Online Art Gallery

Personnage, 1972
Joan Miro, (1893-1983, Spanish)
Resin over steel armature, painted with polyurethane (88" x 135 ^3/4" x 63")

Gift of Betty and David Jones, Dorothy and Wendell Cherry

Miro was already headed towards a fantasy art when he was introduced to surrealism in 1922. Surrealism's emphasis on irrationality and the importance of dreams prompted him to use childhood memories as inspiration. With whimsical freedom, he created an hallucinatory world of creatures whose bulbous shapes seem to have been a cartoon-like potential for constant change. It was Miro's particular genius to give free rein to the products of his imagination rather than strictly guiding them. "I work like a gardener," Miro explained.

Despite its bottom-heavy stability, the two-sided Personnage possesses an odd disequilibrium. Its ballooning and receding convexities and concavities sprout multiple visual puns on male and female forms. Underlying Miro's humor was a sense of wonderment and reverence for every kind of life, real or imagined.