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. Elements from The Farm continued to appear in his work, however, and the intensity of vision found in this painting remained a standard for all of his later art.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. Moreover, space in The Farm is defined by a ground plane that tilts sharply upward, while individual forms are similarly tilted, so that they sit silhouetted, parallel to the picture plane.īy the mid-1920s, Miró had abandoned the realist manner of The Farm and had created a surrealist style of automatism and abstraction. This detailed realism, however, is matched by a tendency to simplify forms into abstract, geometric shapes. The painting is a compendium of separate details, each carefully observed and precisely described. The Farm represents a brilliant amalgamation of an intense, even primitive realism with the formal vocabulary of cubism. In 1921, he determined to make a painting of this farm, a painting that he came to regard as one of the key works in his career. Nevertheless, he remained deeply attached to his native Catalonia, and returned each summer to his family's farm in the village of Montroig. “Miró” moved from Barcelona to Paris in 1920, determined to participate in the artistic vanguard of the French capital.
The Farm /Joan Miró/1921-1922/Oil on canvas/ National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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