Drawings

A pencil study, a nude drawn from life, a sheet assembled with newspaper fragments and a charcoal figure on a studio wall can all belong to Joan Miró’s practice of drawing. Looking across them reveals how he moved between observing a body, inventing a sign and preparing something that would take shape in another material. In 2020, the Fundació Joan Miró presented Antoni Llena’s selection of 150 drawings from around 8,000 in its archive. Some led to celebrated works; others recorded projects that never materialised. Drawing preserved both possibilities.^[1]

Observation and the Human Figure

Miró’s Man with a Moustache of 1917 is a pencil drawing on paper measuring 27.3 × 23.2 cm, now in the Museum of Modern Art. Its descriptive title places a particular human feature at the centre of attention. A reader approaching Miró through his later birds, stars and wandering lines can begin here: the medium was already sufficient to make a work centred on a person.^[2]

Observation also remained available to him after his language had become unmistakably his own. In 1937 he attended nude classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. The Reina Sofía holds an untitled sheet from this group, drawn in graphite on a page from a drawing pad. Paloma Esteban Leal situates these works within a renewed engagement with realism, following the charged distortions of the preceding years.^[3]

That episode complicates any neat progression from youthful realism to permanent abstraction. Drawing from a model could coexist with invented beings. The Fundació Joan Miró’s Untitled (Drawing from La Grande Chaumière), also dated 1937, is graphite on paper, 27 × 20.8 cm, and bears the register number FJM 1525. The small difference between its dimensions and those of the Reina Sofía sheet matters: these are separate drawings from a substantial activity, rather than alternative descriptions of one object.^[4]

When comparing such sheets, look for the decisions a contour makes. Where does it follow a joint, where does it turn, and where does the artist allow the paper to stand for a larger area of the body? The question brings attention back to drawing itself: the pressure and direction of a mark, the relationship between an outline and the space beside it, and the amount of information needed to establish a figure.

Notebooks as Places to Think

The apparent ease of a Miró image can disguise a long sequence of choices. MoMA’s account of its 1993 retrospective identifies 1925 as the point from which he planned groups of works by organising notebook drawings into predetermined series. The notebook offered a place to develop an idea before committing it to a larger surface. It also allowed several ideas to remain in play at once.^[5]

This is particularly revealing in relation to the dream paintings of 1925–27. Their suspended shapes and economical lines have often encouraged an association with Surrealist automatism. MoMA’s exhibition brought notebook studies alongside the paintings and emphasised the planning they reveal. A free appearance need not describe the whole history of a work’s making.^[5]

A notebook page therefore deserves more than a search for the finished painting hidden inside it. Its spacing, repetitions and alternatives can show an idea still taking form. Equally, a drawing for an unrealised project has its own interest. The Foundation’s account of Llena’s exhibition explicitly includes such projects. Their survival keeps open a part of Miró’s imagination that cannot be reconstructed from completed paintings alone.^[1]

Studies, Cartoons and the Journey to a Painting

The preparations for Dutch Interior I make that journey unusually tangible. MoMA’s historical collection checklist records seven pencil studies from 1928, using paper or graph paper, followed by a cartoon in charcoal and pencil. Here, “cartoon” means a developed preparatory drawing. It describes a stage in planning a painting, rather than a humorous published illustration.^[6]

The sequence offers several scales of attention. A small study can test a relation between forms; graph paper provides a measured field; a larger cartoon can bring an arrangement closer to the demands of the final canvas. These functions help explain why drawings associated with one painting may look very different from one another. Their differences record different tasks within the same project.

The same checklist lists three pencil studies on lined paper and a charcoal-and-graphite cartoon for Portrait of Mistress Mills in 1750, made early in 1929. Lined and squared sheets bring ordinary writing and measuring surfaces into the studio. Comparing these preparations with the finished portrait lets us follow the work of selection: what becomes larger, which relationships persist and which details cease to matter.^[6]

Paper Has a Character of Its Own

Drawing could also occupy a substantial surface and establish a complete pictorial world. The Family of 1924, in MoMA, measures 74.3 × 102.9 cm. The museum’s current record identifies charcoal, chalk and conté crayon on flocked paper. That combination gives drawing a material presence very different from a small graphite notebook page. “Drawing” does not specify one scale, one kind of line or one level of finish.^[7]

