Still life with an old shoe
| Still life with an old shoe |
|---|
| Joan Miró , 1937 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 81.3 x 116.8 cm |
| Museum of Modern Art, New York
Link to the picture |
Still Life with Old Shoe , Catalan Natura morta del sabatot , French Nature morte au vieux soulier , English Still Life with Old Shoe , is an oil painting by the Catalan painter Joan Miró from 1937, which was created in Paris . It is currently held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York after it was donated to the museum in 1969 by James Thrall Soby.
history
After the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Miró left Spain until 1940 and only moved back to Paris alone - his family followed in December of that year. In the beginning he had to take a hotel room, later the family got a small apartment, which, however, offered no opportunity for artistic work. He therefore worked in the mezzanine of Pierre Loeb's Galerie Pierre and studied life drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière .
The Spanish Civil War influenced Miro in his work. In 1936, for example, he painted a painting with his husband and wife in front of a pile of dung in a gloomy atmosphere; In front of a statue-like pile of poop stands an alienated couple with extremely prominent genitals. A return to realism followed in 1937 with the still life with an old shoe , which was painted in five months ; the everyday motifs of the picture seem like an apocalyptic vision. The monumental painting Le faucheur ( The Reaper ) and the poster Aidez l'Espagne ( Help Spain ), both with revolutionary motifs against the fascist putschists General Francisco Franco , were created for the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris . Aidez l'Espagne was exhibited at the same time as Pablo Picasso's Guernica in the Spanish Pavilion. However, it was the still life with the old shoe that Miró later saw as the equivalent of Guernica , not the reaper . As you could read in his Catalan notebooks, he had planned a large tragic picture in response to Guernica , but it was never painted.
description
The still life with the dimensions 81.3 cm × 116.8 cm, which Miró counted among his most important pictures, shows everyday things painted in glowing colors, placed on a table. In the front left you can see an apple with an oversized fork, the center emphasizes a wrapped gin bottle, followed by a cut half of a brown bread. At the front right is the colorful old shoe that gives the title the title. A wall lamp is visible in the background. The picture is dominated by predominant black and dark green, which oppress the objects, which are painted in pure, bright colors, they seem to burn in the dark. The things that don't necessarily belong together on the same table express a feeling of poverty, anger, loss and abandonment. In a letter to his art dealer Pierre Matisse dated February 12, 1937, Miró stated that he was trying “to create a work that could 'compete with a Velázquez'”.
literature
- Janis Mink: Joan Miró . Taschen, Cologne 2006, ISBN 978-3-8228-6367-1
