Drawing in Space

All Julio Gonzalez wanted to do was “to draw in space.” Born September 21, 1876, Gonzalez grew up working in his father’s metalsmith shop, learning how to work and handle with metal shaping tools, curving, folding, cutting, and welding metal together to suit different purposes. Gonzalez found his purpose of life in art, especially after meeting Pablo Picasso and discovering the world of Cubism. Taking the intellectual concept of Cubism, Gonzalez added heart and humor, creating such works as Head (above) in 1935, with it’s tiny mouth full of sharp teeth and comic tuft of hair at the other end of the wide arc of metal suggesting the head itself.

Gonzalez first met Picasso in their native Spain in the late 1890s and met him again after moving to Paris in 1900. The two artists collaborated on several sculptures, with Gonzalez offering technical assistance and Picasso offering more philosophical advice. Gonzalez furthered the use of welding as an artistic technique and helped not only Picasso but also Constantin Brancusi in realizing their imaginative visions in cold hard steel. Woman Combing Her Hair (above) amazingly allows you to “see” the complete female figure in the metal, her hair suggested by the curved bars of metal trailing into space and the arch of her back shown in the smooth curve of the main metal torso. I’ve always loved Gonzalez’s sculpture because it follows the spirit of Cubism without disintegrating the image altogether, taking the cognitive leap in seeing that Cubism demands without excluding all but the initiated.

There’s also a Romanticism to Gonzalez’s work that the other Cubists seem to leave out in their sculptures and especially in the monochromatic paintings of Picasso and Georges Braque. The Kiss (above), from 1931, seems like an update of Auguste Rodin’s version. "It is high time," Gonzalez once wrote, "that this metal cease to be a murderer and the simple instrument of an overly mechanical science. Today, the door is opened wide to this material to be forged and hammered by the peaceful hands of artists." Gonzalez died in 1942, during the middle of World War II, sharing a studio and home with fellow artist Hans Hartung (with whom he also shared a birthday, see below). With his gift for making cold, hard metal bloom with the warmth of life, love, and peace, Gonzalez today seems more alchemist than sculptor.

Working from Scratch

While sharing a home and studio between 1937 and 1942 in France, Hans Hartung and Julio Gonzalez must have celebrated several birthdays together, amused that they shared a common birthday as much as a love of art. Hartung, born on this date in 1904, created some of the most beautiful gestural abstract works of the mid-20th century, such as T1963-R6 (above), from 1963, which displays no bitterness from the harsh treatment he suffered at the hands of the Nazis during the occupation of Paris and the pain of losing a leg while fighting for France in North Africa during World War II.

Hartung studied philosophy and art history at the University of Leipzig before turning his full attention to art and moving to Paris in the 1930s. After years of studying German artists such as Lovis Corinth and Emil Nolde, Hartung now studied Cezanne and Van Gogh and learned the secrets of Cubism. During this time, Hartung met Wassily Kandinsky, whose new style of abstraction inspired Hartung to create a style later known as Art Informel (also known as Tachisme), a kindler and gentler form of Abstract Expressionism in which gesture and rhythm become the elements of a piece. T1937-33 (above) shows the influence of Kandinsky on Hartung’s work. Although it looks like a random arrangement of shapes and gestures, Hartung carefully arranged the pieces on the canvas from smaller works of automatic drawings, hoping to capture the energy of those smaller pieces in a larger format.

When the Nazis occupied France during World War II, they labeled Hartung’s work as “degenerate art” and even imprisoned him for seven months. Sadistically, his captors placed him in a red-lined cell when they learned he was an artist, thinking the color would damage his eyes. Fortunately, Hartung was released and later fled to fight with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. As thanks for his heroic service, France granted Hartung citizenship in 1945. In the 1960s, at the height of his reputation, Hartung developed a technique in which he scratched gestures into acrylic paint, such as in T1963-R6 (top of this post) and T1964-H31 (above). In T1964-H31, Hartung scratches into a two-toned surface of pure colors, as if he had taken a work by Mark Rothko and added his signature touches. I like to imagine that such an image represents the rising of a new dawn, a bright sun on the horizon for Hartung and Europe, after the sadness of two long wars.