With these words, Picasso received the delegation from Horta that visited him in his residence in Notre-Dame-de-Vie. Gaudí, Picasso, Miró And Casals in Tarragona “You come from Horta, you are friends of mine”. A visit to Picasso is like visiting a ballerina with a number of lovers…” Miró’s individualism and strong moral vision pushed him away from some of the dominant artistic labels of the time, and in retrospect it is a glaring omission on Breton’s part to have left him out of his surrealist manifesto of 1924. Everything is done for his dealer, for the money. The visit to his studio made my spirit sink. Picasso very fine, very sensitive, a great painter. Miró viewed his life in strict moral terms, “I have seen exhibitions of moderns. “After Miró had painted The Farm,” Hemingway would say, “and after James Joyce had written Ulysses, they had a right to expect people to trust the further things they did, even when people did not understand them.”Ī visit to Picasso is like visiting a ballerina with a number of lovers…

Hemingway held onto the painting for the rest of his life. The piece took Miró nine taxing months to complete, but Hemingway saw the value of the piece, picking up shifts as a grocery clerk to buy it. The two would box after long days of painting or writing. It was while Miró was working on The Farm that he met Ernest Hemingway in Paris. One of his most acclaimed works, The Farm (1921), a half-Cubist and half-Realist painting depicting his Catalan countryside, includes a French newspaper, a nod to the influence of Paris on his work and thought. He had become deeply entrenched in the intellectual and artistic world of Paris that flourished in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Joan Miró had been living between Paris and Spain since 1920. National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Mary Hemingway © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011 Though the cause that Miró was fighting for would be defeated by the Nationalists, his vision of defiance and strength persist. While Picasso depicted a tragic and horrific vision of the war and also reality, Miró depicted a defiantly optimistic vision of the Spanish people and humanity. Picasso’s Guernica overshadowed the work in the eyes of critics of the time, and because of this the world did not yet understand its great loss. The mural was lost or destroyed in the years following the World Fair. All that survives of the work are pictures. The large mural symbolically depicts a man wearing the cap of the Catalan peasant with a sickle, a crude weapon, and a clenched fist, the salute of the Republicans. Joan Miró, till then a mostly apolitical spectator, put The Reaper on the wall of the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair, publicly declaring his loyalty to the Republican cause. Spain’s great artists collected in Paris in 1937 to display solidarity behind Azaña and the Republicans. The Spanish Civil War had begun in 1936 when Francisco Franco and the fascists attempted to overthrow the Republic under Manuel Azaña. Joan Miró working on his mural The Reaper in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair in 1937

Miro the farm