The celebration of the Picasso year in Madrid has got off to a strong start: not only does the Thyssen Museum confront the Malaga-born artist with Coco Chanel, but the Mapfre Foundation reviews his decisive collaboration with another artist in a major exhibition: Julio González, Pablo Picasso and the dematerialization of sculpture , an exhibition with 160 works that cover the moment in which a new way of making sculpture with materials such as iron and with a language of planes, lines and voids was born in Europe.
A new sculpture that will have a decisive moment in the collaboration between Picasso and González between 1928 and 1932 to create a monument to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The exhibition, open until January 8, was designed by Tomàs Llorens, but after his death a year ago it has been curated by his son Boye.
Friends from a very young age, both Picasso and González lived in modernist Barcelona at the beginning of the 20th century, worked in Paris and maintained a friendship that was only broken by González’s death at the age of 66 in 1942, in the midst of the Nazi occupation. In fact, Picasso is one of the few who attended his funeral and would dedicate works to him, such as the painting Head of a bull that opens the exhibition.
A González who would work as a painter and goldsmith in Paris and even as a worker for Renault, where he would learn the technique of autogenous welding, which he would use in the new iron sculpture he would make years later. Picasso would precisely call him for that career when he was commissioned to pay homage to his friend Apollinaire. In one of the writer’s works, The Murdered Poet, a sculptor – a copy of Picasso himself – announces that he is going to erect a sculpture of the dead poet of the title. A sculpture that will not be made of bronze or marble: “I have to sculpt a profound statue of nothing, like poetry, like glory…”. And to give life to that nothingness that prophetically announced Apollinaire Picasso called González. A collaboration that would give works such as Woman in the Garden (1930), a key sculpture of the 20th century and which is in the exhibition, an iron sphinx with a single eye painted white that Picasso made with González and that he always kept in his castle in Boisgelup.
If the invention of abstract sculpture in iron is often located in the collaboration between both artists, the exhibition shows that it was a broader process and since the twenties there is a trend in Paris towards the dematerialization of the volumes of the sculpture with artists such as Lipchitz, Giacometti or Laurens, who dissolve volumes into planes and incorporate emptiness into the work. Picasso and González would be in the spirit of the time and González would bet on drawing in space with the metallic lines of his sculptures. After their collaboration, they evolved differently but the exhibition closes with a final approach: the war takes the man from Malaga to Gernika and his women crying, while González creates sculptures of his Montserrat, symbol of the Catalan woman, screaming or frightened by the horror warlike
