![]() ![]() Having stumbled upon the series’ wash technique while cleaning his paintbrushes on paper, this happy accident became the basis for the blotchy coloured backgrounds of each painting and in turn inspired the birth of complex forms, from planets and moons to stars and ciphers. Using the same abstract shapes and geometric forms of a decade previous, the series elevated Miró’s aesthetic vocabulary to new heights. Often without electricity, Miró and his family took to stargazing from their house’s balcony, prompting Miró to continue the nocturnal series he had begun in Paris. Having hastily left Paris for the Spanish island of Mallorca to escape the German advance, the near-two year period in which the series was created came at a time of great fear and uncertainty. ![]() While still based in Paris, Miró’s oil paintings at the time reflected his growing despair, with nightmarish works like Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement (1935) reflecting prescient visions of Spain’s imminent Civil War.Īmong Miró’s most famous works are a series of 23 paintings he produced on paper from January 1940 to September 1941 that he referred to as Constellations. In the years of hardship that followed the Great Depression, the region twice requested an autonomous government during the 1930s and old tensions between royalists and socialists re-emerged along new lines of fascism and communism. ![]() By dramatically changing the proportions of the original composition into discrete abstract forms, Miró destroyed what he saw as an outdated perception of reality and replaced it with his own.Ĭentral to Miró’s life and artistic development were the events that took place in his native Catalonia. Miró rejected the naturalism of the original, in other words, the shading, modelling and perspective that gave it an illusion of reality. In 1928, after a trip to the Netherlands brought him into contact with the work of the Dutch Old Masters, Miró produced Dutch Interior I (1928) as an abstracted riposte to Hendrick Martensz Sorgh’s painting of a lute player. Miró’s rejection of what he saw as the bourgeois nature of painting would see him retire from painting altogether at several points during his career but not before he’d ruffled a few more feathers. Key works from his painting-poetry included Photo: This is the Colour of My Dreams (1925), which combined painting and text, compulsive energy and considered intellect, contravening every rule of painting in the process. Around this time Miró had begun to adopt key Surrealist ideology within his work, drawing heavily from the subconscious, dream-states and automatism, the practice of liberating oneself from rational thought with the aim of attaining higher creative consciousness. Embedded within its literary and academic circles, a new period emerged in his work that culminated in a series produced between 1924-7 which he referred to as “peinture-poésie,” or “painting-poetry”. ![]() By 1924, Miró was a fully fledged member of the Surrealists, part of a wider cultural movement that had lost faith in the power of reason following the inexplicable horrors of World War I. ![]()
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