Le roi guerrier (The Warrior King)

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. Le roi-guerrier (The Warrior King, 1969) is one of the most important sculptures from the final period of Miró's work. Its artistry, the richness of its pictorial patina, evident in the large central plane of the figure, and the irony of its meaning, justify this consideration. As its title indicates, the work is devoted to the idea of power, personified through a curious assemblage of objects: a frame for hand embroidering, a wooden spoon and a large flat board, which he uses to form a hieratic male figure of apparent grandeur. The detailed view of the elements used in the composition and their connection with reality nuance this late work by Miró, an artist who, one must remember, admired Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi ever since his youth and whose vision of power seems to hang over this sculpture from his later years.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio