In a Freudian posthumous twist, researchers discovered a portrait of Catalan artist Joan Miró’s mother concealed beneath his “Painting” nearly a century after its completion in 1927.
Researchers at Barcelona’s Fundació Joan Miró, a museum and center for scholarship on the late artist and contemporary art at large, announced last week in a press statement that “Painting” overlaid a portrait of his mother, Dolors Ferrà i Oromí. The discovery comes almost 50 years after the foundation first detected the likeness of a mysterious woman behind the deep blue paint.
Miró, often described as a Surrealist, gifted “Painting” to his friend Joan Prats, who owned the work until his death in 1970. Five years later, Fundació Joan Miró acquired the work. In 1978, the organization conducted the first X-ray of the painting during a preliminary restoration report, which revealed a portrait of an unidentified woman.
In the most recent study led by Head of Preventive Conservation and Restoration Elisabet Serrat, foundation researchers used more advanced techniques, including infrared photography and X-ray spectroscopy and fluorescence, to discern who the mysterious woman was.
According to Fundació Joan Miró, the Catalan artist overpainted other works — mostly to criticize what he deemed “imitative painting.” The same year “Painting” was completed, Miró famously declared his intent to “assassinate painting” in a challenge to artistic convention. Between 1940 and 1960, Miró overpainted portraits, and by the 1970s, he concealed mostly landscapes.
In later iterations of covering existing artworks, Miró often left evidence suggesting the base painting’s existence. In the case of “Painting,” Miró left behind raised clumps of paint over the brooch and earrings of his mother’s portrait.
Researchers suspect the original portrait was painted by Cristòfol Montserrat Jorba, who also painted a similar portrait of the artist’s mother in 1907. The subsumed woman was identified as Miró’s mother based on the technical similarity between these two works as well as Serrat’s observation that the two faces were “exactly the same,” as she told the Guardian.
An analysis of the paint suggests that Miró used zinc white to prepare the second-hand canvas for his new work. Researchers aren’t sure why the artist decided to smother the portrait of his mother for this particular painting, but the foundation suggested it could have been out of convenience.
But the organization’s executive director, Marko Daniel, told the Guardian he has a different theory.
“It is an act of rebellion. But Miró was already 32 when he started this, so it’s not a juvenile act of rebellion against his parents,” Daniel said. Instead, he suspects it was an act “against the kind of world that his parents represented; the middle-class aspirations to being ever so slightly posher than you really are.”
The findings are the subject of the institution’s exhibition Under the Layers of Miró: A Scientific Investigation, which will run through June 29.
