JEUNE FEMME AU JOURNAL
1926 -1928
Médium: Cuivre repoussé
Dimensions: 47,8 x 26,5 cm
« Jeune femme au journal (Young woman with a newspaper)” is a relief in embossed copper, executed by Julio González between 1926-1928, housed at the IVAM Centre Julio González (Valencia, Spain).
This scene depicts a single standing woman wearing a dress, hair pulled back into a bun. Seen from the back, she is holding a newspaper in front of her face, reading, in an unidentified environment.
Like González’s depictions of dancers, acrobats, or women grooming themselves, the motif of a woman reading was another way for González to experiment with the human body in movement.
While the contours of the reader’s silhouette, expertly hammered out in copper, are strongly marked–particularly the sharp angles of the pleats of her dress and the pages of the newspaper on the right side–the volumes of the woman’s body have been flattened, and its details simplified. This treatment contrasts with his previous embossed reliefs. For example, in “Reclining woman reading” (1927-1928) (fig. 2), also on display in the exhibition, the figure is more detailed—her hairstyle is more intricate, the pleats in her dress more defined—and the volumes of her curved body are more rounded and convex.
This simplification and subtle geometrization speaks to the growing impact of the avant-garde, and more specifically, Purist Cubism, on González in the late 1920s. Works like “Young woman with a newspaper” anticipate González’s subsequent reliefs, whose geometricized contours are directly cut out of sheets of iron, and whose volumes are completed with empty space. These reliefs are an important step on the path towards his revolutionary life size works of the 1930s which he “draws in space” out of iron rods and sheets.
