Masque de Montserrat criant (Mask of Montserrat Screaming)

Julio González is the great originator of iron sculpture, forging a personal body of work which reflects the tensions between abstraction stemming from Cubism and the heartrending and poetic potential of non-figurative Surrealism. González’s contribution to the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of 1937 was manifested in the figure of a peasant women carrying her baby with her left arm and holding a sickle with her right, in a work entitled La Montserrat (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). A sculpture which illustrated how the avant-garde constructive system, rooted in flat forms of curved and welded iron, could assist a realist work packed with social and political intent.
In Masque de Montserrat criant (Mask of Montserrat Screaming), here in its version cast in bronze, González explores the theme of the horrors of war, now centred on the pure expression of the disturbed face of his archetypal female personage, the Catalan peasant woman with the generic name of Montserrat. The thin, fragile mask, both fragmented and uneven, synthesises the pain of the Spanish civil population during the Civil War. At a time in which the artist had reached the maximum expression of abstraction in his sculpture, he returned to figuration to express terror and violence with greater formal invention.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio