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拍品專文
Filled with raw energy and a powerful sense of presence, Forme sévère is the embodiment in three dimensions of a form that occupied Julio González’s creative imagination repeatedly between 1936 and 1938. This was the most productive period of González’s career, during which he refined his experimental style, using his skills in forged and welded metal to create a highly expressive, austere, abstract sculptural language that marked a radical departure from carving and modeling traditions. Carefully constructed from a progression of flat sheets of iron, González’s works from these years celebrate the properties of their materials and the method of their fabrication, ushering in a new approach to form and sculpture that would prove revolutionary for generations of younger artists through the rest of the twentieth century.
As Marilyn McCully has noted, “The most important body of work that Julio González produced as a sculptor was done over a relatively short period of time, during the last fourteen years of his life” (Julio González: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Dickinson, New York, 2002, p. 13). Born into a family of metalsmiths, González had joined his older brother Joan in their father’s workshop at the age of fifteen, and as an apprentice learned to cut, hammer and forge all kinds of metal, making jewelry and decorative objects. He was especially drawn to hand-forged ironwork, a specialty in Barcelona since the Middle Ages, which had experienced a major revival in the late nineteenth century with Gaudí and the Art Nouveau movement, and supplemented his practical training with classes at the city’s Escuela de Bellas Artes. This in-depth knowledge and familiarity with various materials gave him a strong understanding of the plasticity of different metals when heated, their individual properties and potential for transformation and creative expression.
González had moved to Paris with his family at the turn of the century, and for many years made a living there as a highly skilled craftsman, collaborating with a number of progressive sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Pablo Gargallo, while also continuing to pursue his own creative path in painting. During the First World War, he worked at a Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt that had been requisitioned for the war effort, where he learned the technique of oxyacetylene welding, a method that would prove highly influential in his later experiments. It was not until 1928, however, when he rekindled his friendship with Pablo Picasso, that González found his true artistic direction. Picasso had always had a predilection for sculpture, and had made some of his greatest artistic breakthroughs working in three dimensions. Having already created assemblages in both wood and various forms of cardboard, he wanted to experiment with metal, though lacked the technical know-how to be able to do this. Working side by side in González’s studio, the pair inspired each other—González providing the practical expertise and knowledge of the material, and Picasso the creative impetus—to create metal assemblages, La femme au jardin and Tête de femme as well as linear constructions, known as Figures. González’s imagination took flight, and from 1929 onwards, he began to make his own free-standing metal sculptures.
González’s sculptural approach was radical for the time. Due to the technical skill needed to forge and weld metal, sculpting directly in this medium was almost impossible for artists without a background in these methods. With his extensive training, González was perfectly placed to conjure new and daring compositions directly out of this material, allowing him to “draw in space,” as he described his method. Using metal off-cuts and remnants that littered his small studio in Arcueil, González developed a bold constructive style that remained rooted in his sensitivity to the intrinsic nature of his medium. In the mid- to late-1930s, his sculptures gradually became more volumetric, enhancing the weight and presence of his earlier, linear constructions. Standing at over 31 inches (79 cm.) in height, Forme sévère is a prime example of this mature aesthetic, marrying a palpable sense of solidity and mass, with an openness and space, that shifts and changes as the viewer moves around the sculpture.
For González, this internal play of form and negative space was essential to the success of a work of art: “In order to give his work the maximum power and beauty, the sculptor is obliged to conserve a certain mass and to maintain the exterior contour,” he wrote. “So it is on this mass that he has to focus his attention, his imagination, his technical skill, his way of conserving all its power… In traditional sculpture a leg is formed from a single block; but in sculpture that uses SPACE as a MATERIAL, that same leg may be HOLLOW, made at a STROKE within an assembly that thus forms one block. Traditional sculpture has a horror of hollows and empty spaces. This new kind of sculpture makes the maximum use of their potential and now thinks of them as an INDISPENSABLE material” (“Notes on Sculpture,” circa 1930; quoted in Picasso and the Age of Iron, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1993, p. 283).
In Forme sévère, the melted residue at the joints and edges has been left clearly visible, calling attention to the innate beauty of the metal and to the elegance with which González has welded together the various parts to construct his form. Indeed, his sculptural practice retained a level of improvisation, as González responded directly to his materials as he worked, making decisions or changing tact as he progressed through the various stages of fabrication. As Margit Rowell has noted, the results “illustrate the vision, logic and skills of a man who thinks, sees and assembles directly in metal” (exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1983, p. 21).
Alongside this, González maintained a dedicated practice of drawing. Across numerous sketchbooks, he explored and developed his ideas, inventing complex, semi-abstract structures and forms that he explored in three-dimensions. Abstrait (Etude pour ‘Femme au miroir’), a drawing of 1937, clearly shows that González at one time considered using an inverted version of the claw-like structure of Forme sévère as the biomorphic pedestal of an elaborate construction that in its scale and complexity would rival his largest and most important work to date, Femme au miroir. The distinctive curved form of this sculpture also appears in slightly altered format in a number of preparatory sketches for Femme au miroir itself, most notably in Etude pour femme au miroir where in an upright position it forms the structure of the arm holding the woman’s mirror.
