Joan Miro and War

Joan Miró i Ferrà (1893-1983) was a Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. As World War 11 loomed on the horizon, Spain became the battleground between Fascism and Communism inspiring artists such as Joan Miro (and Picasso as we saw yesterday) to express their perceptions. Miro saw his painting Still-Life with Old Shoe as his Guernica (see Picasso). Both artists, through their paintings, heralded a great darkness descending over their world.  

Miro was a surrealist artist but decided to employ a realistic style for this painting since he believed the struggles of war didn't allow anyone to escape through surrealist drawing as in previous works.  

The best description of the colours used in The Realer seem to be mainly black (chin, cheek, eye, ear, teeth, left arm, body, teeth), white (face, nose, neck) and shades of red (cap, nose, cheek, neck, right arm), with green, blue and yellow in the background, including a blue star, and some exposed buff of the celotex ground on which the image was painted.

I don't know if Joan Miro produced any more works reflecting his feelings about war. Unfortunately I haven't been able to do a thorough search but if anyone knows more about this fascinating artist please let me know.

Please follow this link to see the complete series. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1998/miro/plates/plate1.html

Tomorrow we are moving to Britain to see if any of the artists felt compelled to record the events unfolding in the Spanish Civil War.