The hidden Columbus in a key painting by Miró
Paintings also have their archaeology. Beneath the visible surface, there are sometimes hidden layers that reveal obsessions, regrets, doubts, and hidden stories. The avant-garde has solved the enigma hidden beneath the famous Paysage catalan (The Hunter) (1923-1924), one of Joan Miró's first two surrealist works, painted before André Breton's surrealist manifesto.
In 1992, the conservation team at MoMA in New York applied infrared rays to Miró's work and detected traces of a clearly figurative drawing, with the inscription "Retour de Colomb en Espagne," but the museum had not been able to identify the visual source.
'Catalan Landscape (The Hunter)' (1923-1924, by Joan Miró
Miró Succession
Image of the painting through the infrared rays with which it was studied at MoMA in 1992
LVThis is undoubtedly a variant of a French print from 1866, The Discovery of America by Christophe Colomb. The Return of Christophe Colomb (The Court of Spain), from the Pellerin printing house in Épinal. It features a semi-nude indigenous woman holding a parrot and the scene of the greeting between Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs, supposedly in the Saló del Tinell in April 1493, exactly five centuries before Miró was born.
Read alsoMoMA's then curator, Carolyn Lanchner, had no doubt that Miró was the author of the underlying image, based on the ink marks, the trompe-l'oeil frame lines, and the drawing's composition itself. Restorer José María Pardo, however, suggests that it was "a 'transfer' of the image by impregnating the offset print of Columbus with solvent, deposited on the surface of the painting."
The print of Columbus's return is not a simple decoration. A sketch preserved at the Fundació Miró in Barcelona shows that Miró planned to use it as an iconographic attribute for a portrait. The Columbus theme rules out the possibility of a nude painting or a simple interior. Miró was accustomed to incorporating symbolic elements into the portraits of his painter friends from the Agrupació Courbet (1918-1919). In the portrait of Enric Cristòfol Ricart (1917), a collector of oriental art, he pasted a Japanese print. In the portrait of Heribert Casany (1918), he drew an automobile (his father owned a taxi rental business). Who among Miró's circle could have been affected by the American influence of the print? The closest was undoubtedly Rafael Sala, a painter included in the Escola de Vilanova alongside Ricart, JF Ràfols, and Miró himself.
In the French print of 1866, the figure of a half-naked indigenous woman holding a parrot stands out.In October 1919, unlike his other friends, who dreamed of moving to Paris as soon as the First World War ended, Rafael Sala went to New York to explore new avenues in art. The following year, another Courbet, Joaquim Torres García, who was disillusioned with Catalonia, would join him. In a joint letter to JF Ràfols, Torres García wrote: “Without any nostalgia, except for our good friends, Ricart and Miró. We regret that they are not here with us, facing this new culture of the future. Blessed is the day Sala embarked for these lands of the New World. And I say the same about myself.” “Yes, dear Ràfols,” Rafael Sala now continues, “Torres García and I have decided to plant our flag here and have agreed that this is the only country in the world where something will be done… and who knows if we will be the ones to rediscover this admirable country.”
Read also “Joan Miró did not want a gray Barcelona” Maricel Chavarría, Teresa Sesé
At that time, the European avant-garde associated the figure of Columbus with the idea of discovery, of adventure into the unknown. The Surrealists—Apollinaire, Breton, Desnos—saw the ocean voyage as a metaphor for the inner journey. The artist as an explorer of invisible worlds, of uncharted territories of mind and matter. Columbus discovered America by accident, by chance, searching for a route to India, and when Duchamp died, his friends—including Miró—contributed to the ironic portfolio Monument à Christophe Colomb et à Marcel Duchamp.
'Objet poétique' (1936), at MoMA, is an assemblage crowned with a stuffed parrot
MoMAThe discovery redefines other works by Miró. Especially Objet poétique (1936), also at MoMA, an assemblage crowned with a stuffed parrot; a mannequin's leg wearing a stocking, velvet garter, and high-heeled shoe, suspended in the hollow of a wooden frame (an echo of Dalí's Objet à fonctionnement symbolique ); a hanging cork ball (Giacometti's suspended ball?); a map; and a red celluloid fish (subconscious?) swimming on the brim of a bowler hat, a transposition of the human mind from which the dream objects emanate. But it has gone unnoticed that the map is not just any map: it is the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum atlas (1570) by Ortelius, considered the first modern world atlas published after the discovery of America, with a quote from Cicero on human humility in the face of the vastness of the newly discovered world.
