Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Jordana Mendelson presents the lecture Modern Banalities: Recto and Verso of the Artistic Self as part of the seminar Ser artista. Seminario Julio González, coordinated by Juan José Lahuerta, which seeks to propose a new reading of the artist’s work.

“This talk explores the role of postcards in the creation of artistic selves that circulated widely in the twentieth century among artists, writers, and the general public. Featuring subjects that ranged from artistic masterpieces to tourist locations and ethnographic subjects, modern artists expressed their amuseument and admiration for these tiny, ephemeral pieces of modern visual culture while sharing them with family, friends, and acquaintances. Placed in the context of other artists who turned to the postcard fo communication (and creativity), Julio González’s cards offer another opportunity to consider the ways his adoption of mass culture mirrored that of other artists, like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí among others. Postcards were particularly fascinating for the surrealists, especially poets like Paul Eluard. González’s turn to the postcard was part of a generational phenomenon that was registered in the literary and general press as something that marked a nostalgia for the turn of the century, and kept the postcard circulating in the mind and work of artists well past its golden age” Jordana Mendelson. 

Jordana Mendelson (1970). PhD in art history from Yale University. Director of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center and a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She is the author of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation 1929-1939 (2005) and co-editor of Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (2010) . She has curated or co-curated Miró i ADLAN (2021), Encuentros con los años 30 (2012),  Revistas y Guerra 1936-1939 (2007), Other Weapons: Photography and Print Culture during the Spanish Civil War (2007), Margaret Michaelis: Fotografía, Vanguardia y República en la Barcelona de la República (1998). She serves on the advisory committee of the Archivo Español de Arte and Culture & History, is a member of the Editorial Board of Modernism/Modernity, and is currently the Editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. She directed the IVAM’s International Seminar: Renau in Exile in 2021.  

Coinciding with the exhibition Being an artist. Julio González, and with the upcoming publication of the book that accompanies this exhibition, the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) organizes a seminar that proposes a new reading of the work of Julio González. Coordinated by Juan José Lahuerta, curator of the exhibition and author of the book, the seminar will feature the participation of Jordana Mendelson, Rocío Robles Tardío and Celia Marín.

Both the exhibition and the book propose a continuous vision of the work of Julio González through themes that, coming from the academy, run through it completely: from the female nude, an academic theme par excellence, which González develops in all its aspects, to motherhood, which culminates in the sculpture Montserrat in the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic from 1937. In addition to drawings, paintings, jewelry and sculptures from the IVAM collection, the exhibition includes a large number of manuscripts, letters, documents and photographs that are not They only complement or contextualize his work, but are an essential part of it, and have also been included in the pages of the book.

On this basis, the two faces that coexist in the work of Julio González can be better explained: on the one hand, his origin in an artisan workshop, his father’s metalwork, which would also seem to be his destiny, and, on the other, in the face of this destiny, one will is to be an artist, in the idealized sense that the end of the century gives to that word. The extraordinary work of Julio González is that of a sculptor who has defeated that “tyranny”, making craft and iron, precisely, the condition and material of a radically new work, the undisputed protagonist of the great transformations experienced by art. in the era of the avant-garde.

The seminar will focus on deepening some of these topics, such as, for example, Julio González’s relationship with Picasso in his training as an avant-garde artist; González’s use of materials of popular origin, such as postcards, so abundant in his archives and presented together for the first time in this exhibition; González’s manuscripts and his vision of art and the artist through his attempts to theorize his work; the review of González’s life in the setting of the Paris of modernity and the avant-garde; or, finally, the posterity of Julio González’s work and its presence in the construction of the history of modern art. All these visions will be complementary and designed to allow open discussion and critical insight into a work from which there is still much to learn and enjoy.

SEMINAR PROGRAM

Tuesday, December 12, from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. IVAM Center Julio González

11:00 a.m.- Welcome Nuria Enguita. IVAM Director

11.15 a.m.- Julio González Conference: iron, planes, war, cards and masks by Juan José Lahuerta. Professor of Art History at the TS School of Architecture of Barcelona.

12:30 p.m.- Conference Modern Banalities: Recto and Verso of the Artistic Self  by Jordana Mendelson. Director of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center of Spain in New York. In English with simultaneous translation.

Pause

4:00 p.m.- Commented visit to the exhibition. IVAM mediation team

4:45 p.m.- Conference Pablo Picasso, Julio González: being an exhibition by Rocío Robles Tardío. Professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid.

6:00 p.m.- Conference Sewing and Welding by Celia Marín. Lecturer in the Department of Theory and History of Architecture of the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona (UPC-BarcelonaTech)

7:15 p.m.- Conclusions by Juan José Lahuerta and Nuria Enguita