19th-20th Century Spanish

The son of a family of Catalan goldsmiths, González learned how to forge metal at a very early age. Trained at the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona and at , he also frequented the Els Quatre Gats café, the meeting place par excellence of Catalan practitioners of Modernismo, the Spanish variation of Art Noveau, and its offshoot post-Modernismo.

In 1900 he moved with his family to Paris, where he contacted artists of the stature of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Pablo Gargallo (1881-1934), exhibiting at the new in 1915 and 1916. In 1918 he entered the Soudure Autogène Française as an apprentice welder and improved his metalworking techniques. In spite of his beginnings as a painter, in 1927 he abandoned it definitively in favour of sculpture.

The following decade marked the peak of González’s career as an artist. In 1931 he collaborated with Picasso in making the sculpture Femme au jardin, currently at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. That same year he joined the

 Cercle et Carré 

A movement created in 1929 in Paris by Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949) and Michel Seuphor (1901-1999) with the goal of promoting the work of abstract artists ascribed to Constructivism. It was active only for one year, during which they published three issues of the magazine with the same name: Cercle et Carré.

art group and in 1934 he signed the Abstraction-Création manifesto with Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). For the Spanish Pavilion at the International Paris Exposition in 1937 he created La Montserrat, a sculpture through which he strove to address Spain’s social problems and the pain of war.

He died suddenly in Paris five years later.