Joan Miró Lithographs

A line can be wiry, smoky, broken or almost swallowed by black. Miró’s lithographs invite attention to these differences. In Barcelona XIII of 1944, thin contours surround eyes and gently shaded bodies; in The Fire-eating Bird of 1969, a heavy black figure sits among loops of green, blue, yellow and red.^[1][2] Lithography gave him a way to carry the character of drawing into a printed image. Its appeal lies partly in that encounter: a mark can retain the appearance of a quick gesture while belonging to a carefully prepared, repeatable work.

Drawing on a flat surface

The word “planographic” describes the essential arrangement: the image prints from a flat surface. The drawing does not depend on cutting a raised design or an ink-bearing groove. Instead, lithography separates the parts that accept oily ink from those protected by water. The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies limestone and prepared metal plates, usually zinc or aluminium, as printing surfaces for the process.^[6]

The drawing materials matter. A lithographic crayon contains grease; tusche is a greasy drawing medium that can be applied in liquid form with a brush. The surface has enough texture to hold their marks.^[3] Tusche can also be diluted to produce different consistencies and effects, as the Getty’s materials vocabulary explains.^[7] These possibilities make lithography especially rewarding for an artist interested in the difference between a narrow contour and an expansive, fluid shape.

The printing surface is chemically treated, dampened and rolled with oily ink, which adheres to the image areas. Paper receives the impression in a press.^[3] The apparent freedom of a moving hand reaches the viewer through operations that preserve the gesture.

A drawing can travel to the stone

Drawing directly on stone was one possibility; transfer drawing offered another. Deborah Wye’s MoMA account identifies a consequential exchange in Normandy in 1939. Georges Braque, then Miró’s neighbour, explained how drawings made with lithographic crayons could be transferred to stones for printing. Wye connects that encouragement with the fifty works eventually drawn in Barcelona and printed there in 1944.^[8]

The distinction brings the drawing stage into clearer focus. A lithographic image need not begin with the artist leaning over the heavy printing stone. A drawing can enter the workshop as a separate object and become the basis for an impression. MoMA’s 1993 checklist specifically describes Barcelona XIII as a transfer lithograph.^[9] That description gives a more precise account of its making than the general medium label alone.

It also encourages a particular kind of looking. Follow a contour as though following a drawn sentence: where does it accelerate, hesitate, or change weight? Then consider how the line shares the paper with a dark patch or a faintly worked body. The printing process brings those different kinds of mark into one image, while leaving their contrasting characters available to the eye.

Black, texture and the Barcelona sheets

In Barcelona XIII, two tall figures enclose a smaller, eye-filled form. Thin outlines leave much of their interiors open; irregular shading gathers around the central eyes and beneath one elongated head. Stars and small suspended shapes punctuate the paper.^[1] A pale area can appear almost weightless beside a black eye.

MoMA connects the series’ disturbing hybrids with Miró’s Republican sympathies and the anguish of wartime Spain.^[1] Across the Barcelona Series, line, grain, shaded mass and untouched paper take distinct parts within a restricted palette.

MoMA identifies Joan Prats as publisher and Mirallas in Barcelona as printer, recording an edition of five.^[1] The intimacy of the drawn marks remains connected to the practical work that allowed them to circulate.

Colour becomes part of the structure

After Miró’s first exhibition at Galerie Maeght in 1948, his publishing association with Aimé Maeght gave him sustained opportunities to explore colour lithography. Wye describes this as a particularly fertile area of experiment, alongside the invitations, catalogue covers and other printed forms produced through Maeght’s activities.^[8]

Dog Barking at the Moon of 1952 offers a vivid example of colour doing structural work. A dark border contains a blue field, streaked with lighter marks. Angular yellow and green areas push across it; red patches interrupt the larger shapes, while black claws and curves give them a sharp articulation. The eye moves between broad coloured zones and smaller, emphatic details.^[4] These observations concern the lithograph, which is a separate work from the earlier painting with the same title.^[10]

MoMA names Mourlot as printer and Tériade as publisher, and records an edition of eighty.^[4] The Hammer Museum’s impression is numbered 63/80. Its record also distinguishes the signature printed from the stone from the signature and date added in white pencil.^[11] That small distinction makes two moments visible: information carried by the printing surface and marks subsequently placed on an individual sheet.

How separate colours become one image

A multicolour lithograph normally involves additional printing surfaces for the different colours. The sheet returns to the press, and each stage must align with what has already been printed. This alignment is called registration.^[6] It gives the printer a task that remains largely hidden when we take in the finished image at once.

Knowing this changes the pleasure of looking at Miró’s colour. A red shape and a black boundary may appear to belong to one gesture, yet their relationship can depend on successive impressions. An edge or an overlap becomes interesting as an artistic decision and a technical achievement. The general procedure does not establish the precise sequence used for every Miró lithograph.

Each colour has to be considered in relation to the parts it will meet. Apparent exuberance and deliberate organisation can be enjoyed together.

The dense centre of The Fire-eating Bird

By 1969, The Fire-eating Bird presents another relationship between drawing and colour. A black shape stretches across the centre, broken by openings and a red-ringed circular form. Around it, coloured loops seem to coil and double back. Fine speckling spreads beyond the principal figure into the pale surrounding area.^[2] The image holds several speeds of attention: the black mass registers immediately, while the loosely circling colour and scattered marks invite a slower examination.

Compared with the fine contours of Barcelona XIII, the later sheet gives black a greater visual weight and lets colour gather around it. The comparison concerns what these particular images do; it does not require every black mark to be assigned the same meaning.

MoMA records Galerie Gérald Cramer, Geneva/Paris, as publisher, Arte Adrien Maeght in Paris as printer, and an edition of seventy-five.^[2] The names reveal a different production arrangement from the earlier Barcelona project, even though both works belong to lithography.

Printers, publishers and the page

The roles become especially clear in Parler seul, made in 1948–50 and published in 1950. Tristan Tzara supplied the text; Maeght Éditeur published the book; Mourlot printed the lithographs; and Fequet et Baudier printed the typography. MoMA records seventy-two lithographs, including variants on the folder and slipcase, together with a lithographed collage on the wrapper front.^[12]

For a reader interested in lithography, the important feature is the range of surfaces that the process can inhabit within one project. An image can announce the book from its outer covering, accompany a passage of text, or occupy a page with a different visual emphasis. The surrounding words and the act of turning a leaf change how it is encountered. The illustrated books develop that relationship more fully, while Miró’s posters bring lithography into another kind of public address.

These production credits also make collaboration concrete. “Printer” and “publisher” identify different responsibilities, just as the image and the text may require different printers. Their appearance in a museum record helps us recover some of the working structure behind an apparently effortless page.

A lithographic workshop in Mallorca

In the late 1960s Miró fitted out buildings at Son Boter with separate lithography and engraving workshops. The Fundació Miró Mallorca names the lithographer Damià Caus among the specialists involved in bringing his projects to completion. It also identifies lithographs for the Llotja exhibition in Palma and for the Obra Cultural Balear among the work associated with the studios.^[5] Lithography thus acquired a practical setting close to his other working spaces in Mallorca.

The Foundation describes Miró’s printmaking as a process of exchange in which technical specialists actively contributed suggestions.^[13] This account helps explain why the workshop belongs within the art’s history. The passage from drawing to printing involved judgement, experiment and response. Technical knowledge offered ways to develop an image and see what it could become on paper.

An original lithograph is developed through this process; multiple impressions do not make it a reproduction of a painting.^[3] Within Miró’s wider printmaking, lithography gives an intimate view of a drawn mark preserved and transformed through the press.