

If this poetic mode provided one avenue for what Miró declared his “assassination of painting,” a trip to the Netherlands in 1928 brought him to challenge the illusionistic space of Dutch Old Master painting.
The farm miro Patch#
Experimenting at his studio alongside the visual artists André Masson and Max Ernst, he found himself equally inspired by his association with the prominent literary minds of the movement, leading to a series of works from 1924 to 1927 that he dubbed peinture-poésie, or “painting-poetry.” This is the Color of My Dreams (1925), for example, consists only of those titular words and a small patch of blue pigment. (The author Ernest Hemingway bought the painting, seeing in Miró’s work the perfect encapsulation of his memories from a trip he’d once taken to Spain.)īy the mid-1920s, Miró was spending most of his time in Paris, having officially joined the Surrealists in 1924. Miró’s love of the early Catalan painters is recognizable in his painstaking attention to each leaf on the tree and furrow in the soil, while his relationship with Cubism can be seen in the way he flattens the otherwise linear space of the composition with geometric forms and stretches of unmodulated pigment. Miró’s encounter with the Paris avant-garde would bring more modern influences to bear on his work, as seen in The Farm (1921), a semi-realistic, semi-Cubist rendering of his childhood home.

Before the groundbreaking Surrealist painters Salvador Dalí or René Magritte, Joan Miró helped to give visual definition to the young movement, influencing generations of artists to come. Starting in the 1920s, Miró’s studio in Paris would be an experimental meeting place for artists and writers, introducing him to leading thinkers and cultural figures like Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos, Jean Dubuffet, and Ezra Pound.Įnvisioning his artistic pursuit as a challenge to traditional painting and an assault on the bourgeois society that produced it, Miró developed a distinctly symbolic language of simplified, biomorphic, or lifelike, forms. Miró would incorporate this method into his work for the rest of his career.įor the Catalan artist, the conflict between an impulsive stream of consciousness and the careful deliberations of the intellectual mind was fertile ground and would drive his work into greater formal exploration in a number of media-from prints, sculpture, and ceramics to stained glass, set design, and even tapestry.
The farm miro license#
Indeed, the works reflected Breton’s embrace of dream imagery and “psychic automatism”: a practice that sought to give creative license to the unconscious mind through unmediated drawing or painting. Just a year earlier, Miró, who was based between Paris and Spain, had begun work on The Tilled Field (1923) and The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) (1923–4), paintings whose fantastical, lyrical fields of uncanny references-swirling, abstract forms, floating body parts, and distorted animals-aligned closely with the concerns of the Surrealists. But in retrospect, one name is glaringly omitted from Breton’s selection: the Catalan painter Joan Miró. When the French poet André Breton penned his Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, cementing one of the most important movements of the 20th century, he claimed as his associates some of the leading avant-garde artists of the period: Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, among others.
