SELF-PORTRAIT I
JOAN MIRÓ, 1937-1938
This is a self-portrait, but not the normal kind. Not the usual, great man of the arts, nice to meet you. This is a guy looking in the mirror and going, what happened? Miró. Paris, late 1937 into '38. And he calls it Self-Portrait I. Number one. Like he already suspects one round isn't going to settle it. Hold that thought. The timing is the whole thing. Spain has just blown up. Civil war. Miró had gone to Paris for a short visit, a few weeks maybe. He's stuck there four years. Can't go home. So he decides, his phrase, to do something absolutely different. He sets up a magnifying mirror, face blown up three times its size, and he stares. For almost half a year. One face. And look what came out. Get up close. It's barely even painted, mostly pencil, a giant ghost of a head. And the face is full of weather. The eyes are two huge burning planets. There are stars sitting on his shoulders. Flames curling through the hair. He stared into a mirror for half a year, and what looked back was a sky. You know that thing where you catch your reflection in a dark window, and for half a second you go, is that me? This is that, at full scale, during a war. The face is there. Eyes, nose, all the parts. But the person inside it is somewhere else, and the place he came from is falling apart while he watches. He called this one of the most important works of his life. And he never stopped arguing with it. Twenty-two years later he had an exact copy made, set it up, and went at it with thick black strokes. Same face, attacked. Whatever he saw in that mirror, he wasn't done with it. Hence the number.