In 1928 Picasso, who at that date lacked experience of working in iron, asked his friend Julio González to assist him with the creation of a funerary monument to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The collaboration between the two artists has traditionally been viewed as the starting point for a new type of sculpture - iron sculpture - which would come to prevail in art in the central decades of the 20th century.

The exhibition organised and presented by Fundación MAPFRE, which Friends can enjoy in a private visit, takes a closer look at this episode with the aim of analysing the wider context in which metal sculpture evolved in the 1920s. It also reveals how Picasso and González’s shared affinities and concerns were not confined to this brief period but rather began in modernista Barcelona in the early 20th century and continued for years in Paris until Julio González’s death in 1942.