Maquette pour l'Enfance d'Ubu

Joan Miró

1975

Model for the second lithograph of "L'Enfance d'Ubu" ("Ubu's Childhood")

31 x 50 cm

Black lithographic background and embossing, colored grease pencils, dated lower left "20/VIII/75. II.

Mourlot imprimeur.

Catalog raisonné: Cramer 204

Joan Miró conceived L'enfance d'Ubu (Ubu's Childhood) in 1975, inspired by the imagination, gaudiness and fantasy that Jarry had injected into his play Ubu Roi. The work, the last of the twenty-seven published by Tériade, consists of twenty-seven plates, the third of which contains an erratically arranged text by Miró.

In this model, we find the same aesthetic as in the definitive suite, where the tangle of lines and colors is mastered by the use of shapes of apparent childlike simplicity. The character is flanked by slightly monstrous protuberances, with enormous feet symbolizing human voracity and stupidity.