped the region of its autonomy, his regime poured a great deal of state funding into its manufacturing industries in service of his GDP-boosting “Spanish miracle” plan. However, the dissolution of his regime and the 1973 global oil crisis caused Basque industries to all but collapse. Many factories and shipyards abruptly shuttered. In the ’80s, unemployment rates in certain parts of Bilbao reached 35 percent. Wealthy Basque entrepreneurs had already been fleeing the country due to being frequent targets of ETA’s kidnappings for ransom, and although the group’s activity had decreased substantially, it nonetheless deterred foreign investors.
In 1992, the Basque Government changed its economic strategy to focus only on highly specialized manufacturing and scientific and technological research. It also planned the “regeneration” of urban spaces by funding culture and making improvements to public infrastructure. When the Guggenheim Foundation, in dire financial straits, was in search of a site—and public funding—for a satellite museum, Bilbao’s vacant, post-industrial waterfront became the perfect match. The Basque Government agreed to cover the one-hundred-million USD construction cost, bankroll the fifty-million-dollar acquisition fund, and pay a twenty-million-dollar fee to the foundation. The Frank Gehry–designed museum opened in 1997, and spawned the concept of the “Bilbao effect,” which touts the idea that investing in culture will beget “social transformation” and tangible economic returns.16
The third and final exhibition at Artium Museoa, “Artelekun zehar, 1987–2002,” commemorated another publicly funded arts institution that was established during this period. The Arteleku Centre for Contemporary Art and Culture became, as the exhibition’s curators attest, a “benchmark for artistic creation,” attracting participants from around the world.17 Located in Loiola, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of San Sebastián, Arteleku was funded by the municipal government of Gipuzkoa, the city’s province. In its early years, the Centre focused on providing facilities for artists to learn and practice various plastic arts such as printmaking and stone carving. But it soon became a cradle of artistic and intellectual discourse: Arteleku hosted seminars and conferences on criticism and theory, produced the magazine Zehar, and encouraged methods of artmaking that collapsed disciplinary boundaries.
Ángel Bados, who taught in the Faculty of Fine Arts, was central to Arteleku’s transformation into a highly experimental site for arts education. In the ’90s, post-conceptual trends seemed to harken back to Oteiza’s earlier ideas about art’s inextricability from the public and society; they also fit with older Basque traditions of parity and localism. Intervenciones urbanas (Urban Interventions), a workshop led by Antoni Muntadas, pulled participants out of the studios and into the city. Pepe Espaliú’s workshop on “remnants” similarly “resulted in various outdoor actions,” such as the 1992 group performance Carrying.18 The workshop Colisiones (Collisions), led by Francis Gomila and Corinne Diserens, studied art that trafficked outside of traditional venues and functioned instead as gestures in actual space and time.
“Artelekun zehar: 1987–2002” displayed various photographs of these classes and actions alongside reproduced layouts of Zehar and over thirty artworks created at Arteleku. Several paintings by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa and Gabriela Kraviez embraced the abstract geometric stylings that were so hard-won in earlier decades; otherwise, the work is as aesthetically and conceptually variegated as the art currently circulating in the contemporary global arena. Though Arteleku remained in operation until 2014, the curators chose to halt their history of the institution at 2002, when its facilities “underwent a major renovation.” The curators identify a “paradigm shift in the way it understood artistic practice,” citing a new commitment to “the path towards digitalization.”19 Very well.
Today, the Basque Country remains politically sovereign and stable. Its GDP and per-capita income have assumed their former top rank within Spain, and it remains a powerful hub of scientific and technological research. Road and street signs use Euskara, and students can opt to take classes in the native language. In Bilbao, the Guggenheim’s silver façade reflects the glimmering waters of the decontaminated Nervión river. Although locals’ attitudes towards the museum are often analogous to Parisians’ opinions of the Eiffel Tower, it attracts over a million visitors a year, the majority of them tourists. Local and state governments seem to remain avid proponents of the Bilbao effect; they have made substantial efforts to pave art’s “path towards digitalization” and ease its intersections with technology and commerce.
A stone’s throw from the Guggenheim Bilbao, the “cultural center” Azkuna Zentroa has occupied a 450,000-square-foot former warehouse since 2010. The center offers exhibition spaces, a cinema, an auditorium, a fitness center, a restaurant, and several artist residencies and tech-leaning production grants. In San Sebastián, a 400,000-square-foot decommissioned tobacco factory was also refurbished into a sprawling, multifunctional cultural center, which opened its doors in 2015. Its facilities boast a state-of-the-art “medialab” and audiovisual lab, a well-appointed artist residency, a film school, a restaurant, and several rentable event spaces. Both receive substantial public funding. The art incubated at and on view inside each center’s galleries is sleek and science-y; it politely gestures towards civic-mindedness, communality, and art as a public good. It is a far cry from the radical, transgressive aesthetics and politics that Oteiza and his peers crafted, often under much more strained circumstances, at their informal, unfunded schools, at the nascent Faculty of Fine Arts, and during Arteleku’s early experimental years. Thankfully, these three exhibitions at the Artium Museoa ensured that their histories, and enduring impact on contemporary art in the Basque Country and beyond, will not go unacknowledged.
Jorge de Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, ed. Joseba Zulaika, trans. Frederick Fornoff (Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, 2003), 335.
Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 335.
The third exhibition, Artelekun zehar. 1987-2002, was also curated by Beatriz Herráez, the director of Artium Museoa.
Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 260.
Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 260.
Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 337.
Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 260.
Mikel Onandia, Rocío Robles Tardio, and Sergio Rubira, “A Place to Think: Experimental Art Schools and Educational Practices in the Basque Country, 1957–1979,” in David Fuente et al., A Place to Think: Experimental Art Schools and Educational Practices in the Basque Country, 1957–1979 (Artium Museoa; Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, 2022), 251.
Mikel Onandia, “Associación Artística de Guipúzcoa” in Fuente et al., A Place to Think, 262.
Onandia, “Associación Artística de Guipúzcoa,” 262.
Fátima Sarasola Rubio, “Jorge Oteiza’s Educational Project Through Architecture,” in Fuente et al., A Place to Think, 270.
Miren Vadillo, “Bilbao Higher School of Fine Arts: An Official Training Centre for the Basque Country,” in Fuente et al., A Place to Think, 290.
Mikel Onandia, Sergio Rubira, and Leire Vergara, Edonor denok inor ez: Institutionalisation Processes of Art Education in the Basque Country, 1978–1991 (Artium Museoa; Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, 2024), 9.
Onandia, Rubira, and Vergara, Edonor denok inor ez, 7.
Michael Tarantino, “The San Sebastian International Video Festival,” Artforum 22, no. 5 (January 1984), 87.
In a 2024 article, Gehry recalled Oteiza’s vehement objections to his building, mentioning that the sculptor even put up a sign that read “Kill the American architect.” Luis Pablo Beauregard, “Frank Gehry, architect: ‘I was always told that I wasn’t the same as everyone else, and some people made fun of that,’” El País, January 1, 2024 →.
Mikel Onandia, Sergio Rubira, Leire Vergara, and Beatriz Herráez, Artelekun zehar, 1987–2002: An Exhibition about Arteleku through the Archive (Artium Museoa; Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country), 2025, 16.
Onandia, Rubira, Vergara, and Herrâez, Artelekun zehar, 17.
Onandia, Rubira, Vergara, and Herrâez, Artelekun zehar, 18.
