Joan Miró: The conquest of New York (1947)

Based on previously unpublished materials from Joan Miró’s first trip to New York, this paper reexamines the artist’s early encounter with the city as a formative moment in the construction of his international identity. These documents reveal New York not merely as a destination, but as a symbolic and cultural threshold, later conceptualized in The Conquest of New York as a space of artistic validation, negotiation, and reinvention. Building on this framework, the study explores a series of visual and performative exchanges involving Miró, Balthus, and Louise Bourgeois. Particular attention is given to Bourgeois’s reinterpretation of Balthus’s portrait of Miró and his daughter, as well as to the reenactment in New York of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Thetis Adoring Jupiter. These acts are understood as forms of citation and transformation, through which artistic memory and lineage are reconfigured across time and context. Finally, the paper examines Atelier 17 as a key site of technical and intellectual exchange, focusing on the collaborative attempts to reconstruct William Blake’s engraving methods. Through these interconnected episodes, the study argues that the “conquest” of New York operates less as a gesture of dominance than as a complex process of cultural translation, where displacement, reinterpretation, and performative reconstruction become central strategies of artistic production.