As Marilyn McCully has noted, “The most important body of work that Julio González produced as a sculptor was done over a relatively short period of time, during the last fourteen years of his life” (Julio González: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Dickinson, New York, 2002, p. 13). Born into a family of metalsmiths, González had joined his older brother Joan in their father’s workshop at the age of fifteen, and as an apprentice learned to cut, hammer and forge all kinds of metal, making jewelry and decorative objects. He was especially drawn to hand-forged ironwork, a specialty in Barcelona since the Middle Ages, which had experienced a major revival in the late nineteenth century with Gaudí and the Art Nouveau movement, and supplemented his practical training with classes at the city’s Escuela de Bellas Artes. This in-depth knowledge and familiarity with various materials gave him a strong understanding of the plasticity of different metals when heated, their individual properties and potential for transformation and creative expression.
González had moved to Paris with his family at the turn of the century, and for many years made a living there as a highly skilled craftsman, collaborating with a number of progressive sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Pablo Gargallo, while also continuing to pursue his own creative path in painting. During the First World War, he worked at a Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt that had been requisitioned for the war effort, where he learned the technique of oxyacetylene welding, a method that would prove highly influential in his later experiments. It was not until 1928, however, when he rekindled his friendship with Pablo Picasso, that González found his true artistic direction. Picasso had always had a predilection for sculpture, and had made some of his greatest artistic breakthroughs working in three dimensions. Having already created assemblages in both wood and various forms of cardboard, he wanted to experiment with metal, though lacked the technical know-how to be able to do this. Working side by side in González’s studio, the pair inspired each other—González providing the practical expertise and knowledge of the material, and Picasso the creative impetus—to create metal assemblages, La femme au jardin and Tête de femme as well as linear constructions, known as Figures. González’s imagination took flight, and from 1929 onwards, he began to make his own free-standing metal sculptures.
González’s sculptural approach was radical for the time. Due to the technical skill needed to forge and weld metal, sculpting directly in this medium was almost impossible for artists without a background in these methods. With his extensive training, González was perfectly placed to conjure new and daring compositions directly out of this material, allowing him to “draw in space,” as he described his method. Using metal off-cuts and remnants that littered his small studio in Arcueil, González developed a bold constructive style that remained rooted in his sensitivity to the intrinsic nature of his medium. In the mid- to late-1930s, his sculptures gradually became more volumetric, enhancing the weight and presence of his earlier, linear constructions. Standing at over 31 inches (79 cm.) in height, Forme sévère is a prime example of this mature aesthetic, marrying a palpable sense of solidity and mass, with an openness and space, that shifts and changes as the viewer moves around the sculpture.
For González, this internal play of form and negative space was essential to the success of a work of art: “In order to give his work the maximum power and beauty, the sculptor is obliged to conserve a certain mass and to maintain the exterior contour,” he wrote. “So it is on this mass that he has to focus his attention, his imagination, his technical skill, his way of conserving all its power… In traditional sculpture a leg is formed from a single block; but in sculpture that uses SPACE as a MATERIAL, that same leg may be HOLLOW, made at a STROKE within an assembly that thus forms one block. Traditional sculpture has a horror of hollows and empty spaces. This new kind of sculpture makes the maximum use of their potential and now thinks of them as an INDISPENSABLE material” (“Notes on Sculpture,” circa 1930; quoted in Picasso and the Age of Iron, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1993, p. 283).
In Forme sévère, the melted residue at the joints and edges has been left clearly visible, calling attention to the innate beauty of the metal and to the elegance with which González has welded together the various parts to construct his form. Indeed, his sculptural practice retained a level of improvisation, as González responded directly to his materials as he worked, making decisions or changing tact as he progressed through the various stages of fabrication. As Margit Rowell has noted, the results “illustrate the vision, logic and skills of a man who thinks, sees and assembles directly in metal” (exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1983, p. 21).
Alongside this, González maintained a dedicated practice of drawing. Across numerous sketchbooks, he explored and developed his ideas, inventing complex, semi-abstract structures and forms that he explored in three-dimensions. Abstrait (Etude pour ‘Femme au miroir’), a drawing of 1937, clearly shows that González at one time considered using an inverted version of the claw-like structure of Forme sévère as the biomorphic pedestal of an elaborate construction that in its scale and complexity would rival his largest and most important work to date, Femme au miroir. The distinctive curved form of this sculpture also appears in slightly altered format in a number of preparatory sketches for Femme au miroir itself, most notably in Etude pour femme au miroir where in an upright position it forms the structure of the arm holding the woman’s mirror.