{"id":8331,"date":"2018-02-13T13:44:04","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T12:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/a-propos-de-l-artiste\/roberta-gonzalez\/"},"modified":"2023-11-28T16:17:33","modified_gmt":"2023-11-28T15:17:33","slug":"roberta-gonzalez-old","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/roberta-gonzalez-old\/","title":{"rendered":"Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez (1909-1976)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roberta et Julio Gonz\u00e1lez, ca. 1937<\/h3>\"\"<\/div>

Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez, ca. 1940<\/h3>\"\"<\/div>

Roberta, ca. 1945-50<\/h3>\"\"<\/div>

Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez, ca. 1970<\/h3>\"\"<\/div><\/div>

Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez (1909, Paris-1976, Monthyon)<\/h3>\n
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Roberta pursues the family vocation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez is Julio Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s only child, born in Paris in 1909.\u00a0 Abandoned by her mother, Roberta grows up in a Catalonian enclave in Montparnasse, which in those years becomes an important avant-gardist hub. According to family legend, her childhood drawings are praised by Picasso, a longtime family friend. Indeed, Roberta pursues the\u00a0family\u2019s artistic vocation. Her father encourages her creative pursuits, often telling her: \u201cyou will become a painter and you will accomplish that which neither your oncle nor I have managed to express in painting\u201d.<\/p>\n

Roberta makes her Parisian debut in the late 1930s. Her works were then similar in style and content to those of her father. Her early drawings and paintings, rendered in a classic style, often representing peasants and mother and child scenes, evolve over the course of the 1930s. She adopts an avant-gardist style, influenced by Cubism and Surrealism. Her first personal exhibition takes place in 1939 at the Henriette Gomez gallery in Paris, along with the German abstract painter\u00a0Hans Hartung.<\/a>\u00a0Roberta and Hans marry that same year.<\/p>\n

A career interrupted by war<\/strong><\/p>\n

Soon after, their promising careers and their life as newly-weds are interrupted by the Second World War and the Nazi Occupation of Paris. The Gonz\u00e1lez family flees to the Lot at the outbreak of the war. Hartung, considered a traitor for having abandoned, and fought with the French Foreign Legion against, his country, is tracked by the Nazis, and unable to return to Occupied Paris.\u00a0 However, Julio Gonz\u00e1lez, eager to get back to his welded sculpture, which he was unable to pursue while in the Lot, returns to Paris in 1941.<\/p>\n

Roberta is therefore separated from her father when he unexpectedly passes away on March 27, 1942. Soon after, in response to the Nazi invasion of the South of France, Hartung is forced to flee to Spain. The two will only reunite after the war, while Hartung is hospitalized for wounds sustained during the Battle of Belfort, that lead to the amputation of his leg.<\/p>\n

Back in Paris in the postwar period, Roberta returns to painting and drawing. She produces a series of stylized portraits featuring pensive and melancholic women. These are a reflection of her state of mind after the dark years of the war and the devastating loss of her father. Nonetheless, she pursues her career. She is featured in personal exhibitions at Parisian galeries like Jeanne Bucher (1948), Colette Allendy (1951) and Nina Dausset (1954), receives distinctions in several Paris-based art competitions, and participates in numerous collective exhibitions in Europe, the Americas and Asia.<\/p>\n

The path to a personal style, between figuration and abstraction<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the years, Roberta\u2019s work shows an increasing impact of Hartung\u2019s lyrical abstraction, which achieves great success in postwar Paris. As Roberta puts it, Hartung \u201copened a window on a new pictorial universe\u201d for her. Without ever completely abandoning the representation of observed reality, Roberta develops a unique plastic language in which figurative symbols, motifs and signs exist in an undefined space, an abstract universe, often signified by expressive, dynamic and increasingly colorful, brushstrokes. Her personal style between figuration and abstraction reaches its maturity in the mid-1950s, and continues throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, before her declining health negatively impacts her production.<\/p>\n

All the while, Roberta works tirelessly at the promotion of her father, and later, her oncle\u2019s, work. She organizes exhibitions and makes important donations of the Gonz\u00e1lez family\u2019s work to collections in France, Spain and abroad.<\/p>\n

Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez today<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today, her own work is conserved in prestigious museums and institutions including\u00a0le Centre Pompidou Paris,<\/a>\u00a0l\u2019IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0 and\u00a0la Fondation Maeght<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2012, Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez was featured in two exhibitions. First, her work was displayed with that of her father in the exhibition \u201cJulio y Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez\u201d at the IVAM Centre Julio Gonz\u00e1lez. Next, her works were shown at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art et Histoire in Bormes-les-Mimosas. Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez was a part-time resident of this village on the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur, where she had a modernist villa built after plans she drew herself.<\/p>\n

In 2019, a dozen of her paintings and drawings were featured in the highly successful exhibition\u00a0\u201cPicasso et l\u2019exil. Une histoire de l\u2019art espagnol en r\u00e9sistance\u201d<\/a>, which took place in Toulouse, at the mus\u00e9e les Abattoirs, from March 15 to August 25, 2019.\u00a0 At the same time, her wartime work was featured in a\u00a0conference at Paris\u2019s Army Museum\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0, as part of their cycle on 20th century artists and war.<\/p>\n

In the Summer of 2020, Mexico will be able to discover Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s work when the \u201cPicasso and exile\u201d exhibition is presented in a modified form at the INBAL Modern Art Museum of Mexico City.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>

\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tCheck out the flip-book presentation on \"Roberta Gonzalez, or the art of duality\"\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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Angoisse, 1936<\/p><\/div><\/div>

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Jeune fille pensive, 1949<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Roberta

Jeune fille s\u00e9v\u00e8re, 1937<\/p><\/div><\/div>

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Sans titre, 1952<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Sans titre, 1939<\/p><\/div><\/div>

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La t\u00e2che bleue, 1956\n<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Portrait de famille no. 2, 1969<\/p><\/div><\/div>

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Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez, ca. 1970<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Sens obligatoire no. 1, 1969<\/p><\/div><\/div>

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Ils brillent pour tous, 1972<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roberta pursues the family vocation Roberta Gonz\u00e1lez is Julio Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s only child, born in Paris in 1909.\u00a0 Abandoned by her mother, Roberta grows up in a Catalonian enclave in Montparnasse, which in those years becomes an important avant-gardist hub. According to family legend, her childhood drawings are praised by Picasso, a longtime family friend. Indeed, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8331","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8331"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9818,"href":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8331\/revisions\/9818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliogonzalez.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}