TÊTE LONGUE TIGE – LONG-STEMMED HEAD
1932 -1933
Medium : Iron, cast, welded
Dimensions : 59,5 x 22 x 13 cm
“Tête longue tige (Long-stemmed head)” is an iron sculpture executed by Julio González in 1932-1933. This elongated and highly abstracted interpretation of the human head is an early example of González’s revolutionary linear iron sculptures with which he manages to “draw in space”.
In “Long-stemmed head”, González deconstructs and transposes the motif of the head into various decomposed geometric forms—namely, rectangular planes and a circle—welded to curved and straight lines. The roughly L-shaped juxtaposition of these forms and lines is inverted and fixed atop a long vertical iron rod which serves as the central axis of the work.
Though González’s work is always based in observed reality, this work counts among his most abstract. The most recognizable part of the abstracted head is the sculpture’s crowning element: a superposition of small rectangular planes that signifies hair in González’s unique artistic vocabulary.
Throughout the 1930s, González turns to the classical motif of the human head to experiment with various formal innovations, assimilated from cubism, surrealism and non-Western art. “Long-stemmed head” comes on the heels of more compact depictions of the subject, first in the form of masks, then in a series of heads whose volumes were rendered through a succession of planes.
This elongated interpretation marks the beginning of González’s linear sculpture series. In this series, he uses iron rods to “draw in space”, or in other words, to partially trace forms whose volumes are completed by empty space. It constitutes an important phase in his revolutionary sculptural career.
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