Artwork detail
Peinture (Painting)
1933
Spanish, 1893-1983
Oil on canvas mounted on board
51 15/16 x 77 5/8 "
University purchase, Kende Sale Fund, 1945
WU 3768
Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró was one of the most influential artists of modernist abstraction. This large Peinture is from a series of eighteen images executed by the artist, all with the same name. Based on an earlier collage of fragments from sales catalogs, the painting presents an image of abstract, biomorphic forms interlocked across the surface of the canvas. It is rendered primarily with flat blacks and whites but also with simple primary and secondary hues, including red, blue, yellow, and brown in the smaller forms, while the hard-edged organic shapes are set against an amorphous brown and green background. Creating a tension between the illusion of depth and an emphasis on surface effects, Miró's amoeba-like forms appear to be in constant metamorphosis and flux; they waver between purely formal elements and suggestions of bodily forms or individual organic entities. At the same time, within the context of the early 1930s, the large, dark, and foreboding forms that invade and subsume others can be seen as an image of fascist violence and cruelty.
