Tête de taureau (Head of Bull)

Between 1928 and 1934 Joan Miró approaches the techniques of collage and building objects as a means of anti-pictorial rebellion against the traditional concepts of art. In his final period, from the sixties onwards, he aims to create a series of works that preserve his traditional and fascinating attraction to objects, yet the clear desire to build a corpus of sculptures leads him to the use of one of the most ancient techniques from this discipline: casting.
The Museo Reina Sofía’s collection of Miró sculptures, consisting of 43 works dating from 1967 to 1981, responds to this criterion. They are works that arise from a great variety of always humble objects, and that after a long process of definition in which he prepared a multitude of drawings and sketches, was completed with the casting and the patinating of the bronze in the Parellada workshop in Barcelona.
With the completion of the sculpture Tête de taureau (Head of Bull, 1970), Joan Miró deals with subject matter that inevitably brings to mind the sculpture made by Pablo Picasso in 1942, which consisted of superimposing a bicycle seat and handlebar. Both in the work by the painter from Málaga and in this one by Miró, the choice of a bronze finish gives the work homogeneity; but whereas Picasso tries to disguise the components to give greater relevance to the ingenuity of his inventiveness, Miró maintains, despite the uniformity of the bronze cast, the attribute of the object by not disguising its shape and clearly showing the bull’s horn. The large bull’s head is, as a whole, a sculpture with a rough surface, of considerable size and physical presence, which hints at the world, dark and rooted in raw nature, of Miró’s later work.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio