Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937

4 / 14

Joan Miró
Dutch Interior (I)
Montroig, July–December 1928

Joan Miró. Dutch Interior (I). Montroig, July-December 1928

Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 28 3/4" (91.8 x 73 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. © 2018 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Curator, Anne Umland: This work is one of a series of five paintings that Miró made over the course of the summer of 1928 after a trip to Holland…And this particular painting in fact …has its origins in a postcard that Miró bought at the Rijksmuseum of Sorgh's The Lute Player.

Traditionally, 17th century Dutch genre paintings of interior were scenes that were rendered in a very naturalistic way. Shading, modeling, perspective were all used to construct the illusion that you were looking into a real space…. And so then what Miró does is as though to say well, all right, I don't want to construct an illusion. I don't want to make something that convinces you that what I have painted is real.

Miró changes the relative scale of all of the elements in the composition dramatically, so that the head of the lute player has ballooned. And really all that's left of his facial features is this distended…red grimacing face at the center with a displaced moustache over to the right. And then if you start looking down…looking down his body you realize that the lute…has really taken it over. And all that is left of the lute player's figure is one tiny leg that protrudes from the bottom of the lute. And then another has burst through, literally… the front of the lute expressing a sort of physical excitement the force of which has actually broken the strings.

Miró in this moment basically attacks the human anatomy. So instead of thinking of the body in classical terms as some sort of a ideal of harmonious form, Miró takes it as his project to take it apart.

Narrator: To hear Conservator Jim Coddington describe how this work was painted, press 6-1-4-0.