Erika Mosier and Anne Umland’s investigation of Miró’s 1920s collages explains why paper descriptions deserve attention. Flocked paper has a coating of fine particles or fibres. It can resemble an abrasive sheet while being made for artistic use. Their study distinguishes these materials and describes how Miró drew on their textures, sometimes scraping away the flocked surface to expose colour beneath.^[8]

Such choices affect what a line can do. A mark laid on a smooth sheet and one caught by a textured coating occupy different surfaces. Paper colour also becomes part of the image before another mark is added. These are useful things to notice when a catalogue lists a brown, green or buff support: the sheet supplies a condition to which the drawing responds.

Mosier and Umland also show that the boundary of a drawn line could become physical. In the 1929 collages, lines cross between different paper levels, while wire makes a line project into space. Preparatory studies accompanied nearly all the collages they examined. Even a work that appears roughly assembled could have a closely considered plan.^[8]

Collage as a Plan and as a Finished Work

Collage sometimes performed a specific preparatory role. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Painting of 1933 developed from a collage made with printed illustrations of mechanical goods, including drainpipes, propellers and umbrellas. The museum identifies eighteen corresponding pairs of paintings and collages. Their relationship exposes a transformation from printed objects into the rounded, nature-like forms of a painted image.^[9]

The comparison changes how we look. A shape that seems to have sprung from fantasy may have begun with an illustration from everyday commerce. Yet Miró’s transformation is the point: the painting need not preserve an object’s original identity. Drawing and arranging can prise a form away from its first use and make it available for another kind of image.

Other collage-drawings stand as works in themselves. In the 1936 Métamorphoses catalogued by Christie’s as number 610 in the drawings catalogue raisonné, a clipped image of legs becomes part of the figure at the left. A ladybird supplies an eye, and a newspaper photograph becomes an ear. Watercolour and drawn contours connect the borrowed fragments into two strange beings.^[10]

The resulting figures shift between the recognisable and the improbable. A printed fragment arrives with its own detail and scale; a drawn outline persuades us to read it as part of a body. Looking back and forth between those two kinds of mark is one of the pleasures of the work. The figures are assembled before our eyes, and the joins remain active.

Titles, Dates and Separate Objects

Repeated titles need careful handling. MoMA owns a different Drawing-Collage of 1936, made with crayon and decals on paper. Its 2012 gallery interpretation connects coloured reproductions of a fish and a chick with the work’s early title, L’Origine de la bête humaine, or The Origin of the Human Animal. The figure combines human and animal suggestions and sexual characteristics.^[11]

That description belongs to this particular sheet. It should not be transferred to every work called Metamorphosis or Drawing-Collage. For Miró, a shared title can identify a field of investigation across several objects. Date, medium, dimensions and collection help establish which one we are looking at.

The date can be equally informative. Christie’s records Métamorphoses as made between 23 March and 4 April 1936. That span leaves room for successive interventions. The title describes transformation, while the attached fragments and added drawing allow us to see transformation taking place through different materials.^[10]

Drawing Beneath Paint and Across Studio Walls

The range of materials remained open. MoMA’s 1998 checklist includes an untitled drawing of 1961 made with ballpoint pen and ink on yellow paper. The familiar everyday pen joins the older tools of graphite and charcoal, while the coloured sheet supplies a starting field for the marks.^[6]

Drawing’s relationship with another medium did not always end when painting began. In their study of the 1938 canvas Groupe de Personnages, Elma O’Donoghue and her colleagues report earlier shapes and details revealed by infrared examination beneath the visible figures. The painting contains a continuing process of refinement.^[12]

The authors also discuss Miró’s written references to projecting a preliminary drawing onto canvas and sometimes reversing it. Those accounts help explain ways of carrying a drawing into painting, while the examination of this particular canvas demonstrates that changes could continue afterwards. A study, a transferred contour and an altered painted figure belong to successive decisions; their relationship need not be a mechanically exact enlargement. The broader material questions are explored in Miró’s style and technique.^[12]

Later, drawing could expand beyond a sheet altogether. At Son Boter, the Mallorca property acquired in 1959, Miró worked directly on the walls in charcoal. The Fundació Miró Mallorca records 57 surviving wall drawings and describes the building as an immense notebook associated with his experiments in sculpture, large canvases and graphic work.^[13]

A wall gives a drawn form a different relationship to the artist’s body and working space. It can remain beside objects and works in progress, available to be seen again while another project develops. These marks make drawing part of the studio’s physical fabric. Together with the pencil studies and independent collage-drawings, they show why drawing occupies such a central place in Miró’s art: it could hold an observation, organise a project, or become the finished encounter itself.

