Femme aux beaux seins (Woman with Beautiful Breasts)

Between 1928 and 1934 Joan Miró approaches the techniques of collage and building objects as a means of anti-pictorial rebellion against the traditional concepts of art. In his final period, from the sixties onwards, he aims to create a series of works that preserve his traditional and fascinating attraction to objects, yet the clear desire to build a corpus of sculptures leads him to the use of one of the most ancient techniques from this discipline: casting. The Museo Reina Sofía’s collection of Miró sculptures, consisting of 43 works dating from 1967 to 1981, responds to this criterion. They are works that arise from a great variety of always humble objects, and that after a long process of definition in which he prepared a multitude of drawings and sketches, was completed with the casting and the patinating of the bronze in the Parellada workshop in Barcelona. Femme aux beaux seins (Woman with Beautiful Breasts, 1969) is built using the cast of a barbecue fork as the axis of the figure, on which the other shapes can be interpreted as cosmic and earthly metaphors. In this way, the simple allusion to the solar disc is transformed into a head and in turn becomes an essential reference to the shape of the breast, a maternal and sexual symbol that provides the title of the work. Compared to other works by Miró, this sculpture has an appearance of lightness that seeks ethereal beauty from the unlinked elements of a cosmic landscape without losing its anthropomorphic quality.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio