Joan Miró Spanish, 1893-1983

Tête is a commanding presence that reflects the primal urge man finds to give face and eyes to gods and creatures we feel sure to exist. It is an exceptional sculpture of Miró’s series he focused on during the late 1960’s. Developing a progressive new approach to sculpture in the early 1960’s, Miró began constructing visceral works using raw, unidentifiable found objects and later casting them in bronze. Inspired by the ancient drawings in the Altamira Cave that he visited with the celebrated ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas in 1957, Miró created works reminiscent of children’s drawings, a true expression of the “infancy of art”. Such metaphorical “cradle of life” references was reflected in the prevailing surrealist theories current among the intellectuals and artist to whom Miró was exposed.

Miró was particularly concerned with the patina of the piece, which he refined himself while at the foundry; he equated its importance to the surface texture of a painting. As a result, Tête sports a beautiful patina, worked over extensively, mimicking the appearance of ancient outdoor sculptures streaked in verdigris. As we see in ancient art, the eyes of a piece are important, pointing to the perception that one is always being watched or seen. Tête thus attests to Miró’s profound ability to alter the aesthetics and purposes of objects and imbue them with new meaning.

We feel the 1960’s series he did of these heads in very small editions, communicates how strongly he felt that these were not commercial sculptures to be overseen in great number or reproduction. That it was antithetical to what the sculpture was suggesting, which was a uniqueness, a one of kind visage of a God or presence. It is also an important series as to date, not a lot of artists had as of yet reapproached this type of primitive nature sculpture in “casted” form. To cast in bronze is a hugely expensive and time intensive process and normally an edition of such small number makes it not justifiable. So, the small edition speaks to the regard in which Miro held these works.

Miró found it essential to be close to nature, and sometimes on walks he painted directly onto stones and rocks in order to mark the landscape surrounding him. In a similar sense, Tête can be seen as an amalgamation of objects from nature, repurposed and annotated by the artist. Formally, it draws comparisons to the Moai of Easter Island, which similarly exist as representations of the human form in harmony with their natural setting. As the artist himself posited:

May my sculptures be confused with elements of nature, trees, rocks, roots, mountains, plants, flowers. [I will] build myself a studio in the middle of the countryside, very spacious, with a facade that blends into the earth... and now and then take my sculptures outdoors so they blend into the landscape.

—Miró (M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 175).

His aim, though largely inspired by the world around him, was to “transport you into a world of unreality” by creating works that made up “a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters,” as he noted in a letter to his New York dealer Pierre Matisse. His work in sculpture was based in the ideology that paring compositions down to their most primal and primitive elements would allow them to communicate to viewers on an instinctive level, thus revealing psychological truths.

It was not until late in Miró’s storied career that he dedicated himself to the medium of sculpture. Inspired by the challenges of the new medium, Miró devoted much of his later years to the discipline, particularly from the late 1960s onwards. The artist created over three hundred bronzes between 1966 and his death in 1983. Unflagging in his aim to explore and redefine the medium, at age 81, Miró shared his enthusiasm with his friend Alexander Calder: “I am an established painter but a young sculptor.”