Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937

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Joan Miró
Painting
Barcelona, June 10, 1933

Joan Miró. Painting. Barcelona, June 10, 1933

Spanish, 1893–1983 Oil on canvas, 51 3/8 x 64 1/8" (130.5 x 162.9 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. © 2008 Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris Audio courtesy of Acoustiguide

Curator, Anne Umland: This is a painting based on the adjacent collage. It’s one of a series of 18 that resulted from an assembly line experiment that Miró set for himself. He made these collages, with elements clipped from equipment catalogs, machinery, and newspaper advertisements taken from popular culture. And then he takes these mechanically reproduced objects and arrays them on these empty white sheets. And if you look and see, he carefully inscribes the date when he finished the collage in the lower left corner.

And then he uses that collage to generate the spark, the jolt was how he referred to it, that would catapult him toward making this large-scale painting. And when he completed the related painting, he inscribed its date and its canvas size on the collage. So although in Miró's lifetime, he never exhibited the two side-by-side, it’s clear from the way that he inscribed them that he wanted to retain the relationship, the collage and the painting as a pair. Miró always strikes this uncanny balance in his work between abstraction and yet retaining resemblance. You really can look back and forth between these collages and these paintings, and every element reappears transformed in terms of palette, color, scale.

And it is one of those moments when you actually have the quasi-magical experience of watching an artist's imagination and hand at work.

Narrator: To hear Conservator Jim Coddington discuss how Miró used texture in this work, press 6-1-8-0.