JULIO GONZÁLEZ

Barcelona,(Spain) 1876- Arcueil (France), 1942

Julio González belonged to a family of jewellers and craftsmen who worked with wrought iron. He was the youngest of four children, with whom he worked in the family´s prestigious workshop in Barcelona. Julio and Joan were introduced to metal-working by their father, Concordio, and obtained considerable recognition for their jewellery in exhibitions of applied arts in Barcelona and also abroad, in Chicago, 1892. They both attended drawing classes at the Escuela de Bellas Artes and frequented the circle of Els Quatre Gats, where they met Nonell, Picasso, Casas, Rusiñol, Torres-García and other representatives of Modernismo. After a visit to the Museo del Prado in Madrid and a first jorney to Paris, Julio González decided to devote himself to painting, and in 1900, after the death of his father, he went to live in the French capital. There he met Picasso again, and he established relationships with the Spanish artists and with Max Jacob, Maurice Raynal, Varèse and, later, Modigliani and Brancusi. The death of his brother Joan, in 1908, gave rise to a period of intense grief and reclusion, but in 1910 he started on his masks punched out in metal. During the First World War he remained in París, regularly competing in the Salon des Indépendants. In 1918 he started working for the company La Soudure Autogène Française, where he learned welding and produced a first experiment with a small Christ in iron. He continued exhibiting during a period when he maintained his numerous activities as jeweller, draughtsman, painter and sculptor. From 1927 onwards his sculpture gradually acquired greater importance, and he produced works in cut wrought iron that subjected his earlier figuration to a process of increasing stylization and abstraction. In 1931 Picasso asked him to help with the monument to Apollinaire that he had been commissioned to produce. Julio González introduced Picasso to the procedures of welding to create metal assemblages from rods, sheets of metal and assorted objects, generating pieces based on the absence of solid mass and on the principle of constructed sculpture. Both artists benefited from this collaboration, but for González it led to his definitive devotion to sculpture and the abandon of painting and jewellery. Although he never reached total abstraction, and he even attacked abstract art, in 1934 the members of Abstraction-Création recognised him as abstract because of the radical nature of his proposals. However, his sculpture of planes and lines in space shifted towards a return to volume and form in later years. In 1937 he participated in the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in París, showing a Maternité (Mother and Child), later called Montserrat, although he continued exploring the possibilities of stylization with his “Cactus men”. González left Paris shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War but returned in 1941. The following year, on 27 March, he died at his home in Arcueil.