Motherhood is one of the oldest subjects in the history of Western art and appears in various forms in our collection from early Christian Madonnas to modern secular images. It is something of a shock, however, to encounter this rendering of maternity by the Spanish artist Joan Miró in which womanhood is reduced to a few basic biological components. Here, the female body becomes a mere armature formed by two thin, crossed lines which carry a head, two breasts (one in profile, one shown frontally) and a fan-like shape, resembling a black skirt, pierced by a red-rimmed hole. Two tiny offspring hover at the breasts while a sperm-like shape swims across the picture to complete this ideogram of procreation.

Painted in 1924, Maternity dates from an important stage in Miró’s development. He had moved from Barcelona to Paris in 1920 where he soon became closely involved with avant-garde circles of poets and artists. The painter André Masson occupied an adjoining studio in Montparnasse, and through this contact Miró became friends with other leading figures in the emerging surrealist movement. These early years in Paris corresponded with a dramatic transformation in Miró’s art. In a sequence of major works he moved from a form of super-realism in which landscape and figures are rendered with almost hypnotic detail to a completely new idiom based on a language of hieroglyphic signs and symbols. The surface of his canvases became a backdrop for freely invented, enigmatic forms that evoke all manner of flora and fauna in an art that has moved into an inner world of dream and fantasy. Looking back on his work of this period, Miró recalled: ‘Hallucinations replaced the external model. I painted as if in a dream, with almost total freedom.’

During the 1920s, Miró divided his time between winter in Paris and summer stays at Mont-roig in the Catalonian countryside where his parents owned a farm. Maternity was probably painted at Mont-roig in the late summer or autumn of 1924. The graffiti-like forms seem close to the kind of automatic or unpremeditated drawing espoused by the Surrealists as a route to unlocking the world of the subconscious. Yet there is also a precision and elegance to Miró’s painting that suggests that improvisation was combined with calculation as he developed his composition. The end result is a powerful image that manages to be at once comic and menacing. All human life is broken down into a few, simple forms that seem to hang like a pair of scales in a precarious balance.

Maternity was acquired by the British collector Roland Penrose in 1937 and passed by descent to his son Antony Penrose. When the opportunity arose to acquire the work in 1991, the Gallery mounted a major appeal and, thanks to generous donations from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund and the public, the painting joined other important works from the Penrose collection as a cornerstone of what is now a superb holding of surrealist art.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.