Amanda Herold-Marme, « Roberta González : un parcours artistique forgé par la guerre », Art&Sociétés, n°73, 2014
→Amanda Herold-Marme, “Roberta González : une artiste de l’entre-deux”, master’s thesis, supervised by A. Pierre, Sorbonne Université, 2010
→Vicente Aguilera Cerni, Julio, Joan, Roberta González: Itinerario de una dinastía, Barcelona: Polígrafa, 1973
→Catherine Valogne, Roberta González, Paris: Le Musée de Poche, 1971
Roberta González, MNAM Centre Pompidou, Paris, April 2024-March 2025
→Roberta González, una pequeña colección madrileña, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Conde Duque, Madrid, October 2023-Setember 2024
→Roberta Gonzalez, ou l’art de voler de ses propres ailes, Paris, galerie Espace des Femmes, September 2022, in conjunction with the “Journées du Matrimoine 2022”, of which Roberta was nominated the keynote figure
→Roberta y Julio González, IVAM Centre Julio González, mars-juin 2012
Franco-Spanish painter and draftswoman.
Roberta González became active on the Parisian and international art scene in the 1930s. She was immersed in the arts from an early age. Abandoned by her mother, she grew up in a Catalan enclave in Montparnasse, with her father, the sculptor Julio González (1876-1942), and her aunts, who worked in fashion and as artisans.
She began her artistic training at the Académie Colarossi in the late 1920s. Her early work was influenced by that of her father. In the mid 1930s she transitioned from a realistic style to a more avant-garde approach: her sharp angles and Surrealist deformations express her despair at the injustice of the Spanish Civil War.
She held her first show in 1939 at Galerie Henriette with Hans Hartung (1904-1989), the German painter to whom she was married for over ten years. The Second World War forced the newlyweds into exile, in the Lot region of south-western France, as H. Hartung was considered a traitor by the Germans. However, among the worst hardships Roberta suffered during the war was her father’s sudden death in 1942.
Back in Paris in 1945, R. González set out to assert herself as an independent creator in a world turned upside down. Along with H. Hartung, a key figure of the lyrical abstraction movement, she frequented the Soulages, the Schneiders, the Kleins and the Zervoses. She painted a series of portraits of contemplative women who reflected her own quest to find a personal style that synthesised figuration and abstraction.
R. González created a visual vocabulary composed of geometric and figurative symbols – profiles, female nudes, arrows, eyes, suns, birds — that coexist in an undefined space, often against a backdrop of swaths of paint applied in expressive gestural strokes, as is evident in Chant sombre (1960). She also executed a series of masks, in which the subject’s melancholic, piercing gaze contrasts with the bright colours used, for example, in Masque (1965).
She held several solo exhibitions in Parisian galleries, including Jeanne Bucher, Nina Dausset and Galerie de France. The French state acquired her work and was also recognized by art critics (for example, she received an honourable mention in the Prix Hallmark de Peinture in 1949).
From the 1960s she lived between the Parisian region and the Côte d’Azur, in Bormes-les-Mimosa, where her home-studio was a modernist villa built from her own architectural designs. Her artistic pursuits culminated in large, dynamic and colourful paintings in which duality is the guiding principle, such as Portraits de famille no 2 (1969). All facets of R. Gonzalez’s practice – painting, drawing, sculpture, illustrated books – were fuelled by the synergy of contrasts: figuration/abstraction, stillness/movement, melancholy/joy, shadow/light, human/animal.
Her work can be found in private and institutional collections the world over, including France (MNAM, Fondation Maeght, González Administration), Spain (IVAM, MNAC), Germany (Sammlung Domnick) and the United States (Davis Museum at Wellesley College).
A notice produced with the assistance of the González Administration.