Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry — dark farce, grotesque tyranny, language gone off the rails — had haunted Miró for years before he returned to it in 1971 with Ubu aux Baléares. The figure of Père Ubu — that formless mass of appetite and stupidity — had never truly left his visual vocabulary. But where the 1966 Ubu Roi portfolio followed Jarry’s narrative arc, Ubu aux Baléares does something more personal: it transplants Ubu into Miró’s own territory, the Balearic Islands, the landscape of his deepest roots.
The result is a series of 23 lithographs produced in close collaboration with Mourlot, published by Tériade in Paris — the same publisher behind some of the defining illustrated books of the twentieth century. On Arches paper, in an edition of 120, these are prints of exceptional material refinement that stand in deliberate tension with their subject: Ubu, the embodiment of vulgarity and excess, rendered with the precision and care of a master printmaker at the height of his powers.
In Miró’s hands, Ubu becomes less a character than a force of nature — a primal energy that belongs to the same mythological landscape as the sun, the moon, and the black forms that populate his paintings. The violence of Jarry’s original is absorbed into Miró’s visual language: vivid, almost childlike signs that cut like knife blows, image and letter colliding on the same surface, the boundary between writing and drawing dissolved entirely. A satire without heavy moralising — a visual language that laughs, but accuses.
