Julio Gonzalez

By 1905, several years after first settling in Paris, Julio González forms part of Montparnasse’s artistic milieu. Hailing from a family of renowned Catalan decorative metal-workers, Gonzalez too masters the art of chiseling bronze, silver and copper. In 1912, the artist creates his first metal masks using the “repoussé” technique, in both copper and silver, depicting a child’s head. For Julio, this presents an alternative to drawing to create portraits of his friends and family. Masque de face and Profil de jeune fille are displayed at the  Salon d’automne in Paris in 1913. Starting at that time, Julio Gonzalez abandons the naturalistic style previously used in his cast or forged objects in favor of a more classical style, visible in his sculpture. The rough, textured surface is replaced by smooth, hardly marked faces, often with closed eyes. The technique is complex and the work rigorous, but as he hones his skill, more details appear, such as a more pronounced nose and hair. His masks dated from 1914 demonstrate this technical growth. However, World War I curtails Paris’s Salons d’automne and des Indépendants. Gonzalez changes artistic directions as classicism attracts less interest.

Between 1933 and 1936, after experimenting with the void, Julio Gonzalez returns to full volumes in an important series of heads carved in stone from Monthyon, a village in Seine et Marne where the artist acquires a residence in 1926. The editions in bronze presented here are posthumous. These heads, all carved directly into the stone, oscillate between  figuration and abstraction. Brigitte Léal, curator at the Centre Pompidou, describes a “roughness of the block preserved to enhance the archaic brutality of the facial expression”. The features of the faces, none of which have been identified, are anonymous and blurred. These works manifest Gonzalez’s growing interest in Gothic sculpture and cathedral statuary. In his manuscript, “Picasso and cathedrals. Sculptor Picasso” (1931-1932), Julio Gonzalez exalts the beauty and the geometry of their statue-columns and, without renouncing the sculpture of the void, defends his personal approach to stone sculpture: “In order to provide maximum power and beauty to one’s work, statuary must retain a certain mass, and account for its external contour. It is therefore in the center of this mass that one must direct all of one’s efforts, imagination and science (…) In stone sculpture, holes must not exist.”