Friday, April 16

Joan Miró's Guernica

click to enlarge
Still Life with Old Shoe was painted during the Spanish civil war and was consider by Joan Miró himself as one of his most important works. His biographer Jacques Dupin called the painting "Mirós's Guernica" thou there is no influence whatsoever of Picasso's work that is also dated 1937. This is a good comparison of the two that I found at this site:
"The Spanish Civil War broke out in July, 1936, and by November of that year, Miro was in France, where he would live in exile with his family until 1940. Initially without a studio, he stopped planning large groups of paintings in advance, as though reluctant to pursue any projects requiring long-term stability. (However, he had left a large number of unfinished works behind in Barcelona.) In January, 1937, he decided to move in a completely new direction and began work on a painting, "Still Life with Old Shoe, " often called his " Guernica" (in reference to Pablo Picasso's famous painting protesting the bombing of that Basque town). Although "Still Life with Old Shoe" manifests Miro's new need to grapple with material reality--for the first time in years, he worked from a model, a still life set up on a table before him--it is far from the historical and political reality of Picasso's painting. Where Picasso was concerned with a specific time and place, Miro's "Still Life with Old Shoe," and indeed all of his work, is pointedly ahistorical. Through the psychedelic colors and ominous forms of this painting, Miro found the universal aspect of the particular, creating a haunting landscape of devastation from the humble components of a still-life arrangement." (emphasis mine)