Curator, Anne Umland: This series of pastels mark a rather dramatic shift in Miró's practice up until this point. He later on described them as the first of what he would call his savage paintings. 1934, in particular, is a troubling moment on the European stage. In the months leading up to the making of these works, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini met for the first time. And then in October of this year, there were general strikes in Spain, and also there was violence in Barcelona. And you know from Miró's correspondence that he is keenly aware of the danger of the moment, and that it shocked these creatures into existence.
From the start, when Miró talked about them, he would say "These pastels are going to be very, very painted." And what pastel does, it's dry, and it's powdery, and it's chromatically very vivid. So, it is the type of medium that actually can capture and retain light
And as you walk around the room and look at these figures, what you begin to realize is that they strain forward, out into our space. There is a very odd relationship between their world and ours. They sort of hover somewhere in between the two with these distended limbs, overinflated genitalia, these acidic, hallucinatory colors. It's as though to create monsters that register the anxiety of this particular moment in time.
Miró plays with this fine balance of things being humorous yet horrifying. They're kind of seductive and luscious, but then they're really kind of scary and repellant, what could be more antithetical to the classicizing ideals that were embraced by the various fascist parties than bodies that were swollen or distorted or grotesque?
Narrator: To hear about the paper Miró used to make the works in this gallery, press 6-2-0-0.