Miro painting series#

Subsequent research suggests a more deliberate approach: the Miró Foundation in Barcelona holds notebooks containing many preparatory drawings from this period (Gaëtan Picon (ed.), Joan Miró: Catalan Notebooks, London 1977, p.7). He recalled in 1948 that he was inspired at the time by hunger-induced hallucinations, and that he allowed his compositions to be directed by chance and by the movements of his paintbrush (Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Perhaps influenced by this contemporary interest in relinquishing artistic control, Miró often described his working method as highly spontaneous. Writer André Breton was among those interested in using art to reveal the secrets of the unconscious mind, and his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto famously advocated the practice of ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’ (André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor 1972, p.26). In the 1920s, Miró was dividing his time between his native Catalonia and Paris, where he became closely associated with avant-garde figures in art and literature, including members of the emerging surrealist movement. With their fields of colour animated by semi-abstract symbols, they represented a marked departure from the figurative style of Miró’s earlier work.

Miro painting series#

Painting is one of a large series of works made by Miró between 19 which are often referred to as ‘automatic paintings’ (Simon Wilson, Surrealist Painting, London 1975, p.5), ‘dream paintings’ (Dupin 1962, p.157) or ‘peinture-poesie’ (poetry-painting) (Lanchner 1993, p.15). On the right, small circles with lines dangling from them may suggest airborne balloons. Sinuous black lines and smaller organic shapes in touches of black, red, green, yellow and brown hover between abstraction and poetic suggestions of sexual organs: breast-like forms appear in the upper centre and lower right, and the nipple of the latter is almost enclosed by a dark brown patch. The most prominent of these is an amorphous white shape floating on the left, painted in patchy brushstrokes that allow glimpses of the blue beneath.

Over this luminous monochrome surface are arranged several delicately irregular forms. Painting is a large canvas in landscape format dominated by a highly saturated cerulean blue ground painted in tempera.