Joan Miró’s Personnage
A versatile master, Miró demonstrates his visual wit and poetic imagination with Personnage in his late career
Conceived in 1970, Joan Miró’s Personnage was one of the crowning achievements of the artist’s late career. Though it is painting that he is more known for and that took up the majority of his lifetime, Miró believed that what he did in the age-old medium was more ‘conventional’ as compared to his three-dimensional forms. It was only in sculpture that he could ‘create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters.’ Personnage, a potent but whimsical Neolithic god, with its massive head, bold protusion in the lower belly organ and curvilinear striations mapping the figure’s sexual organs, illustrates Miró’s metamorphic understanding of what he termed humankind’s ‘true reality.’
Joan Miró (1893-1983), Personnage; signed, numbered and stamped with foundry mark 'Miró 2/4 FONDERIA FRATELLI BONVICINI CASELLE DI SOMMACAMPAGNA VERONA' (on the back of the left leg); bronze with dark brown and green patina; Height: 80 in. (203.2 cm.); Conceived and cast in 1970
Miró is one of those very few artists who mastered everything he tried — painting, murals, printmaking, costume design, poetry, sculpture and ceramics. Apart from his compatriot Picasso, no other artist in the 20th century has shown such versatility and invention across so wide a range of media. In order to realize his creative vision exactly, Miró made sure he was involved in every aspect of his sculpture’s production. He worked closely with the foundries and distinguished different forms of patina between each of the firms he used. Personnage was cast by the lost-wax process at Fonderia Artistica Bonvicini in Verona. It is one of seven casts that is signed and justified by the artist, and it is the second of four numbered examples from that edition.