Hyperallergic magazine just published the article “The Almond and Pebble That Inspired Joan Miró”* where L. Moya Ford talks about Miró’s relationship with small everyday objects and the way he incorporated them into his work. As a result of his frequent walks along roads, beaches, fields and markets, Miró collected a series of found objects and used them as inspiration for his collages and sculptures. As J. Prats observed, the artist was capable of endowing these objects with a characteristic personality: “if I pick up a stone, it is a stone; if Miró picks up a stone, it is a Miró”.
Image: Courtesy of the Photographic Archive of the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Mallorca.
Courtesy of the Photographic Archive of the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Mallorca
Wishing to leave Franco’s surveillance and after having lived in France and Catalonia, the artist moved in 1956 to Palma de Mallorca. There, he was able to fill his studio with thousands of found objects, such as pumpkins, bones, toys, hats and croissants. Objects that he would later transform to produce his pieces. Appreciating this unique ability to reformulate the everyday, the archive of the Miró Foundation in Mallorca has in its collection an almond and a pebble that belonged to the artist. Probably found in the late 1960s during one of his daily walks through his home and studio in Mallorca, Miró transformed these elements into a two-meter high anthropomorphic monument, the celebrated 1970 sculpture Personnage. From 1966 onwards Miró made sculptures systematically until the end of his career, producing more than 400, practically all of them in bronze.
As we can see in other pieces, such as the piece Tête, oiseau, Miró’s sculpture often developed by transforming something ephemeral and disposable into something noble and permanent (Juncosa Vecchierini, P). In 2015 Jean Marie del Moral photographed, as part of a conversation with the artist’s memory, all these accumulated objects for the book The Eye of Miró. Today this cabinet of “curiosities” preserves each object in the same place where Miró once placed them. “Photographs that admirably restore the universe and the gaze that Miró knew how to pour over things.”
Photography by Jean Marie del Moral.
*Moya Ford, L., “The Almond and Pebble That Inspired a Joan Miró” Hyperallergic Magazine. 19 de abril de 2021.
Link: https://hyperallergic.com/637197/the-almond-and-pebble-that-inspired-a-joan-miro/