Art: Homage to Gonzalez

The sculptures, drawings, masks and enamels by Julio Gonzalez now on show in Manhattan’s Galerie Chalette tell a great deal about the strange and melancholy adventurer who wrought them, and a great deal more about the adventuresome path sculptors of this age have taken.

When Gonzalez died in 1942, the world’s scrap iron was as precious as its guns. It was not until war’s end that sculptors in metal were free to trace his pioneer steps. Now rods, clinkers, nuts and bolts have been fused and forged into the new nature of sculpture, and in its open and bristling aerial forms, there is everywhere homage to Gonzalez.

The Scream. Gonzalez’ work is basically representational. His early pieces are small and classic, colored with Moorish and North African influence. Later comes the great body of his work—angular, spiked, abstract constructions done in the early ’30s, when, in collaboration with his friend Picasso, he found freedom of form and began his explorations of the play of shadow and light and the machine-age art of “drawing in the air” with brushes of iron. These are his most ingenious pieces; so far as the development of sculpture is concerned, they are also his most influential.

His later work returns to human form and emotion, most notably in a series of depictions of Our Lady of Montserrat, Catalonia’s patron saint. The original Montserrat is a small wooden figure of the Virgin that legend says was carved by St. Luke. It now stands in mountaintop Montserrat monastery near Barcelona. For Gonzalez, the Montserrat was the symbol of the Spanish peasant, and he wrought the first of his series during the Spanish Civil War—a woman erect and proud, child in one arm, weapon in the other. The series ends in 1942 with his last and unfinished study; charged with protest against war and against Franco, Gonzalez shows the Montserrat broken, reduced to her knees, her mouth twisted in an agonized scream.

Twenty Years’ Death. Gonzalez, born in Barcelona in 1876, spent his youth working alongside his brother, Joan, as an apprentice goldsmith in his father’s atelier. He moved to Paris with his family at the turn of the century. The death of Joan in 1908 caused him to turn in upon himself, break off his friendships with his artist friends (including the young Picasso), and enter 20 years’ solitude, torpor and artistic death.

It was not until Gonzalez was 50 that he recognized the iron in his Spanish blood and turned all his attention to sculpture. When he returned to art in the late ’20s, his early attempt at painting was left behind, and in its place was a craft he had learned at the Renault plant during World War I: acetylene torch welding. His reconciliation with Picasso followed, and they worked together on some sculptures. Picasso’s limitless horizon of idea and sense of imagery liberated Gonzalez from his lingering post-impressionist style; Gonzalez took to the air and escaped from the solid, heavy past of sculpture.

But the Spaniard in him still ruled the spirit of his work. It shows in the nobility of his Don Quixote. And even in his most abstract work, there are the symbols of Spain—a Spanish comb, the fringe of a shawl, a guitar’s strings, the horns of a bull. The show—57 sculptures, five enamels, 41 drawings and pastels—will tour the United States and Canada until 1963. Everywhere it travels, it will remind sculptors of their debt to Gonzalez, and of the iron-hard sadness of his life and thought.