Curator, Anne Umland: This is one of a series of six oversized pictures that Miró made in 1930, all on white grounds. It’s on a scale that’s traditionally is reserved for paintings of saints, for history paintings, for things that are meant to be seen from a distance. And instead, Miró uses this scale to make these pictures that more frequently than not skirt failure in every possible way.
Up at top there are these two spherical areas. And on the left, a white impastoed mélange, paint, gesso, possibly plaster mixed together to create this kind of dense textured cloud-like area. And then it's as though Miró sets out to create a similar shape, and similar types of gestures, but with charcoal, and with black paint.
As you proceed down the picture, you notice that it’s one that rather defiantly and definitively doesn't add up. There is a figural form. And at left you see the profile of a face, and then these breast-like forms, and what appears to be buttocks and a leg over at the right-hand side. But it is almost as though Miró decided to take a picture apart completely and just leave the elements scattered for us to try to put back together again.
This picture was made at the height of Miró's contemptuous calls for the death of painting and I think in this work and in the others in this room, there is an anger and a rage and a desire to try to make works that are more often than not willfully ugly, that are off-putting. That very definitively separate painting out from anything that might be dismissed as being a mere commodity product or in service to the market.
Narrator: Conservator Jim Coddington describes how this painting has aged over time. To hear about it, press 6-1-6-0