Communication with the purpose of culturally promoting artists included in the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Collection, works protected by intellectual property rights. Their total or partial reproduction or processing by any means, or their transmission or cession in any form is forbidden without the authorisation of the holder of the rights to the works.
Le cri (The shout)
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Julio González (Barcelona, 1876–Arcueil, France, 1942)
Title: Le Cri (The Shout)
Year: 1940
Technique: coloured pencils, pen and India ink on blue paper
Size: 33 x 24.5 cm
During the French interwar period, the legacies of cubism and surrealism formed the backdrop to Julio González’s practice and appeared alternately or together in his works. Sometimes these works acquired a quasi-abstract nature, although they never lost the reference to reality or proximity to their immediate context: many of González’s images made during the Second World War—and, before that, during the Spanish Civil War—have particularly harsh connotations which, as Dorival said, gave them the quality of symbols, of obsessive, persistent myths. The French critic also mentioned the concept of metamorphosis, and this idea-force of surrealism is intuited in images like Le Cri, which highlights anguish in a moment of great distress, embodying the formal diversity that characterises González’s mature work. The theme of the shout, sometimes associated with the figure of Montserrat—personification of Catalan peasantry in a female figure that simultaneously expresses strength and vulnerability, but above all insubordination in a situation combining war with the rise of fascism—emerges in this work as the end result of a metamorphosis that nevertheless preserves its emotional power intact.
The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson acquired this drawing at Galería Guillermo de Osma at ARCO 2023.