Joan Miró: A Language of His Own

Joan Miró - The Farm. 1921-22 - Oil on canvas - 132 x 147 cm. (52 x 58 in.) The National Gallery of Art - Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)Spanish Artist Joan Miró (1893-1983)—discussed elsewhere on What About Art?—was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse, and in 1920 he moved to Paris. Under the influence of Surrealist artists, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. He was generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols. But, Miró rejected membership to any artistic movement in the interwar European years. This strong individualistic streak benefited Miró and accommodated his uniqueness well. He also remained deeply connected to his Catalan roots and would eventually split his year between living in France and his homeland.

Miró’s work featured here presents a view of the artist's masia or "family farm," filled with animals, farm implements, plants, and evidence of human activity. Miró explained, "The Farm was a résumé of my entire life in the country. I wanted to put everything I loved about the country into that canvas - from a huge tree to a tiny snail." The intensity of vision and almost maniacal attention to detail gives the work the quality of a memory reconfigured in a dream, and prefigures his later Surrealist work. Art critic Laura Cummings wrote, "every entity is given its own autonomous space in the picture, separately praised but connected by rhyming shapes," due to the "quasi-cubist space, tilted upright; and presumably because Miró is celebrating the thriving upward growth of home." 

The artist considered this work among his most important, marking a turning point. While reflecting a number of influences, including Catalan folk art, a Romanesque sense of hierarchy where scale reflects importance, and a Cubist vocabulary. 

After completing The Farm, Miró struggled to find a buyer in a Parisian modern art market that preferred Cubism. One dealer suggested cutting it into several smaller paintings for ease of sale. Fortunately, the artist had become friends with the writer Ernest Hemingway, then a struggling unknown, and, after hours of working the two would meet for boxing sessions to unwind. Hemingway was determined to buy The Farm and, after borrowing money and working as a grocery clerk, was able to purchase it. He kept it throughout his life and wrote, "I would not trade it for any picture in the world. It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there.”