Joan Miro was a Spanish artist born on April 20th, 1893 in Barcelona. He specialized in painting, sculpting, and ceramics. Miro lived for 100 years, and in those years, he produced many fine pieces of art like “The Farm”, “The Harlequin’s Carnival”, and so on. Many of these pieces are surrealist. The piece of art I chose is called “Portrait of Enric Cristofol Ricart”. The reason I chose this was simply the unique design. Although considered modernist, it contained Japanese style art in the background, merging two different cultures. I thought it would be intriguing to understand it by digging a little deeper into it. This piece of art was completed sometime during the winter or early spring of 1917. Pictured in the painting, Enric Cristofol Ricart is the studio-mate, as well as friend. Essentially, this piece embodies Miro’s visual language. Miro’s visual language has been classified as surrealist and this piece brings out many aspects of it. Some of the highlighting traits of surrealist art are the abstraction of the items and characters, bright colors and brush stroke style. The painting context includes Miro introducing his own touches like the painter’s palette, and the waves of colorful lines that intwined into his black hair. The gallery consisted mostly of pieces that were difficult to make out at first glance. However, this piece was very straight forward. But upon closer analysis, it seems that there is more than meets the eye. I also noticed the clothing he was wearing. To me, it looked like a prisoner’s attire. I thought about whether or not that had something to do with Enric’s mentality about art. Although I doubt it was true, I couldn’t help but come to such a hypothesis. The way Enric’s face was portrayed using a wide spectrum of colors to shade it really caught my attention as well. His sharp features are highlighted with almost a brassy rainbow like range of colors. Despite all that in the foreground, the background is just as eye catching. Behind Enric in the top right corner, there’s a large Japanese style piece of art. I think it’s really cool that the two different cultures crossover in this painting. It’s something I don’t come across often. Some questions I have about this painting is what is the reasoning for the the attire Enric is wearing. I’m also curious as to why they included the Japanese part.
Phillips, I love this portrait and totally agree with you that one of the most intriguing things about it is the inclusion of the Japanese painting behind the subject. I wonder what we are supposed to make of this ‘painting within a painting’. I also love the use of color. Here Miro seems to have a lot in common with the Fauvists, another sub-category of modernist, who experimented with color by using colors in ways that were deliberately “not realistic” and instead conveyed particular emotions.