Joan Miró: The Magic of Metaphors

Two works by Joan Miró that will be discussed in class (click photo for larger image)Jill Kiefer will be devoting one online class to Joan Miró ( (1893-1983). You can also read about this wonderful artist here on What About Art?

Miró was one of the great mavericks of modern art. Although he was closely associated with both Dada and Surrealism, Miró developed a signature style that truly defies labels. Using pictorial signs, biomorphic forms, geometric shapes and traveling lines—he vigorously expressed the fruits of his imagination with respect to his own human experience. By juxtaposing semi-abstracted forms with recognizable imagery, Miró addressed a broad range of concepts and ideas in a transcendent, lyrical way. His visual poetry contributed enormously to the avant-garde movements that would follow him, and his work continues to delight and inform us to this day. Join us as we explore the ways in which this inventive artist dismantled traditional modes of representation. 

Friday, 12 June - 3:00pm – 4:00pm Eastern (New York Time)

Click HERE to Register. Class sizes are limited to don’t wait!

René Magritte: Shades of Things to Come

René Magritte - Bather - 1925 - Oil on canvas - 20 x 39 in - 50 x 100 cm - Palais des beaux-arts de Charleroi, Charleroi, Belgium (click photo for larger image)Belgian artist Renée Magritte (1898-1967) created work that frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects, or an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The mystery that emerges from this approach is for what he is best known.

In the elegant work featured here, we have a fine example of Magritte's early attempts to find a restrained, illustrative style. We can recognize many of the elements that characterized his later paintings, such as the prominence of the sea and the mysterious sphere in the background. This work also bears the influence of Magritte's professional forays into the world of fashion advertising. Always evident in Magritte’s work is his extraordinary ability as a draughtsman.

You can read about Magritte elsewhere on What About Art?

Carlo Carrà: Metaphysical for a Moment

Carlo Carrà - Western Horseman - 1917 - Oil on canvas - 52 x 67 cm - Private CollectionItalian painter Carlo Carrá (1881-1966) was a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art and he taught for many years in the city of Milan. 

In 1917 he met Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara, and worked with him there for several weeks. Influenced by de Chirico, Carrà began including mannequin imagery in his paintings, and together they formed the short-lived “Metaphysical Art Movement”. The work featured here is one of Carrà’s metaphysical works. The movement broke up over a dispute between de Chirico and Carrà over who exactly established it. Ah…the ego of some artists!

By 1919, Carrà's metaphysical phase was giving way to an “archaicism” inspired by the works of Giotto, whom he admired as "the artist whose forms are closest to our manner of conceiving the construction of bodies in space.” However, Carrà is best known for his Futurist works.

Giorgio de Chirico: An Artist of Enigmas

Giorgio de Chirico - The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon - 1910 - Oil on canvas - 45 x 60 cm - Peggy Guggenheim Collection - Venice (click photo for larger image)Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was a pioneer in the widespread revival of Classicism that took place in Europe, during the 1920s. His classically inspired pictures of empty town squares are the art for which he is best known. It was the work styled in this fashion that led him to form the short-lived Metaphysical Art movement, along with the painter Carlo Carrà.

In The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, long, sinister, and illogical shadows cast by unseen objects onto empty city spaces contrast starkly with the bright, clear light that is rendered in brooding green tonalities.” This was the first painting in what is known as the Metaphysical Town Square series.

De Chirico’s metaphysical works attracted considerable notice, particularly in France, where the Surrealists championed him as a precursor. But the artist was more conservative than the Paris avant-garde. He later referred to his former supporters as "the leaders of modernistic imbecility.”

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.”