Julio Antonio. Sculptor

“Julio Antonio was naturally gifted young sculptor. I believe he was from Tarragona, and had the body of a Roman. He was a fortunate man: in life everything turned out well for him, and he abused his good fortune and conditions a little. Julio Antonio had a great talent for his profession and he was able to product magnificent busts with great expression.”

With these words, Pio Baroja summarised the life of Julio Antonio, a short life of 30 something years characterised by a prolific artistic output and his love of art.

“A dark young man looked at the lines I was drawing with the charcoal. His face was beautiful, with olive skin, a large and sensual mouth, ambitious about life, with an aquiline nose and the strong hands of a creator”.  Victorio Macho

JULIO ANTONIO or Antonio Rodríguez Hernández was born in Móra d’Ebre in 1889, and from an early age showed an interest in art, in particular drawing and sculpture. His training began in his place of birth, with the teacher Lluís Vinyes Viñales who introduced him to the world of drawing and art.

Family of Julio Antonio (1895)

In 1896 the family moved to Tarragona, and Julio Antonio attended classes at the Tarragona Athenaeum for the Working Classes. His professors were Marià Pedrol, for drawing, and Bernat Verderol, for sculpture. The Archaeological Museum of Tarragona and the sculptures, inscriptions and tapestries of Tarragona cathedral, which Julio Antonio used to visit, began to shape his artistic memory with images and ideas that would later materialise in his works.

In 1897 his father, a first infantry sergeant, was relocated to Cuba, while his mother, his two sisters and Julio Antonio moved to Barcelona where he continued his apprenticeship at the studio of the sculptor Feliu Ferrer i Galzeran.

The family also lived in Múrcia, where he moved in 1903 and where Julio Antonio produced his first sculptural ensemble: Flores malsanas (Sick flowers). Julio Antonio still had not adopted his artistic name and was known as Antonio Rodríguez.

In 1907 he was awarded a scholarship by the Diputació of Tarragona to study in Madrid, an opportunity which allowed him to start working at the studio of Miquel Blay (Olot 1866 – Madrid 1936), one of the most acclaimed sculptors in the country, from whom he gained great technical skill in his work.

During this period he laid the theoretical foundations of his future, engaging in meetings and discussions on literature, music, poetry and art with Miquel Viladrich, Victorio Macho, Enrique Lorenzo Salazar and Lluís Bagaria, among others.

After a period at Miquel Blay’s studio, Julio Antonio and his colleague Miquel Viladrich decided to set up their own studio in 1908 in C/ Villanueva in Madrid. They shared the studio, the house, the little money they had and the necessities and rigour of winter. They worked intensely day and night and paid their models when their income allowed.

He also developed a friendship with the writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna who, one year later, in 1915, would establish the famous Cripta del Pombo literary circle, attended by numerous personalities from the literary and artistic world, including Julio Antonio.

The writings of Gómez de la Serna would become key to understanding the life and work of Julio Antonio:

“At times he would appear with his face of a flamenco singer, with his coarse and blackened expression, and his hands of a bull slaughterer, hands which moved in the air as if covered in clay, the index finger always “thin as a rake” of the sculptor that models what he says... Increasingly, he speaks using signs like a mute, and submerges further into the limbo of his clay, while his prestige grows like one of those tall poplars of Segovia”.

“Sculpture needed a resurrector, and Julio Antonio appears with that task of resurrecting its flesh and spirit. In his work there is not excessive clay as in that of Oslés or in the disciples of Rodin and de Meunier, yet there is always clay, to a greater or lesser extent. He has the skill and the accuracy of the accurate, an ideal and precise accuracy, when his hand adds or removes a piece of clay with one scrape over the moist clay”.         Gómez de la Serna

Julio Antonio was clear about the sources he would have to see in order to train as an artist, who he would have to learn from and how he would have to do it. Thanks to a travel scholarship awarded to him by the Diputació of Tarragona, the sculptor was able to spend three months travelling through Italy with his mother, visiting Rome, Florence and Naples. This trip allowed him to familiarise himself with the work of two of the great sculptors who, alongside Rodin, most influenced his work: Donatello and Michelangelo.

I will ask for protection from the great works of the grand classical masters, I will ask them to teach me where the mystery of form and beauty lies and undoubtedly by studying them and rejecting them they will tell me a great deal and it is then that I will produce my work…        Julio Antonio

After returning from Italy, he moved to Almadén, with Enrique Lorenzo Salazar -disciple and loyal friend of Julio Antonio-, where he worked on Bustos de la Raza (Busts of the Race), a series of sculptures in which the artist aims to summarise the spirit of the inhabitants of villages in Spain.

In 1910 he began his friendship with the Romero de Torres brothers, Julio and Enrique. This friendship, especially with Julio, and his love for Andalusia translated into specific results in this output: the monument the sculptor decided to produce of the bullfighter Lagartijo, La Mujer de la Mantilla (The Woman with the Shawl), two drawings and a proof of the engraving Homenaje a Córdoba (Homage to Cordoba).

In 1911 he won the competition to produce the Monument als Herois de 1811 (Monument to the Heroes of 1811), which Tarragona City Council had organised to commemorate the gesture of the men who gave their lives defending the city during the French war. His project was selected ahead of proposals by Anselm Nogués and Carles Mani.

In 1912, Julio Antonio moved his Madrid studio to an annex of the Codina Foundry in Madrid. The studio was a meeting point for artists and intellectuals of the period, and working at the foundry, in a larger studio, allowed him to work in large-scale projects, such as the Monument a Chapí (Monument to Chapí), which is currently located in the Retiro Park of Madrid, the Monument a Richard Wagner (Monument to Richard Wagner) project and the sculpture of Sant Joan (Saint John), which we only know from a photograph.

During the decade of 1910, he planned and produced a significant number of monuments, making him one of the best-known artists in the country. Many monuments commemorate various personalities, while others represent more sublime concepts, such as work, poetry and spirituality.

Some of these works were commissioned, while others were the result of his own initiative; predominant in all of them is the quest for the true identity of the subject matter through formal serenity.

From left to right, Enrique Lorenzo Salazar, Agustín Mediavilla “el Choco”, Ernesto Menager and Julio Antonio playing the guitar (Madrid, 1916)

In 1916 he moved to a small studio in Valencia, where he often travelled to visit his family or to recover from the illness that had now started to undermine his health. In this city he started to plan a large-scale project, the El faro spiritual (The Spiritual Tower), a monument 70 metres in height and the bearer of moral and spiritual values, to be erected at Cerro de los Ángeles, the central point of the Iberian peninsula.

Julio Antonio died on 15 February 1919, at the Villa Luz sanatorium in Madrid, where he had been admitted by Dr. Gregorio Marañón, accompanied by his mother and sisters, Dr. Marañón, Enrique Lorenzo Salazar, Julián Lozano, Lluís Bagaría, Moya del Pino, Vázquez Díaz and Ramón Pérez de Ayala. His death became a veritable cultural loss which was widely covered by the press of the period.

Shortly before this, the city of Madrid and its political and cultural representatives had paid him homage in the public presentation of one of his final works, Mausoleo Lemonier (the Lemonier Mausoleum).

“Julio Antonio was that class of men who, when they die, have a hole in the ground for their body and another one for the memory in the soul of all those who knew him...” .        Gregorio Marañón