Pintura (Hombre con pipa) (Painting [Man with a Pipe])

Joan Miró would officially enter André Breton’s Surrealist group in 1925, although by 1923 and 1924 his work was inscribed within this poetic, and even prior to the group’s creation. These are years in which he shared his studio on Rue Blomet in Paris with André Masson, the space where both would develop the concept of “painting-poetry” which gave precedence to the spiritual dimension of their artistic practice. The work of Miró in that period would progressively shed Magic Realism as he arrived at his own language anchored in signs and ideograms.

In Pintura (Hombre con pipa) (Painting [Man with a Pipe]), there is extremity in the removal of visual references. The man that lends the work its title is a white mark in which the eyes, and also a schematic pipe, can barely be discerned. The blue background alludes to an ethereal, undefined space that would be commonplace in the artist’s subsequent work and which serves as a blank canvas for Miró to situate his oneiric visions. Such a fluid appearance in his painting shares common ground with the concept of formlessness which Georges Bataille developed in 1929 for the magazine Documents.



Raúl Martínez Arranz