Julio Gonzalez

JULIO GONZÁLEZ (Barcelona, 1876 - Arcueil, France, 1942).
"Adam and Eve", ca. 1910-14.
Relief in bronze.
Certificate of authenticity attached.
Measurements: 29 cm. diameter.

In this bronze relief, Julio Gonzalez reinterprets the biblical theme of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Gonzalez suggests that the couple overcomes the serpent, incarnation of evil. Adam holds the zigzagging body of the animal with his right hand and rests his left hand on Eve's shoulder, who lies peacefully on the grass. Contradicting the way in which art has traditionally bequeathed us the image of repentance and modesty before naked bodies after being tempted by the perfidious animal, Gonzalez shows us both bodies reconciled with their nakedness and natural beauty. The rounded contours of the female bust and hips, following Julio Gonzalez's characteristic canons, reinforce this idea. In short, we observe in this relief inscribed in a medallion with a hexagonal center the triumph of human love over everything else.

Considered the father of iron sculpture, Julio González is a key artist for the avant-garde of the 20th century. He was born into a family of goldsmiths, learning the trade as a child in the stimulating context of modernist Barcelona. Later he studied Fine Arts at La Lonja in Barcelona. In 1900 he went with his family to Paris, where he frequented the artistic circles and maintained contact with Picasso, Gargallo and Brancusi, among others. His stay in the French capital marked a before and after in his language. There he learned the industrial technique of autogenous welding, key to his later research with the expressiveness of iron. Around 1910 he began to work with embossed metal masks, with a style marked by naturalistic and symbolist features, as well as by a new conception of the human figure, with synthesized volumes and lines. During these years, Gonzalez began his participation in the Parisian salons, specifically in the Salon d'Automne, the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. In 1920 he opened his own forge workshop, and two years later he made his individual debut at the Povolovsky Gallery in Paris. During these years he experimented with the concept of the two-dimensionality of the plane through his embossed reliefs, and continued in this line of exploration of volume until 1928, when he was asked to collaborate in the realization of the funerary monument of his friend Apollinaire, characterized by its transparent forms and its emptying, illustrating the poet's own words "a solid statue of nothingness". With Picasso, Gonzalez puts his previous experiments into practice for the first time and proves their viability, given the perfect harmony established between them and Picasso's synthetic capacity for drawing. The delicate, small-format ironwork in which the sculptor had worked until then came to an end, and from now on his forms became increasingly imposing and complex, giving the artist international impetus. Thus, at the end of the twenties he began to develop his first sculptures in wrought iron, a material that until then had been considered merely decorative. During the thirties his work became more abstract, and the first spatial constructions appeared. Always focused on aesthetic and theoretical research, with his filiform sculptures Gonzalez prioritizes "the marriage between matter and space" and moves away from traditional symmetrical compositions, through what he himself called "drawing in space". These are improvised pieces, built directly with wrought iron rods, which construct schematic, abstract images of great formal complexity. In parallel, he will work with the iron plate, creating a series of works that scholars have related to cubism, since in them the sculptor decomposes the volume and incorporates the empty space, playing at the same time with the contrast of lights and shadows. After a long list of participations in solo and group exhibitions such as Spanish Art at the Jeu de Paume Museum (1936) or the Universal Exhibition in Paris (1937), at the beginning of the Second World War his work, as a result of the shortage of iron, focuses on a new material, plaster, and drawing on war themes.