Drawings can lead beyond a canvas

The transfer of a drawing to lithographic stone, described by Deborah Wye, is one example of an image entering another material and another kind of circulation.^[14]

The room guide for Antoni Llena’s 2020 selection supplies more varied destinations. It lists drawings from 1951 for Monument of 1956 and a sheet dated 1951 for an unfinished work. Preparations for Head on a Branch also connect a drawing of 1951 with a sculpture dated 1956. Other sheets concern book projects: drawings of 1927 for Lise Hirtz’s Il était une petite pie, published in 1928, appear beside preparations for a Robert Desnos book that was never completed. The guide also identifies later drawings for Ubu aux Baléares. These particular examples extend the archive beyond a store of plans for oil paintings. A drawing could remain available over several years, accompany a collaboration with a writer, or preserve an undertaking that stopped short of another finished object.^[15]

The same checklist includes three sheets titled Study based on touch, dated around 1912, among early nudes and later invented figures. Their presence broadens the account of drawing as observation: an exercise could begin by testing perception through touch as well as by looking. These early studies remain different objects from the later preparations for sculpture, yet both groups concern how a bodily encounter can acquire a drawn form.^[15]

The interval between drawing and object is part of this history. A sheet gives an idea a form in which it can wait. Its eventual use may demand decisions about weight, construction, printing or the relation between image and text that the drawing itself leaves open. An unrealised project does not make the sheet an unsuccessful version of something else. It preserves the stage at which those possibilities still had a common starting point.

Graphite can give a form two kinds of presence

In the Fundación MAPFRE’s Composition, dated 23 September 1930 on the reverse, graphite produces a different encounter from an elaborate coloured collage. The museum describes an organic lower form suggesting features of a body, joined to a three-pointed star above. Shading gives the lower part volume, while the upper sign remains flat and schematic. Its account therefore identifies more than a sequence of recognisable motifs: it follows a change in the way the same drawing occupies space. The work is graphite on paper, measuring 60 by 45 centimetres.^[16]

This difference makes the apparently modest tool especially expressive. A pencil can establish an edge or accumulate into tone; the drawing can move between those uses without changing medium. In this particular example, the museum’s distinction between the shaded body and the flatter star keeps both kinds of mark active. A bodily association and a celestial one meet through a continuous drawn construction. The paper supports a relation that would be less surprising if every part had been given the same degree of volume.^[16]

Collage joins real and pictured surfaces

Anne Umland’s commentary on MoMA’s Drawing-Collage of 8 August 1933 attends to the different surfaces that drawn lines bring together. Miró combined postcards, printed matter and sandpaper with conté crayon on flocked paper. Umland distinguishes the illusion of depth inside a photograph from the actual flatness and roughness of the abrasive piece. The line moves between these competing kinds of space. She also points to registration marks around the postcards, evidence of calculation within an arrangement often described as spontaneous. The apparently casual encounter among fragments had a placement history.^[17]

Among the postcards, Umland identifies an embroidered image of a woman of the kind produced with a machine. A borrowed picture could therefore bring another manufactured texture into company with the rougher abrasive fragment. The meeting involves more than pasted illustrations of different subjects. Different ways of making an image remain present within the finished surface, while the drawn line gives their gathering the appearance of a connected creature.^[17]

This gives a join more than one job. It can connect the parts of a possible body while also interrupting the passage between a pictured scene and a physical piece of paper. A viewer may recognise a printed figure before noticing the separate object carrying it. The drawing makes that shift productive: the fragment retains something of its first world, while its new neighbours invite another reading. The contrast is built into the surface rather than supplied only by the title.

