Nude with Mirror 1919

Joan Miró painted "Nude with Mirror" with oil on canvas, and when you look closely, you can see how he coaxed the paint across the surface. I imagine Miró approaching the canvas, maybe stepping back, squinting, then diving back in, adding more geometry with each pass. He's not aiming for realism here, but maybe trying to show you how it feels to see, to really see, a person in a space. The geometry in the body suggests there are many ways to view a body. It's like he's turning her around in his head, trying to figure out how to trap her, how to capture a sense of being. I think of Picasso and Braque’s cubist portraits, but Miró's is softer. Maybe he felt compassion for his subject. Every artist is in conversation with artists who came before, and the conversation keeps going, changing, expanding. Painting allows for so many ways of looking, and this painting asks us to look and look again.