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Lot Essay
Le Rêve (Le Baiser) is a totemic free-standing figure sculpture that belongs to the most productive and important period of González’s career. Executed in the early 1930s shortly after the artist’s inspirational and ground-breaking collaboration with Picasso and the creation of his first masks and heads, Le Rêve (Le Baiser) is one of the first of González’s full-length figure sculptures to express the full sense of spatial freedom that his revolutionary constructive approach to sculpture allowed.
González called the new technique that his collaboration with Picasso had enabled him to discover, “drawing in space”. The constructive process of making sculpture from welded iron plus the use of an essentially Cubist aesthetic which easily adapted itself to the three-dimensional concerns of the sculptor, resulted, for González in a way of sculpting that actively employed space as an essential and integral part of the work. “In traditional sculpture a leg is formed out of a single block,” González had observed, “but in sculpture using SPACE as MATERIAL, this same leg may be conceived of as SCOOPED OUT, designated by a single STROKE in a whole that likewise forms a single block. Traditional sculpture has a horror of holes and empty spaces. This new kind of sculpture uses them to their fullest potential, considering them an INDISPENSABLE material now” (Julio González ‘Notes on Sculpture’ reproduced in Picasso and the Age of Iron, ex. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1993. p.283).
The original iron is now housed in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Le Rêve (Le Baiser) is distinguishable from González’s earlier masks and heads by its complete celebration of open form - a characteristic that reveals the artist reveling in the new-found freedom that his welded iron technique of assemblage allowed. This freedom is asserted in the figure’s complete rejection of symmetry. Each separate element of the sculpture maintains its independence from the others as well as something of its original identity from its previous life. These autonomous elements are exquisitely combined to create a totemic figure of a woman with wind-blown hair. In addition, the centre of her figure is an elaboration on the theme of González’s mask-heads that seems also to depict a double-head image.
Roberta González recalled that for many years González referred to this sculpture as both “the dream” and “the kiss”. She added her own interpretation that the sculpture can be considered as either the actual kiss or the woman’s dream-memory of her absent lover. With its strongly phallic cone penetrating an open bowl at the heart of the woman’s body, the sculpture seems to suggest something more than a kiss. In many ways the work seems to evoke the same sense of tormented eroticism as is found in many Oceanic sculpture and the Oceanic-inspired sculptural figures of Picasso’s paintings from the beach at Dinard.
González called the new technique that his collaboration with Picasso had enabled him to discover, “drawing in space”. The constructive process of making sculpture from welded iron plus the use of an essentially Cubist aesthetic which easily adapted itself to the three-dimensional concerns of the sculptor, resulted, for González in a way of sculpting that actively employed space as an essential and integral part of the work. “In traditional sculpture a leg is formed out of a single block,” González had observed, “but in sculpture using SPACE as MATERIAL, this same leg may be conceived of as SCOOPED OUT, designated by a single STROKE in a whole that likewise forms a single block. Traditional sculpture has a horror of holes and empty spaces. This new kind of sculpture uses them to their fullest potential, considering them an INDISPENSABLE material now” (Julio González ‘Notes on Sculpture’ reproduced in Picasso and the Age of Iron, ex. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1993. p.283).
The original iron is now housed in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Le Rêve (Le Baiser) is distinguishable from González’s earlier masks and heads by its complete celebration of open form - a characteristic that reveals the artist reveling in the new-found freedom that his welded iron technique of assemblage allowed. This freedom is asserted in the figure’s complete rejection of symmetry. Each separate element of the sculpture maintains its independence from the others as well as something of its original identity from its previous life. These autonomous elements are exquisitely combined to create a totemic figure of a woman with wind-blown hair. In addition, the centre of her figure is an elaboration on the theme of González’s mask-heads that seems also to depict a double-head image.
Roberta González recalled that for many years González referred to this sculpture as both “the dream” and “the kiss”. She added her own interpretation that the sculpture can be considered as either the actual kiss or the woman’s dream-memory of her absent lover. With its strongly phallic cone penetrating an open bowl at the heart of the woman’s body, the sculpture seems to suggest something more than a kiss. In many ways the work seems to evoke the same sense of tormented eroticism as is found in many Oceanic sculpture and the Oceanic-inspired sculptural figures of Picasso’s paintings from the beach at Dinard.