Pastorale (Pastoral)

Joan Miró officially became affiliated with André Breton’s Surrealist group in 1925, although his work also tilted towards this poetic from the period between 1923 and 1924, before the group had even formed. These are the years of his studio on Rue Blomet in Paris, shared with André Masson, and the place where both would flesh out the concept of “painting-poetry”, giving precedence to the spiritual side of their artistic practices. Miró’s work in this period would progressively divest itself of the fine details that were visible in works such as La casa de la palmera (House with Palm Tree) — part of this exhibition — to reach an idiosyncratic language rooted in signs and ideograms. In Pastorale, with a rural theme referring back to his previous work, he replaces identifiable images with an ideographic idiom that formed the backbone of his subsequent plastic language.



Raúl Martínez Arranz