Although Julio González is best known for pioneering iron sculpture as a medium of radical abstraction, drawing remained a vital and continuous thread throughout his artistic life—a laboratory of ideas, a space of private vision, and a conceptual bridge between the pictorial and the sculptural. Trained in the fin-de-siècle atelier culture of Barcelona and deeply influenced by the graphic poetics of Puvis de Chavannes and Edgar Degas, González was an indefatigable draftsman. He was rarely without a pencil or brush in hand, and his notebooks, many of which are now dispersed, testify to a compulsive and lifelong engagement with line, gesture, and spatial notation.

His early works on paper, often executed in watercolor, pastel, or ink, focused on scenes of domestic intimacy and femininity: women at their toilette, seated nudes, sleeping figures, and women ironing. Yet even in these early explorations, González’s distinctive ability to use line not simply to describe but to construct is already apparent—a sensibility that would later inform his groundbreaking contribution to the sculptural vocabulary of modernism.

The small drawing Les Saules (c. 1927), executed in pen, India ink, and gouache, offers a particularly evocative example of González’s graphic sensibility during a transitional moment in his career. By this time, he had begun to conceive of sculpture as “drawing in space,” a radical idea that would culminate in his forged-iron works of the 1930s. “In the disquietude of the night,” he wrote, “the stars seem to show us points of hope in the sky.… It is these points in the infinite which are precursors of the new art: to draw in space.”

Although Les Saules appears, at first glance, far removed from the linear steel heads and abstract constructions of González’s mature sculptural period, it nevertheless reveals a clear conceptual affinity with them. The trees, stylized as rounded, top-heavy forms rendered in cool blue and green washes, are defined by fine black outlines that suggest both containment and movement. Their bulbous foliage hovers above slender brown trunks, which barely seem to anchor them to the ground. The rhythmic inclination of the trees, combined with the fluid, calligraphic lines that animate the sky, evokes not only wind but also sensations of flux, breath, and weightlessness. The landscape becomes less a specific place than a vibration—a melodic field articulated through line and tone.

The drawing dates from González’s renewed engagement with pictorial expression following a long period devoted to decorative arts and metalwork. Executed during the fertile years of the mid-to-late 1920s, Les Saules reflects both his developing modernist vocabulary and his enduring regional affiliations. Although González spent much of his adult life in Paris, his roots in Catalonia remained profound. The composition’s elegant order, economy of means, and stylized clarity bear traces of Noucentisme, the Catalan cultural movement associated with figures such as Joaquín Torres-García and Eugeni d’Ors, which advocated classical restraint, civic order, and Mediterranean balance.

González never fully embraced the doctrinaire classicism of Noucentisme, yet the movement’s vision of nature as a locus of idealized harmony resonates within this drawing. Catalonia in the 1920s was a crucible of aesthetic and political ferment, in which artists sought to forge a modernity grounded not solely in rupture, but also in continuity—between classical ideals and modern form, regional identity and cosmopolitan ambition.

The physical intimacy of the drawing is equally significant. Punched holes suggest that it may once have formed part of a sketchbook or private folio rather than having been conceived as a presentation work. Its modest scale invites close and sustained observation—what the philosopher Gaston Bachelard might have described as “the reverie of the small.” The work offers no spectacle and no dramatic subject. Instead, it rewards attentive looking, guiding the eye through subtle variations of wash, minor shifts in the angles of the trunks, and the almost musical phrasing of the linear accents in the sky.

Modest in both scale and subject, Les Saules nevertheless captures a convergence of forces: González’s profound engagement with nature as a visual and emotional register, his sensitivity to the formal rhythms of line and wash, and his evolving understanding of how drawing might transcend the page and anticipate the open, spatial logic of sculpture. It is not simply a drawing of trees, but a meditation on structure, movement, and inner stillness—a lyrical notation of a world held momentarily in suspension.