The Fundació Joan Miró revealed a surprising new insight into the Spanish-Catalan artist’s work. The enigmatic composition Pintura, according to a press statement from the foundation, overlays an earlier portrait of Miró’s mother. This announcement comes nearly a century after the work’s completion—and about 50 years since the foundation first detected the likeness of a mysterious woman beneath the blue paint.
Joan Miró Painted Characteristic Pintura Atop Uncharacteristic Portrait
Between 1925 and 1927, Joan Miró—a multidisciplinary modern artist known for his playful and colorful abstract style—painted a characteristically enigmatic composition atop an earlier, more traditional portrait of his mother, Dolors Ferrà i Oromí. Without revealing this secret, Miró gifted Pintura to a friend, Joan Prats, who owned it until his death in 1970.
The Barcelona-based Fundació Joan Miró acquired Pintura shortly thereafter. Because the painting had suffered significant damage, the foundation conducted a restoration report in 1978, which included X-ray imaging. This report determined there was probably a portrait of an unknown woman hiding beneath Miró’s characteristically bright colors and meandering shapes—but further details could not be ascertained at that time.
How Researchers Identified the Hidden Portrait’s Subject
Eventually, Elisabet Serrat, the Fundació Joan Miró’s head of conservation and restoration, set out to identify the subject of the mysterious Miró portrait. This time, she and her team employed more advanced techniques, including infrared photography, X-ray spectroscopy, and fluorescence. Pintura revealed a hidden portrait of a stately and well-dressed middle-aged woman. Beneath three slightly raised lumps of paint on the canvas, the woman’s earrings and broach had been hiding in plain sight.
From there, Serrat worked to identify the overpainted woman. At Joan Miró’s studio on the island of Mallorca, she found a “delightful surprise”: a 1907 portrait depicting the very same woman that lurked beneath the blue brushstrokes of Pintura. She was the artist’s mother, Dolors Ferrà i Oromí, who had grown up in Mallorca.
Why Did Joan Miró Paint Over His Mother?
It was not unusual for Joan Miró to paint over his earlier portraits and landscapes as his painting style and materials grew increasingly unconventional. The artist once controversially proclaimed, “I want to assassinate painting! I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting.” This instinct extended to his own evolving body of work.
However, Pintura might tell a different and more personal story. When Miró completed the overpainting in 1927, he had just come onto the modern art scene in Paris, where his forays into Surrealism were being received positively by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder. Meanwhile, Miró’s bourgeois parents were finally giving up hope that their son would secure stable employment in finance. Perhaps Pintura was a private critique of old-fashioned portraiture—and a rejection of old-fashioned parental expectations.