It's tempting to think that the image of the half-naked Indian woman with the parrot or macaw remained engraved in the artist's imagination and that years later, when he sent this piece to his New York dealer, Pierre Matisse, Miró inadvertently (or not) connected the two moments to send back to America a message of high poetic ambition. "You ask me about objects, and how I come to make them," he clarified to Matisse in December 1936. "This is what happens. I feel magnetized by a particular object. Nothing is premeditated. Afterward, I am attracted to another object. When they come together, their contact produces a poetic shock, a mutual and immediate infatuation. It is this need for one another that makes poetry act on our emotions. Without this human and living element, it wouldn't work at all. My work has nothing to do with Freud, nor with the theoretical ideas that people have claimed to see in it."
Columbus in Barcelona began to symbolize for Miró a rhetoric with which he did not agree, as can be seen in the 1934 collage exhibited at the Serralves Museum in Porto" width="449">
The monument Columbus in Barcelona began to symbolize for Miró a rhetoric with which he did not agree, as can be seen in the 1934 collage exhibited at the Serralves Museum in Porto
Serralves MuseumOver time, the figure of the institutionalized Columbus ceased to represent the promise of the new for Miró. The monument that had been erected to Columbus in Barcelona began to symbolize for him a rhetoric he did not agree with, as seen in the collage exhibited at the Serralves Museum in Porto, which shows a print of the monument surrounded by obscene figures and a fragment of a torn-up postcard of a bullfighter giving a test pass to a bull. The entire postcard reads "Souvenir of Spain. National Holiday," but here the words "Spain" and "national" remain written between the stripes of the Republican flag. The collage is dated April 19, 1934, and is paired with another collage from April 14, 1934, in which a figure appears to be kicking the other fragment of the souvenir postcard with the remaining words: "test pass," "souvenir of," and "party," in a moment of Catalan disillusionment when the right was in power.
The image may have remained fixed in his imagination and years later he sent it back to America.During the Franco regime, Miró perceived the Barcelona statue as a symbol of authoritarian, hierarchical, and imposing verticality. Therefore, when he proposed donating three works to welcome visitors to Barcelona—by land (in Cervantes Park, which was never built), by air (the mural installed at the airport), and by sea—he sought to subvert the entrance marked by Columbus's imperial finger with an anti-monument.
The Rambla's ceramic mosaic is a tribute to Gaudí's trencadís and the spirit of popular craftsmanship. A horizontal, democratic, playful piece that doesn't rise or impose itself, but is stepped on, inhabited, played with like hopscotch. A welcome to an open city. A circle that unites, that doesn't exclude.
the 'Glory in Triumph' hair salon" width="449">
Rafel Sala with Monna Alfau, Tina Modotti and Felipe Teixidor, before the pulqueria 'Glory in Triumph'
LVRafael Sala (Vilanova i la Geltrú, 1891-1927) had been with the Expressionists in Munich, with the Futurists in Florence, and now, in New York, thanks to Joseph Stella, he had connected with Duchamp and Katherine S. Dreier, founders of Societé Anonyme Inc., the seed of avant-garde art in the United States. In June 1922, Sala returned to Catalonia for a few months after the death of his mother and briefly spent time in Paris before returning to New York. Shortly after marrying the journalist Monna Alfau, sister of the enigmatic writer Felipe Alfau, he moved to Mexico in 1923, where he joined the group of muralist Diego Rivera and photographers Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. When he died on June 4, 1927, in a Pasadena clinic, Miró wrote to Ricart: “As a man, he was a most interesting man, always so hypnotized by the spirit of adventure, which Catalans so lack.” In 1915, Sala had painted the nude dancer Tórtola Valencia holding a crow, not a parrot like the indigenous woman in the print. Miró never finished his friend's portrait. He recycled it: either due to a lack of canvases (most likely), or to create (more poetically) a kind of surrealist palimpsest and inaugurate a new world (see La Vanguardia, 11/24/2024).
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