Julio González versus Pablo Picasso

The relationship between Julio González and Pablo Picasso has been one of the most fertile circumstances in 20th century art. For the former it was a fundamental stimulus which permitted him to progress quickly along the experimental path he had begun to tread with his first works and brought him into contact with the cubist constructions that Picasso had made out of sheet metal, cardboard or wood. For his part, González contributed his experience in metal forging, which was to pave the way for a new sculptural language that he himself would define with the well-known expression “drawing in space”. The exhibition of the series of eighty-four sketches that comprise Album no. 7 of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, belonging to the Fundación Picasso in Málaga, with a selection of fifty pieces from the IVAM’s collection of Julio González, will explore this fertile and productive exchange. With the incorporation of sketchbook no. 7 of preliminary sketches for of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Fundación Pablo Ruiz Picasso has succeeded in adding to its collection the first unique pieces of their Picassian heritage and at the same time implies the presence in Spanish collections of sketches for the emblematic painting that marks the advent of contemporary art. Sketchbook no. 7 is one of the sixteen sketchbooks and several separate sketches that Picasso made to prepare of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. On the sixty pages of lined white paper, between May and June 1907 in Paris the artist made a total of eighty-four drawings using India ink, graphite pencil and red gouache. The subject of these sketches, with many variations, are outlines of animals, among which it is especially worth mentioning an eagle that presides over the cover and the first pages, female nudes that become more and more sketchy, like the models of African art, Catalan castellers (human towers), in the only known sample of this element in the corpus of Picasso’s oeuvre, sketches of still lifes with a protocubist treatment, and a portrait of Raymonde, the child he adopted for a time with Fernande Olivier. This iconographic richness that combines a desire for innovation with a love of Catalan traditions and the presence of the most familiar and intimate things, makes this sketchbook a fascinating repertory of Picasso’s work at a crucial moment of its evolution.