Julio González Pellicer was born on September 21, 1876, in Barcelona, Provincia de Barcelona, Cataluña, Spain. His father, Concordio González, was a part-time sculptor, and his mother, Pilar Pellicer Fenés, came from a long line of well-known artists.
As a teenager, Julio González took evening classes at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts.
González exhibited sculpture in metal at the Barcelona International Exposition in 1892, 1896, and 1898 and at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. In 1897 he began to frequent Els Quatre Gats, a café in Barcelona, where he met Pablo Picasso.
In 1900 González moved to Paris, where he renewed his acquaintance with Pablo Picasso. At this time González devoted himself to painting. González, grief-stricken, abandoned all artistic activity for many months. When he recovered, he returned to his first love, sculpture, but his work was intermittent and dispirited. Anguish over his brother's death had abated, but González was haunted by it, and he also suffered from a sense of personal inadequacy.
In 1926, when he was approaching 50, González acquired sufficient confidence to begin working full time. His sculpture of the next 4 years was cubistic, modest in scale, and reminiscent of the so-called transparencies of Jacques Lipchitz.
In 1930 González began to instruct Picasso in welding. The collaboration of González with perhaps the most powerful innovator in modern art led, as one would expect, to a vitalization of his own artistic conceptions. González's Head (1934) and Standing Figure (1932) show Picasso's influence. These works are linear in conception, with forms and attitudes as agile and intense as a grasshopper's body, and yet they are totally expressive of welded iron.
In 1934 he exhibited with the Abstraction-Création group. Some of his last works, such as "Woman Combing Her Hair" (1936) and "Monserrat" (1936 - 1937), have expressionist characteristics and a monumentality unlike anything he had done before. Monserrat, which represents the starkly simple figure of a woman with a scarf on her head, is essentially naturalistic in terms of proportion and sense of bulk despite the meagerness of descriptive detail. In a sense, this sculpture, thought by many to be his finest, is uncharacteristic, for González combined abstraction and surrealism in his two versions of Cactus Man, spiky, gesturing, anthropomorphic vegetations.
In 1937 he contributed to the Spanish Pavilion of the World's Fair in Paris and Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That same year he moved to Arcueil, near Paris, where he died on March 27, 1942.
Julio González was an outstanding painter and scilptor. He was best known for his small-scale, abstract iron sculptures. His works such as "Maternity" (1934) helped establish welded and forged metal as new sculptural idiom and had a major impact on the American artist David Smith. He also had a decisive impact on artists like Chillida, Tinguely and César.
The biggest collection of his work is held by the Valencia’s Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) with close to 400 pieces. The Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, Netherlands), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Luís Ángel Arango Library (Bogotá, Colombia), the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, and others also held his paintings.
Femme au miroir
Architectural Figure No. 2
Main gauche levée no. 2
Les amoreux II
Fantastic Figure
Daphne
Figure with Balls
Femme étendue lisant
Head
Torso
Reclining Figure
Monsieur Cactus
Visage criant a la grande main
La chevelure
Nu assis de dos
Homme cactus dansant
Tête au miroir
Femme au miroir
Quotations:
"The age of iron began many centuries ago by producing very beautiful objects, unfortunately for a large part, arms. Today, it provides as well, bridges and railroads. It is time this metal ceased to be a murderer and the simple instrument of a super-mechanical science. Today the door is wide open for this material to be, at last forged and hammered by the peaceful hands of an artist."
"To produce in space and to draw with new means, to include space and to construct something out of it as if it is a newfound material, this is my whole intention."
"One will not produce great art by drawing one's inspiration from New York skyscrapers. The truly novel works, which often look bizarre, are, quite simply, those which are inspired by Nature."
"Each, with his abilities, must try to raise himself up to the level of the work of art. This must be insisted upon, even many times. That's what I have often done..."
Julio González was a member of Saint Lluc Artists' Circle ("Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc").
In 1909 Julio González married Louise Berton, a model who was the subject of many of his drawings, but the marriage ended shortly after the birth of their daughter Roberta. His daughter married German painter, and Julio's assistant, Hans Hartung in 1938. In 1937, he married Marie-Therese Roux.
