Julio González

Julio González belongs to a breed of twentieth-century artists which includes Paco Durrio, Pablo Picasso, Pablo Gargallo, Alexander Calder and many others, artists who succeeded in seizing on the grandeur and sublimation of explorations carried out in their larger works and projecting them onto small objects for popular use (jewels, pottery, accessories, etc.). Julio González discovered the secrets of metal in carrying out the craft that he learnt at an early age in the workshop of his father, Concordio González. Ornamental metalwork was the traditional occupation of the family, which had a workshop devoted to artistic work with metal in the Modernist Barcelona of the late nineteenth century. In harmony with the movements of renewal in Europe, Catalan Modernism sought to do away with the traditional boundary that separated artistic crafts from the fine arts. Although Julio González moved to Paris in 1900 with the intention of devoting himself to painting and sculpture, the making of bijouterie and jewellery continued to be his main source of income throughout his life. In his jewellery and bijouterie made with modest materials (iron, brass, copper, enamel or glass paste) different from those used in “high-class” jewellery, the future sculptor succeeded in combining the adoption of the iconographies and the aesthetic spirit characteristic of the age with the conversion of each of his works into a challenge of personal exploration of the marvellous course leading to the birth of form. In his jewellery and bijouterie we find the perfect balance between adaptation of the ornament to the functions of the object and reflection on the possibilities and limits of the material in the exercise of representation. Many of the procedures with which Julio González experimented in his jewellery (cutting of metal, superimposition of planes, use of empty space and dialogues between light and shade) set him on a path where there was no turning back from the exploration that was to place him at the forefront of the revolution in twentieth-century sculpture.