Roberta González’s Nu féminin effrayé from 1938 is a raw and urgent depiction of fear, a portrait of the body in crisis. Rendered in black pastel and ink, the figure is violently fractured, her limbs and torso tangled in a web of erratic lines, her wide, hollowed eyes staring out in alarm. The expressive force of González’s line work amplifies the psychological weight of the composition—each stroke seems like a tremor, an echo of an internal rupture that mirrors the external ruptures unfolding across Europe on the eve of World War II. The contorted figure, at once exposed and shielded, evokes a sense of bodily vulnerability, a silent scream translated into visual form. The stark contrast between shadow and illumination, with areas of deep black ink pressing against delicate, ghostly spaces of white, heightens the sense of emotional and physical instability.

This drawing was created in a Europe on the brink of disaster, in a France where the Spanish Civil War had already sent shockwaves through the intellectual and artistic communities. González, born in Paris to Catalan parents, was deeply connected to the modernist movements that defined the city’s avant-garde. She was acutely aware of the suffering wrought by war, particularly as a daughter of exile and a woman working in a largely male-dominated artistic milieu. Unlike Picasso, who monumentalized female anguish through the form of Dora Maar in works like Weeping Woman (1937), González shifts her attention beyond the personal and toward the collective. Nu féminin effrayé does not depict an individual woman but rather a universalized female body caught in the grip of terror, a testament to how women’s experiences of war—displacement, trauma, and uncertainty—were too often rendered invisible. By doing so, she positions the female form not as an allegorical or eroticized object, but as an embodied record of violence and endurance, etched onto the very surface of the paper.

There are strong resonances with Surrealism in González’s treatment of form and space, though her approach remains distinct. The woman’s disjointed anatomy and the eerie mask-like visage in the upper right recall the dreamlike distortions of artists like André Masson and Leonor Fini, yet González’s method is not one of subconscious automatism. Instead, her distortions are deliberate interventions, the fragmentation of the body serving as a direct response to the ruptures of war, displacement, and gendered violence. The architectural elements in the background, suggested through diagonal slashes and enclosing frames, evoke an oppressive confinement, as though the figure is both witness and prisoner to a reality that threatens to consume her. In this way, Nu féminin effrayé is not an escape into the unconscious, as many Surrealist works were, but a confrontation with the encroaching horrors of war in real time.

In this drawing, González finds her own voice, moving beyond the artistic legacies of her father, Julio González, and her contemporaries in the Parisian avant-garde. She asserts the female body as a site of historical inscription, where war and trauma are recorded not only in the annals of politics but in the very sinews of flesh. Her approach is one of profound empathy and urgency, refusing to distance herself from the suffering she depicts. The terror in this woman’s gaze is not abstract—it is immediate, human, and deeply felt. It is a testament to González’s artistic vision that Nu féminin effrayé remains as arresting today as it was in 1938, a visual archive of women’s histories in times of crisis, long before such histories were fully recognized.