Curator, Anne Umland: What Miró did with these small, intimately scaled paintings on view in this gallery is he alternated working, on the one hand, on masonite, and on the other, on copper, as he does here in Two Philosophers. In the masonite paintings, he used Tempera, which creates a dry, matte surface. And on copper works like this one, he's painting with oil paint, which guarantees a very viscous, liquidy, and chromatically vivid kind of surface…
This is another example of what Miró would come to call his “savage paintings.” It is an image of two figures in a landscape. But, it is rendered in hallucinogenic and lurid terms. If you paint something very small and with exquisite color and detail, what happens is you make people want to get up very close to the surface. And then once you get there, it is to find that you are staring at these monstrous forms, that once again, like the pastels of 1934, are both savage and silly.
There is this tense combination of seduction and terrifying figuration, with these two figures, two philosophers with distended genitalia, huge, oversized limbs that are mired into this azure, gorgeous, blue painted ground.
Over on the horizon line is this mysterious clutching, three-dimensionally realized shape, that just hovers on the horizon, both undefinable and menacing at the same time. Part of the force of these pictures comes from their chromatic intensity, from these colors that are both vivid and jewel-like, and at the same time, acidic and off-putting. Miró's choice of colors in this work is, on the one hand, somewhat simple. Yellows, blues and reds. And yet combined in ways that are un-naturalistic, that add up to the profound disquiet that emanates from this small work.