#4, Joan Miro, (Standing Nude), 1921

The Artist:

Joan Miro was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona, Spain. His father was a watchmaker and goldsmith, his father's background as an artisan and the austere Catalan landscape was very important to his art. It was said that he expressed to his parents that wished he  attended a commercial college. Joan worked for two years as a clerk in an office until he had a mental and physical breakdown. In 1912  his parents  allowed him to attend an art school in Barcelona. His teacher at the showed a great understanding of his 18-year-old , advising him to touch the objects he was about to draw, a procedure that strengthened Miros  feeling for the spatial quality of objects (joanmiro.com). In the early 1920s Miro combined meticulously detailed realism with abstraction in landscapes such as the renowned Farm (1921) and The Tilled Field (1923–24). He  began  to remove the objects he portrayed from their natural context and reassembled them as if in accordance with a new, mysterious grammar, creating a ghostly, eerie impression. Upon his return from a trip in 1928 to the Netherlands, where he studied the 17th-century Dutch realist painters in the museums, Miro executed a series of works based on Old Master paintings titled Dutch Interiors (1928). In the 1930s Miro became to experiment in working with techniques of collage and sculptural assemblage and creating sets and costumes for ballets. His art had developed slowly from his first clumsy attempts at expression to the apparently playful masterpieces of his later period. In his late works he employed an even greater simplification of figure and background; he sometimes created a composition merely by setting down a dot and a sensitive line on a sea-blue surface, as in Blue II (1961). In 1980, in conjunction with his being awarded Spain's Gold Medal of Fine Arts, a plaza in Madrid was named in Miro’s honor (Davies, 997).

The Work:


In this oil on canvas, Miro makes use of basic geometric forms. He creates this woman's figure with a rhythm so the viewer has to look up and down the canvas. Miro manages to show the front and side of each body part to allow the viewer to examine how everything was pieced together. Miro's goal was for shapes to point towards the balance of a form (Mink 27-30).

My Reaction:


This piece says femininity to me because the female is the one and only subject of the piece and I can see the whole female anatomy looking at it. Miro gives us a glimpse of the females hair (straight and pulled back), the eye (open and closed), the breasts (soft and hard), and the stomach (flat and round). He even let's us see the vagina and how curvaceous the female figure can be. For me, this piece displays numerous life cycles of the female body.

Works Cited:

Davies, Penelope W., Walter Denny, Frima Hofrichter, Joseph Jacobs, Ann Roberts, and David Simon. Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print. 

"Joan Miro Biography." Joan Miro Art. Web. 05 Mar. 2012. <http://joanmiro.com/joan-miro-biography/>. 

Mink, Janis, and Joan Miró. Joan Miró, 1893-1983. Köln: Benedikt Taschen, 1993. Print.