In the art world's shadow

Pablo Picasso cast a long shadow. Not only was he the most famous Cubist, but with his subsequent explorations and prodigious output, he dominated the art world—particularly the public's perception of it—for decades. Of course, other artists emerged to critical acclaim despite this seeming hegemony, but there was one whose renown has always suffered from an association with Picasso: his fellow Catalan, Julio González. His work has not been seen locally in any depth since a show at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1969, so it is especially gratifying that the Chicago Cultural Center is hosting the traveling exhibition "Julio González: Sculpture and Drawings from the IVAM Collection."

Drawn from the extensive González holdings of the Institut Valencia d'Art Moderne in Valencia, Spain, the exhibit comprises nearly 40 pieces, offering a concise yet informative consideration of the artist's development. Born in Barcelona in 1876, into a family of metalsmiths, González was determined early on to become a painter, enrolling at the city's Academy of Fine Arts while still a teen. In 1907, he was showing at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where the family had relocated in 1900. By the time Picasso sought his help in making sculpture in 1928 (the two had first met in Barcelona), González was an established artist conversant with the various strains of modernism.

Although González had maintained his smithing skills (and even advanced his ability by learning new welding techniques at an auto factory), his work in metal had remained relatively decorative, or painterly figurative (Sitting Nude from Behind, 1927). Working with Picasso, González not only initiated a new way of realizing sculpture—by welding metal rather than casting it—but the process of manifesting Picasso's graphic sensibility in three dimensions apparently unleashed new imaginative powers in the 52-year-old Gonzalez.

With an indirect and sometimes fractured aspect (Raised Hand, 1937), the most inventive pieces González fashioned inhabit a seductive realm between figuration and abstraction. In his hands, the dance of solid and void that defines any sculptural project assumed a character in which the gestural essence of drawing and the constructed quality of assemblage often converged. Planes, rather than more substantial masses, frequently carry the image, and even when he turned to casting in bronze, González's work appears wrought.

González once remarked, "One will not produce great art in making perfect circles...with the aid of a compass or in drawing one's inspiration from New York skyscrapers. The truly novel works, which often look bizarre, are quite simply those which are directly inspired by nature." Once he hit his stride, for the most part, González drew from nature but did not render it directly. The Hair (1934) is but a line, curved and splayed to form a dynamic shape. It's one of those works that seems so easy to grasp, but then plays cat to a mouse in one's mind. Lovers II, (1933)—a tapered cylinder atop an open cone—echoes the surrealist impulse of Alberto Giacometti's Suspended Ball.

González's most progressively creative period was from 1930 to 1940. But even in the mid-1930s, he occasionally produced more traditionally formal pieces, such as Head of a Peasant Woman, which looks as if it could have fallen off the facade of a medieval cathedral. Left Raised Hand, 1942, roughly molded and naturalistic, emits the emotive power of something by Rodin. Of course, for a multitalented artist whose avant-garde bona fides are unassailable, these outings are not retrograde excursions, but simply the full exercise of a singular imagination.

With war and the occupation of Paris, González had little access to materials, and was forced to content himself with drawings and plaster casts. He died of a heart attack in 1942, at age 66. He was, as American sculptor David Smith avowed, the first master of the torch, "the father of all iron sculpture in this century."

"Julio González: Sculpture and Drawings from the IVAM Collection" is at the Chicago Cultural Center through January 8.