A Favorite Painting 26

Joan Miro, Self Portrait 1937-38

I alluded to this painting way back in A Favorite Painting 3, also by Miro. I think its the closest thing I've ever seen to a visualization of how the imagination shapes the personality of an individual. There's no mistaking this as a prototypical Miro painting, even though it engages a degree of realism (quasi-realism?) that is largely absent from his more famously surrealistic work, like the Carnival of Harlequins. There's nothing particularly original about the use of abstraction in the components of a portrait, but it's rare to see them employed so consistently to convey the subject's particular bent in relation to how those elements reflect his perceptions of the rest of the world (or at least the way he paints it). That is, this self-portrait conveys as much about the essence of Miro as the actual features of Miro, without really sacrificing anything significant in either direction.