Masque de Montserrat criant (Mask of Montserrat Screaming)

The independent nature of Julio González’s work meant that his sculpture was unclassifiable in terms of any conventional style. In fact, his discourse could be assimilated by contemporaries from the most disparate art movements, from Cubism to Surrealism, abstraction to Constructivism. In 1937 he did his previous work, La Montserrat, which showed how his new constructive syntactic system of iron sculpture, based on flat forms in welded iron sheet, was an equally appropriate vehicle for a realist sculpture loaded with social and political intent. This irregular, cracked iron sheet, scrap metal, became a means of expressing a broken-down humanity, arising out of the armed conflicts of the first half of the 20^th century. The use of cracked materials was taken further in Masque de Montserrat criant (Mask of Montserrat Screaming), with González presenting the tortured features of his archetypal feminine character, a female Catalan peasant with the generic name of Montserrat, in an attempt to show the pain suffered by the whole of the Spanish people during the Civil War.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio