La Montserrat

González began this figure around 1935 as a sculpture about motherhood, a peasant woman holding her child. In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out, and the work he was still building took on a political charge. The woman now stands on a wooden box, the child on her left arm and a sickle in her right hand, braced as if ready to fight. He called her La Montserrat, after the mountain outside Barcelona that has long stood for his native Catalonia. González had written that it was high time iron stopped being a murderer and was at last forged and hammered by the peaceful hands of artists. He came from a family of metalworkers and had learned industrial welding at the Renault works, and the figure is built from sheets of iron, cut, beaten and welded together, with very little detail.