As Angelenos know better than most, proximity to celebrity can muddle an individual's status as friends, associates and partners of the famous are pulled into the limelight -- and eclipsed at the same time.
This is true of the Catalan sculptor Julio Gonzalez, whose affiliation with Pablo Picasso brought him recognition but also virtually guaranteed him a second-fiddle position in history. This was perhaps reinforced by Gonzalez's own modesty, his tendency toward small-scale works and the fact that he dropped out of the Paris art scene at the high point of his development. He was a bridge figure, between Picasso's generation and that of emerging post-World War II sculptors, including American David Smith, Anthony Caro of Britain and the Basque Eduardo Chillida. Smith, Caro and Chillida became known for explorations in ironworking, the area Gonzalez opened to fine art.
A traveling exhibition aspires to properly introduce Gonzalez to U.S. audiences. On view at USC Fisher Gallery through Oct. 29, "Julio Gonzalez: Sculpture and Drawings From the IVAM Collection" is co-curated by Fisher Director Selma Holo and Angel Kalenberg, director of the National Museum of Visual Arts in Montevideo, Uruguay. The show, which opened in New York, travels to Chicago and Miami after leaving L.A., where the last major Gonzalez exhibition was in 1965. Drawn entirely from the collections of the IVAM, the Valencia Institute of Modern Art, the repository of the artist's estate, the exhibition includes 43 works: mostly sculptures, but also reliefs and drawings as well as dazzling jewelry and decorative wrought-iron pieces.
Gonzalez was born in 1876 into a family of Barcelona metal smiths and apprenticed in the family business. He became versed in the fashionable architectural style of Modernisme, a Spanish variant of Art Nouveau, and as a teenager mixed with members of the Catalan avant-garde, including the young Picasso. When business declined after Spain's 1898 defeat in the Spanish-American War, the family moved to Paris, where Gonzalez focused on drawing and painting and associated with the likes of Cubist painter Juan Gris and Modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi.
The long involvement with drawing and painting proved essential to Gonzalez's development as he moved from two dimensions into relief and finally sculptures in the round that emphasized line and plays on positive and negative space. Work during World War I in a Renault car factory, where he learned to weld, and later as an assistant to Brancusi, also proved formative. Perhaps no contact was more important, however, than his reacquaintance in the late '20s with Picasso, who needed a fabricator and teacher to help him realize ideas in metal.
