Misunderstood Master of Iron

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the Guggenheim, Spain's Julio Gonzalez gets his due "

The age of iron began many centuries ago," declared Catalan Sculptor Julio Gonzalez in the 1930s. "It is high time that this metal cease to be a murderer and the simple instrument of an overly mechanical science. Today the door is opened wide for this material to be--at last!-- forged and hammered by the peaceful hands of artists." Prophetic words, and it was largely Gonzalez's own work that made them true. The great shift in sculptural history during this century, away from "closed" (solid) to "open" (constructed) form, became possible through the use of iron. Gonzalez's work, and in particular his collaboration with Pablo Picasso more than half a century ago, was the clue to this shift. Without Gonzalez the story of modern sculpture would be wholly different, perhaps unrecognizable.

Curiously enough, there has not been a proper retrospective exhibition of his work in either Europe or America since 1956. If not a forgotten man of sculpture, Gonzalez (1876-1942) is certainly a much misunderstood one. But last month a show of almost 300 of his sculptures, paintings, drawings and related objects went on view at New York City's Guggenheim Museum. Organized with bracing intelligence by Art Historian Margit Rowell, who must by now be regarded as the world authority on the relation between cubism and constructivism in modern sculpture, it shows us Gonzalez whole for the first time in more than a generation.

The surprising thing is that Gonzalez did not take up a full-time career in sculpture until he was past 50. He was trained as a decorative-metalworker. Iron is everywhere in Barcelona, foaming along the balconies, standing out in rigid black swags and spikes from the corners of 19th century buildings, lacing itself into intricate grilles and diapers and chevaux-de-frise: it is the bronze of Spain. The Gonzalez family had been forging it for at least three generations. Julio Gonzalez worked in the family firm; he went to art school and learned to draw, but at root he was thought of as a forjador and not a "fine" artist.

The Guggenheim show contains a fair sampling of his early metalwork: boxes and buckles, necklaces and rings, all made with perfect competence and a brisk sense of design, none of them markedly different from or technically better than the general run of high-quality craft metalwork that came out of Barcelona in the years of el modernismo, or art nouveau. After 1900, when Gonzalez moved to Paris, he and his sisters made a living by selling such things in a boutique. What with his metal ornaments and their laces and embroideries, the Gonzalez clan in Paris was closer to the fashion industry than to the centers of the art world. Gonzalez painted, mostly awkward imitations of Puvis de Chavannes. He drew, with ability. He turned his metalworker's hand to making hammered copper masks. This went on through the teens and '20s. In short, Gonzalez took longer to peck his way out of the egg than any modern artist of comparable stature, and what cracked the shell and released him was his relationship to his fellow Spaniard in Paris, Picasso.

Picasso had been working in sheet metal since 1912, the year he snipped and folded a piece of that material into a cubist origami guitar, thus producing what was probably the first constructed (as distinct from modeled or carved) sculpture in the history of art. But he was not a skilled metal worker. He had never troubled to learn welding, forging or sol dering. He therefore turned to Gonzalez for help, as other sculptors, such as the Spaniard Pablo Gargallo (1881-1933), had already done. Between 1928 and 1931, Gonzalez helped Picasso construct six sculptures of wire, rod and sheet metal. Gonzalez humbly asked Picasso for permission to "work in the same manner as himself," which, as Margit Rowell points out, meant three things: using scrap metal as a medium in its own right, putting sculptures together like iron collages of existing parts, and translating "conventional subject matter [a nude, a face, a harlequin] into ex pressive ciphers or signs." Apparently, Picasso was flattered to agree. For the next decade, until his death in 1942, Gonzalez went on to create a body of terse, harsh work that would inspire most iron sculpture to come.

There is no doubt that Picasso was the inventor of planar and then linear iron sculpture in the 20th century. But through Gonzalez, this fundamental addition to the sculptor's repertory was given a syntax. The friction of Picasso's urgency made Gonzalez forget the need for "finisish" in metalwork, endowing his iron sculptures in the 1930s with an extraordinary rawness, directness, vitality and self-sufficiency.

Gonzalez did not leap into abstraction, and at first his sculpture was permeated with cubist devices acquired from Picasso. Harlequin, Pierrot, 1930-31, makes no attempt to conceal its Picassoan borrowings: the grille of lozenges quoting a harlequin's costume, the whimsical shield-mask of a face. Gradually these images were stripped and pared and stripped again. Inside the maker of art nouveau neck laces, a master of formal reduction was signaling to be let out. By the mid-1930s Gonzalez had got his sign for a human figure down to a mere gesture of forged bar-iron, surmounted by a spiky quiff of met al hair; a metal plate with two cuts and a couple of bends would both evoke a face and suggest a "primitive" African mask.

If his work touched constructivism at one end, it encountered surrealism at the other in its liking for metamorphosis. The Angel. The Insect. Dancer, circa 1935, belongs to the surrealist vein of hallucinatory insect life--praying mantises, grasshoppers and the like--and its springing rods and vanes achieve a taut, predatory balance between grace and threat.

Yet although Gonzalez could invest his abstract use of iron with the deepest and most complex layers of formal sensation, he refused to become programmatic about abstraction. If meaning required it, he could turn back to the figure--and did, in The Montserrat, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government in 1937 for its exhibition pavilion in Paris. The Montserrat is the kind of sculpture that can no longer convincingly be done, or so it seems: images of the Enduring Peasant, sickle in one hand and baby on shoulder, are apt to look very condescending and nostalgic today. But to Gonzalez, a Catalan living half a century ago, this was a natural figure from experience. He was able to invest its stance--legs planted like olive trunks, lifted face scanning the sky--with an archaic alertness; The Montserrat also derives some of its meaning from the same history that provoked Picasso's Guernica. (The sickle is a weapon against Franco, an emblem of Communism, not just an agricultural tool.)

But what carries the image is Gonzalez's unerring sense of sculptural form: the massive rotundities of the skirt and the baby's hood, the way the literal folding of the hammered sheet iron parallels the folds of the cloth it depicts, the difficult rendering of nuances in a stiff, intractable substance. That Gonzalez should have moved between this and abstraction is not proof of his indecisiveness. Rather, it shows what protean abilities lay beneath his work, when feeling was strong enough to roll back even the hard-won data of his own style.

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.