Miró‘s Umbrella (1901)

Miró, Umbrella (1901) Graphite pencil on paper. 18.5 x 11.5 cm. Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

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Joan Miró was 8 years old when he drew this umbrella and it is mostly ignored in the literature because the general belief is that artists are made, not born. Such works are said to inform our knowledge of their development but are rarely of interest in themselves. Yet appearances can deceive and art certainly does. When I recently published drawings by the 12-year old Picasso and pointed out features that children do not normally include but adult artists do, readers complained I was making much out of nothing. Each was a typical child's drawing, they said. And so they seem. Nevertheless the content (or meaning) in each, which can be quite separate from the craft, is a typical feature of poetic art by adults that few ever see. 

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Top: Detail of Picasso's Last Bull (1892)
Bottom: Picasso, A Gentleman Greeting a Lady (1894-5) with diagram

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The two Picasso drawings (top and bottom), made when he was 11 and 13 years old respectively, each form natural objects into the shape of his initial(s). At top the sword, a common symbol for an artist's implement, is shaped into a P suggesting that he and the bullfighter are in the process of "drawing" the bull while the bull's left foreleg may be "drawing" his own shadow. There are hundreds of similar examples by other artists on EPPH.

In the later drawing (below) Picasso formed the two separate figures into the shape of his childhood initials, PR for Pablo Ruiz which is how he signed the drawing. You would not expect to find either of these features in a child's drawing though, again, they are common elements of art. Perhaps that's what Picasso meant when he regretted never having been able to draw like a child.

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Miró, Umbrella (1901)  

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Miró also signed his drawing with a name he later dropped: Joan Miró i Ferrà. Miró was his father's name, Ferrà his mother's. Picasso, I have argued, dropped the Ruiz not because it was too common, as his major biographer believes, but because Pegasus in Spanish is pegaso. Miró, likewise, probably found more meaning in Miró than Ferrà because Miró means he looked. Either way, names and their meaning were important to them. Not all children sign their works either. Indeed Miró signed Umbrella twice with a J. M. F. at the bottom too.

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Top: Miró, Umbrella (1901)  Detail rotated
Bottom: James Tissot, Detail of Monogram from First Frontispiece (1875)

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Turn the umbrella upside down though (top) and his initials become apparent again, a J for Joan in the handle and an M reflected on either side. Miró's later abstract art, as I have often shown, includes his name as well. Here the design is similar to James Tissot's earlier monogram developed in adulthood, a T with a J reflected on either side. This suggests, of course, doubling, reflection and unity though how much the 8-year old Miró would have seen or consciously understood about any of this is unclear. There is more though.

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Miró, Umbrella (1901)

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The point of the umbrella resembles a piece of chalk or pencil drawing the scribbled shadow (or is it a puddle ?) below. This is something we have seen several times before in Delacroix's Two Women at the Well (1832), Edvard Much's Old Man Praying (1902) and the 17-year old Giacometti's Self-portrait with Brush (1918). Miró, though, was much younger. So, what does this tell us about artistic development? I'm not sure but if I was a student in search of a subject I might well begin where many great artists have, in their childhood. The evidence, little-studied, is not what many expect.









 

Notes:

Original Publication Date on EPPH: 27 Jun 2014. © Simon Abrahams. Articles on this site are the copyright of Simon Abrahams. To use copyrighted material in print or other media for purposes beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Websites may link to this page without permission (please do) but may not reproduce the material on their own site without crediting Simon Abrahams and EPPH.