What the reverse of a sheet preserves

The Detroit Institute of Arts records a different Untitled (Drawing-Collage) from 1933, made in charcoal, collage and graphite on laid paper. Its reverse bears Miró’s signature and the date 12 August 1933, together with red-pencil and graphite numbers. The museum also identifies paper watermarks, including INGRES and a divided-diamond device with lettering. These details belong to this particular sheet, which measures 62.9 by 47 centimetres. They should be kept separate from the surface descriptions and dimensions of MoMA’s work dated four days earlier.^[18]

Such information expands what it means to examine a drawing. The image occupies one face, but the sheet also carries traces of naming, numbering and manufacture. A watermark identifies something about the paper rather than explaining the meaning of the invented figure. A date narrows the history of the object without telling us how long the artist had considered its arrangement. Front and back preserve different kinds of evidence, and neither makes the other redundant.^[18]

Other sheets carry less precise dates. The Centre Pompidou catalogues a small Untitled in graphite on blue-grey paper as approximately 1933–34, retaining brackets around the range. It measures 27.1 by 21 centimetres and entered the collection through Nina Kandinsky’s bequest in 1981. The support’s colour is part of its material identification, while the catalogue retains a date range rather than a single year. Beside Detroit’s precisely dated collage-drawing, this record shows why a shared decade or medium does not make all the surviving evidence equally specific.^[19]

A paper study and a drawing beneath paint

Recent technical research gives surviving paper studies a further point of comparison. Elisabet Serrat, Javier Becerra and Anna Vila examined seventeen paintings from the Barcelona foundation using hyperspectral imaging, which records the response of materials at different wavelengths. In their account of Painting (The Wine Bottle) of 1924, the hidden drawing establishes details of the bottle, stopper, snake and mountains; guide lines also helped position the dedication and signature. The authors place this evidence beside two pencil sketches in the foundation’s archive, FJM 635 and FJM 643. They stress that surviving preparatory drawings do not always coincide exactly with the final image. Their investigation concerns a selected group of paintings, rather than every work Miró made.^[20]

This comparison distinguishes a drawing on paper from a drawn stage within a painting. One can survive as a separate sheet; the other may remain partly visible or disappear under colour. Bringing them together allows a decision to be followed between supports without assuming an exact mechanical transfer. The painted image can retain evidence of preparation while giving its contours a different final presence.^[20]

Pastel can establish the ground

Women Dreaming of Escape, dated 1 December 1942, offers a different order of work. The Allen Memorial Art Museum identifies pastel, gouache and crayon on pulpboard. Its account describes Miró rubbing pastel into faint areas of colour before responding to the resulting surface with drawn figures. The ground was therefore already active when the more defined marks arrived. The museum connects this procedure with his earlier Constellations, while the sheet’s own materials and date keep it a distinct object.^[21]

The sequence also complicates the common expectation that drawing must begin with a clean outline. Colour can prepare the conditions in which a line becomes necessary. A less defined area invites a sharper mark; a pale field gives that mark room to remain legible. In this sheet, as described by its owning museum, pastel belongs to the beginning of the image as well as to its final material identity.^[21]

Pastel continued to belong to the later practice. MACBA classifies its Untitled of 1968, R.4462, as a drawing in pastel on paper, measuring 48.9 by 37.4 centimetres. The collection credit places it within the Joan Brossa Fund, on long-term loan from Barcelona City Council. These specific terms broaden the category beyond a monochrome pencil sheet. They also preserve the distinction between the date of making and the work’s entry into MACBA in 2011: a drawing can have a long material life before its present collection history begins.^[22]

An archive of starting surfaces

The foundation’s 2025 programme drew attention to another part of this material variety. Its Opening the Archive initiative, begun in 2022 in the building’s octagonal tower, gave preparatory drawings and documentation donated by Miró a dedicated exhibition setting. The programme announced Improvised Surfaces as an examination of materials used to hold the first stages of ideas. A newspaper article, advertisement or stain could help initiate a drawing, rather than merely provide neutral space for one. The project also addressed Miró’s habit of keeping these things. The archive preserves conditions of invention alongside the more familiar finished images.^[23]

A reused fragment carries an existing arrangement before the artist adds anything: a column of print, the boundary of an illustration or an accidental patch. A new mark can answer that arrangement, resist it or turn it towards another purpose. Keeping the fragment preserves this encounter between what was found and what was made. Seen alongside cartoons, independent sheets and coloured grounds, such material gives drawing an unusually broad reach. It could record a deliberate plan, respond to an unforeseen surface, and leave both kinds of beginning available for another day.