Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937

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Joan Miró
Collage (Composition with Wire)
Montroig, late July–early October 1929

Joan Miró. Collage (Composition with Wire). Montroig, late July–early October 1929

Spanish, 1893–1983 Conté crayon, flocked paper, tar paper, wire, and string on paper, 30 5/16 x 21 7/16" (77 x 54.4 cm). Private collection © 2008 Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris Audio courtesy of Acoustiguide

Curator, Anne Umland: In these works, Miró is persistently playing off the abstract geometries of cut-out collage materials, the use of found elements, like wire, using them to create these palpable three-dimensional lines. Setting up, as you can see here, a tense relationship between his own drawn lines and the obdurate opacity of these real material elements.

This looks remarkably spontaneous. But, like many of Miró's works from this moment, was meticulously planned. And in this case, generated from a small preliminary collage that he made using found menswear advertisements for an umbrella, the vestige of which is seen in the lower right corner; a shoe, which is recast in the drawn element at left, which overlays the two brown circles of paper; a pair of pants, and then a boy's head, which reappears up at the top of the composition.

There's a tremendous variety of paper types in these works. Often he uses, as you can see here, this flocked paper, made by coating paper with paint, and then adhering a fibrous or a wood-chip flocking to the top. When you use papers that have texture to them, that's one way of having a real literal depth added to your work. And in many of these collages, originally the cut-out circular elements raised and lifted. So it’s as though extending out into space was something Miró was striving to do, or testing in different ways.