Three clumps of raised paint, an old X-ray and months of scientific analysis and dogged detective work have revealed that a portrait of Joan Miró’s mother has lurked, undetected, beneath the cobalt-blue surface of one of the Spanish artist’s inimitable works for the best part of a century.
Between 1925 and 1927, Miró created a small, oil-on-canvas picture, titled Pintura (Painting), which he gave to his great friend, the art promoter Joan Prats.
By that time, having made the inevitable artistic pilgrimage to Paris, experimented with fauvism, post-expressionism and cubism – in the process comprehensively dashing his parents’ hopes that he might one day find stable employment as an accounts clerk – Miró had alighted on a freer, more individual style.
Pintura underlines what Marko Daniel, the director of the Fundació Joan Miró, describes as the artist’s commitment to “exploding the conventions of painting, of pictorial space, of the way in which painting works”. But it may also hold a deeper, hidden meaning that reflects the artist’s attempt to break away from the bourgeois constraints of his family as he set out on his famous quest to “assassinate painting”.
Five years after Prats’ death in 1970, the painting became part of the collection of the foundation, which is based in Barcelona. Time, and humidity, had not been kind to the canvas, which had suffered microfissures and other damage.
A year ago, experts at the foundation, led by Elisabet Serrat, its head of preventive conservation and restoration, decided to take another look at Pintura. A decades-old X-ray had hinted that something else lay beneath Miró’s brushwork, as had the edges of the painting, where the blue paint cedes to older, darker colours.
Using X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared light, hyperspectral imaging, visible raking and transmitted light, Serrat’s team and researchers from organisations, including the Centre de Restauració de Béns Mobles de Catalunya and the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, discovered the portrait of a well-dressed, middle-aged woman, painted in a style that could not have been more different from Miró’s.
They soon clocked that her earrings and the brooch at her neck corresponded to the three spots of raised paint already glimpsed on Pintura’s surface.
“So now we had a good-quality image of the portrait, which looked almost like a photo,” says Serrat. “But we didn’t know who it was of.”
Unable to find any clues as to the woman’s identity in Barcelona, Serrat headed to Tarragona a few weeks later to visit the Fundació Mas Miró, a museum situated in the farmhouse where the artist and his family spent their summers.
“But none of the portraits there was a match,” she adds. “The director of the foundation said that the portrait could be in Mallorca, where Miró also lived and worked.”
The steer was a good one. At Miró’s Son Boter studio on the Balearic island, Serrat found a 1907 portrait signed by the artist Cristòfol Montserrat Jorba. Not only did the face match that of the woman in the Pintura X-rays, its subject was one Dolors Ferrà i Oromí – better known as Miró’s mother.
“The [Mallorca portrait] is exactly the same, bar a few differences: the dress was different and the earrings were different, but there’s no doubt that it’s the same face,” says Serrat.
Such discoveries are vanishingly rare. Uncovering the face of Dolores Ferrà, Serrat adds with a degree of understatement, was “a delightful surprise”.
Her team believes that Miró cut down another version of Montserrat’s portrait – Pintura measures just 49cm x 60cm – and flipped it from portrait to landscape, but deliberately chose to keep the central portion that showed his mother’s face.
All of which raises the obvious question: why?
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Serrat and Daniel see Miró’s decision as a deliberate act and as a foreshadowing of the over-painting that the artist would apply to his own, earlier works in the 1950s. Over-painting was also a technique he visited on the kitsch, tacky works of hack artists towards the end of his life, when he set about defacing what he saw as cheap, bad and cheesy art.
“That said, the new discovery is not situationist over-painting, nor his own, revisionist over-painting,” says Daniel.
“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 … [but] against the kind of world that his parents represented; the middle-class aspirations to being ever so slightly posher than you really are.”
He is convinced Miró did not choose the Montserrat portrait by accident: “There was no technical need for him to paint on top of that; he wasn’t like Gauguin in the South Pacific, without access to materials. For him, this really was an act of choice.”
And yet, to Serrat’s mind, the artist’s odd gesture was not without a certain affection.
“He could have chosen another portrait,” she says. “But he chooses this one, and he cuts it and keeps his mother’s face complete, so there’s a respect there.”
She also notes that he left the trio of paint clumps – the x that marked the spot of his mother’s jewellery – intact, when he could easily have scraped them flat.
The experts’ findings, which Daniel refers to as “CSI: Miró”, are laid out in a new exhibition, Under the Layers of Miró: A Scientific Investigation, and in an accompanying documentary, El Secret de Miró. The show, at the foundation’s Barcelona headquarters, will allow visitors to see both Pintura and Montserrat’s portrait of Ferrà.
Almost a century after the brilliant blue paint dried on Miró’s enigmatic painting, Daniel feels the world is finally beginning to understand the artist’s intentions.
“In a way, Miró left us really good clues – especially the brooch, which is really three dimensional and you can see it in raking light,” he says. “He left us these clues, so he must be thinking, ‘Why on earth did it take you so long to discover this? A hundred years later, you’ve worked out what I did!’”
