Julio González (Barcelona, Spain, 1876 – Arcueil, France, 1942) is remembered as the father of modern iron sculpture, the artist who first proved that welded metal, long confined to industry and craft, could carry the full weight of artistic expression.

Born into a family of metalsmiths, González learned to work metal in his father's Barcelona workshop while attending evening classes at the city's School of Fine Arts. He moved to Paris around 1900 with his family, where he renewed a friendship with a fellow Barcelona native, Pablo Picasso, and formed a close bond with the sculptor Pablo Gargallo, a relationship that would prove decisive to his own development. For years, though, González supported himself chiefly as a painter and jeweler; the death of his brother Joan in 1908 plunged him into a long depression, during which he largely abandoned art. During World War I, working at the Renault automobile factory, he learned the technique of oxyacetylene welding: a skill developed for wartime industry that he would spend the rest of his career repurposing for sculpture, drawn to iron, he later suggested, in part because he wanted to reclaim a material otherwise given over to munitions and machines.