Miró, Joan, Suite for Ubu Roi, 1966

In 1948, Joan Miró and Efstratios Eleftheriades (publisher and art critic) embarked on a project to illustrate Ubu roi, Alfred Jarry’s famous play. The book was published almost twenty years later. If the painter was so sensitive to the discovery of this comedy, it was because it echoed for him the Franco dictatorship he had rejected all his life.

“The result is quite surprising, in that each of the thirteen plates is treated as if it were a small puppet theater, i.e. a space in which volumes – in this case, the play’s characters – are inscribed, rather than as a drawing. The grotesque, rounded forms of the characters – they seem inflated – reveal a profound reading of Jarry’s text, which had so impressed Miró. In this case, contrary to what he had done before, the artist has illustrated the text by following it to the letter, as if he had performed the play in the theater”.
Catalog raisonné P. Cramer: Miró, The Illustrated Books