Curator, Anne Umland: This is one of a whole series of objects that Miró made in 1931 and 1932 from painted found wood components, bits of scrap, bric-a-brac. What you're looking at is a construction assembled from six or seven discrete slabs of wood, with one of them direct front center with a very long nail inserted into it. And on the end of that nail is a piece of bone that actually is a vertebrae from a dog. Like many of Miró's objects at this period, that bone element can be repositioned. So he is creating works that have potentially moveable components, compositions that are intentionally variable.
If you look down in the lower right hand corner, this little crudely constructed box, and suspended within is a chickpea. At this moment, in Paris, among the surrealists, there is a great vogue for creating art made out of bits and pieces, put together so that the act of art-making resides in the assembly as opposed to in the crafting, the hand, the touch, the skill. And so again, one way of thinking about challenging or pushing at the boundaries of painting, with painting understood as being a static, self-contained unified art object is of course to create works that have moveable elements that can be repositioned. And moveable elements that are moreover found real objects collected from the world.