Portrait II

In the Spanish Pavilion of 1937, Joan Miró displayed a large-scale mural entitled El payés catalán en rebeldía (The Catalan Peasant in Revolt) or El segador (The Reaper). The work, monumental in size and currently with unknown whereabouts, was created in Miró’s most radical period, stretching from 1927 to 1937, a time in which he experimented with variegated materials and with extreme disfigurations of painted motifs, an attempt, as he explained, to “assassinate painting".
As in Payés (Catalan Peasant), the body in this painting has become deformed to the point of being virtually unrecognisable; although in the first the barretina hat and the sickle wielded by the reaper can still be made out, in this instance the portrait has been sublimated into two rounded forms for the body and head, with simple marks suggesting the features of the face. The colours, applied on large surfaces, lend a more serene appearance and with less torment than the preceding works — a prelude to the more lyrical language of his period of constellations which materialised from 1939 after he fled from Paris over the threat of Nazism.

Raúl Martínez Arranz