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Lot Essay
Carved from the friable stone that Gonzlez collected in a demolition site near his small weekend retreat in Monthion about 40km east of Paris, Tte douloureuse is one of a group of remarkable stone heads that Gonzlez carved between 1933 and 1937.
These stone heads have been difficult to date precisely as the only recorded reference to them is an exhibition review from the Salon des Surindpendents first cited by Josephine Withers in her monograph on the artist. This review draws attention to a number of these stone heads being exhibited at the Salon where they were, "casually placed on the floor in a square marked off by four pegs joined together with a flimsy cord". (J. Withers, Julio Gonzlez, Sculpture in Iron, New York 1978, p. 77).
In many ways these stone heads can be seen as representing a more material and mass-orientated development of the iron mask sculptures that Gonzlez made in the early 1930s. Of these Tte douloureuse is one of the many more dramatically cubist in form. The angular incised planes that have been rectangularly chiseled into the stone to form the contours of the face here relate to one another in a play of angularity that clearly recalls the cubistic structure of Gonzlez's masks while the flat side of this irregular head prefigures the most abstracted of all Gonzlez's stone sculptures, Le Baiser.
These stone heads have been difficult to date precisely as the only recorded reference to them is an exhibition review from the Salon des Surindpendents first cited by Josephine Withers in her monograph on the artist. This review draws attention to a number of these stone heads being exhibited at the Salon where they were, "casually placed on the floor in a square marked off by four pegs joined together with a flimsy cord". (J. Withers, Julio Gonzlez, Sculpture in Iron, New York 1978, p. 77).
In many ways these stone heads can be seen as representing a more material and mass-orientated development of the iron mask sculptures that Gonzlez made in the early 1930s. Of these Tte douloureuse is one of the many more dramatically cubist in form. The angular incised planes that have been rectangularly chiseled into the stone to form the contours of the face here relate to one another in a play of angularity that clearly recalls the cubistic structure of Gonzlez's masks while the flat side of this irregular head prefigures the most abstracted of all Gonzlez's stone sculptures, Le Baiser.