Portrait of a Spanish Dancer 1921

Joan Miró made this ‘Portrait of a Spanish Dancer’ using oil paint, and it’s now housed at the Musée Picasso in Paris. Miró uses flat planes of colour and bold outlines, distilling the dancer into a collection of simplified shapes. The colour palette is relatively muted, focusing on earth tones and reds, which gives the painting a grounded, almost tactile quality. Look at the surface of the shawl. It’s built up with layers of paint, creating a subtle texture that makes the red fabric feel almost tangible. It is in these subtle modulations of the surface where Miró departs from a more illustrative or representational style of painting. This tension between flatness and depth is what makes it so engaging. Miró is an artist who embraces ambiguity, inviting us to see the world through a playful and imaginative lens. Like Picasso, Miró understood that art is an ongoing conversation, a constant exchange of ideas and experimentation.