A Playful Portrait’s Regional Spirit

On a straw-yellow background, scattered with a few gray freckles in the top left and bottom right corners, two lines form a pencil-thin cross; on each end of the horizontal stroke are black dots with three red lines shooting out of them like eyelashes at half-mast. At the top is something that resembles a drooping bell pepper, partially shaded in cardinal red; at the bottom a brace of thicker crimson squiggles dangle like the tentacles of a jellyfish. In the top right corner hangs a funky five-pointed star, shaded in blue, beneath blue, yellow and red arcs.

The painting, in oil and crayon and measuring roughly 5 feet by 4 feet, is unmistakably by Joan Miró.

Titled "Head of a Catalan Peasant," it's the first of four "Head" canvases made in 1924 and 1925, right as the Spanish painter developed the capricious style for which he became famous. The title (unusually, Miro's own) brings the painting into focus: The cross forms a face; the two black dots, eyes; the squiggles beneath, a beard. Atop the head sits a barretina typical of Miro's native Catalonia.

Miró called himself an "international Catalan," and each term is important in his biography. Born in 1893 to a prosperous Barcelona goldsmith, Miró was bound for bourgeois respectability. His father enrolled him in business school, but in 1911, typhus, and something like a nervous breakdown, intervened. His parents sent him to their small farm in Montroig (Red Mountain), near Tarragona. That arid landscape became his Eden.

Once he recovered, Miró studied art in Barcelona, where he made paintings with the bright colors of the Fauves and, later, in the style of Cezanne and the Cubists. In 1919, he first visited Paris, and from then on his artistic life was split between the middle of nothing in Catalonia and the middle of everything in the capital of the avant-garde. When he settled there, in 1920, he brought grasses and twigs from Montroig to finish his early masterpiece, "The Farm" (1921-22), a translation of Tarragona into an aesthetic space between Fra Angelico and André Breton, whom he met in Paris.

Though Miró was too attached to craft and composition to be a bonafide member of the movement, he was inspired by Surrealism's intuitive and even automatic approach, in which the artist cedes control to chance. Breton called him "the most thoroughly Surrealist of us all." In Paris's cosmopolitan swirl, Miro found in the figure of the Catalan peasant a means of evoking his regional identity-of setting it loose in the new aesthetic realms he had discovered. It first appeared in "The Hunter" (1923-24), a surreal landscape in which the peasant holds a dead rabbit in one hand and a still-smoking gun in the other, all depicted in a symbolic language that, like the word "sard" painted in the bottom right corner, is as much read as seen. Fittingly, Breton bought the piece, as he would "Harlequin Carnival" (1924-25), a chaotic circus of a canvas that represents the zenith of Miró's Surrealism.

"Head of a Catalan Peasant" reflects the evolution of Miro's style, from eclectic representation to a near-abstraction that hovers between drawing and writing, delineating figures but also spelling out signs. The crossed lines form the face of the ghostly cartoon, but also divide the canvas into four quadrants around a horizon. The wavy beard (Miró loved drawing hair), and the three lines (a cloud, perhaps?) hanging like nested apostrophes in the top right of the canvas, are little more than glyphs.

Increasingly free from form, Miró embraces color. He grounds his painting not in the brown earth of Montroig, from which figuration grew, but rather in the world of "The Hunter," in which his distinctive fantasies played out with the jumbled dream logic of collage. Here the peasant leaves behind "The Farm" and passes by the surreal environs of a landscape like "The Tilled Field" (1923-24), as he strides straight onto the picture plane; the field is definitively a color-field, with its loose brushwork pointing ahead to the nearly Pollock-like use of paint in "The Birth of the World" (1925).

From the safety of the French capital, Miró watched the Spanish Civil War in horror, and made a lost work known as "Catalan Peasant in Revolt." When he eventually returned to Spain, as the Nazis invaded Paris, he lived uneasily under the fascist regime. He remained, however, the Catalan peasant, devoted less to grand causes or -isms or even politics in general, and more to the world around him-and the world beyond.