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Portrait of Joaneta Obrador

Portrait of woman in black and white stripped dress against floral wallpaper.
© 2018 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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  • Portrait of woman in black and white stripped dress against floral wallpaper.

Date:

1918

Artist:

Joan Miró
Spanish, 1893–1983

About this artwork

This painting belongs to a group of fascinating and highly individual works by Joan Miró that document his early efforts to grapple with revolutionary developments in modern art (such as Fauvism and Cubism) and to forge his own direction. These efforts culminated in the early 1920s in the artist’s breakthrough to a style of fantastic, simplified forms, freely and loosely scattered across the surface of his pictures with an exuberant abandon that is hard to imagine based on this tightly constructed portrait. And yet, something of this exuberance—of the vitality and poetic intensity of Miró‘s later works—seems indeed to underly this strangely powerful portrait, manifesting itself, for example, in the unrestrained rhythms of the dress, barely held in check by the diamond grid in the background, or in the lyrical note introduced by the small flower on the front of the dress.
Different and often contrasting impulses are brought here into uneasy balance through the sheer force of Miró’s talent for creating compelling simplifications of the forms before him. The strong rhythms established by the dress, wallpaper, and face all vie for attention, as do the artist’s various sources of inspiration: the influence of the Fauves and especially of Henri Matisse in the bold use of color, dense application of paint, and flat patterning of the dress and background; the effect of Cubism in the far more sculptural, angular treatment of the face; and the impact of the Romanesque frescoes of Miró’s native Catalonia (which the artist himself acknowledged as a major inspiration) in the linear rhythms of the dress, hair, and background, in the frontal pose, and in the large, staring eyes. This is a painting of dramatic contrasts, between the insistent flatness of the dress and back-ground and the Cubist modeling of the face, between the startling pink of the wallpaper and the restrained black-and-white color scheme of the dress, between the human presence of the sitter and the strong linear patterns that threaten to engulf it. It does not seem surprising, given the impact this portrait still has today, that the young woman who initially agreed to sit for it became frightened both by Miró’s intensity and his strange style of painting, forcing him to finish the portrait from memory.

—Entry, Margherita Andreotti, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, The Joseph Winterbotham Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago (1994), p. 152-153.

Status

On View, Gallery 391

Department

Modern Art

Artist

Joan Miró

Title

Portrait of Joaneta Obrador

Place

Spain (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1918

Medium

Oil on canvas

Inscriptions

Signed and dated lower left: Miro/1918

Dimensions

69.5 × 62 cm (27 3/8 × 24 3/8 in.)

Credit Line

Joseph Winterbotham Collection

Reference Number

1957.78

Copyright

© 2018 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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