Tête d'homme (Head of a Man)

In the early months of 1935, Joan Miró made a group of paintings on cardboard which he would later describe as a self-evaluation or a summary of his own career to date. Tête d’homme (Head of a Man) is one such work in this series and is a partner piece to another, same-titled cardboard work in the Museu Serralves. The head theme is a constant across his trajectory, and this work references a series of heads he made in 1931 resembling greatly schematic masks. Here, Miró resolves this revision with greater monumentality and with the use of a thicker line, bestowing the work with a more violent and wilder tone which is possibly ascribable to the growing political turbulence in Spain, culminating in the Civil War and the fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s rise to power.



Raúl Martínez Arranz