Julio González spent most of his life in Paris, where he was friends with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Juan Gris (1887-1927) and Pablo Gargallo (1881-1934). There, González developed a personal style halfway between and abstraction, tradition and modernism.

His representations are limited to the use of essential planes and lines of force, engaging with only the most significant elements of the chosen subject. His themes draw inspiration from Nature and from the human figure, more generally women, yet without ever relinquishing their most academic interpretation.

This unaffected yet finely rendered work on paper showcases the most intimate facet of an artist who devoted almost all his career to sculpture. Main et cheveux (Hand and Hair) represents a woman combing her hair with her fingers. It is part of his series of drawings depicting heads of “femmes à leur toilette”, although in this case he displaces the head towards a corner of the composition, ceding the main role to the hand as it disentangles a lock of hair. Julio González’s way of painting is similar to how he sculpts. He gives the forms a sense of volume that is almost asking to be taken to three dimensions. The angle of the wrist and the position of the fingers afford the hand with movement. The half-finished female head with an empty eye socket addresses the same spatiality as his sculptures of masks, with a protruding nose and sunken eyes and with well-drawn eyebrows and nasal septum. This small work, made one year before the death of the artist, is a record of his private, personal work at his studio in Arcueil. Worth noting is the presence of the two drawing pin holes in the bottom corners of the paper, perhaps made by González himself who could have shown the piece upside down. As far as the support is concerned, he used paper from a notebook. On it, he drew a quick pencil sketch. Later, with identical quickness, he used watercolour to produce shadows and lights, finally defining the lines with Indian ink.