Lot 279 D

Written at the age of 15 and premiered only a few years later, Alfred Jarry's anarchical farce “Ubu roi” (“King Ubu”) is considered a milestone in modern theatre. It is hardly surprising that contemporary critics saw Jarry's satire of power as an obscene provocation, but fellow artists proved all the more enthusiastic. Its premiere was held in 1896 with stage sets by Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard, and the figure of the ravenous and destructive monster Ubu quickly became an icon of the Dadaists and Surrealists, but also an important point of reference for Fluxus and happenings.
Formally the grotesque and at times vulgar language of King Ubu is distinguished by its graphic and phonic deformation of individual terms, and it attains its characteristic quality through an entirely novel and sometimes absurdly strange semantics. Our work builds on this distinctive formal feature when it sets the young King Ubu in motion, together with a series of letters, which irresistibly form themselves into a crude “putaine” before the eyes of their viewer. Joan Miró repeatedly dealt with Jarry's satirical play in his work, and his only ostensibly naive formal idiom enabled him to depict the character of Ubu in an all the more bizarre fashion. Like few other works by the artist, our drawing represents a particularly sharp-witted dialogue with “Ubu roi” in its demonstrative linking of language and figure.