The Art of Looking: Joan Miró, The Farm
Join a National Gallery educator in this hour-long virtual session on Joan Miró’s “The Farm” to gain insights into the artwork and enhance your visual literacy.
The National Gallery of Art’s The Art of Looking program consists of a free series one-hour virtual sessions and interactive conversations open to all, facilitated by National Gallery educators around a single work of art. Participants will be invited to share observations, interpretations, questions, and ideas about the works of art. This session will focus on Joan Miró’s The Farm.
The Farm by Joan Miró
Miró moved from Barcelona to Paris in 1920, determined to participate in the artistic vanguard of the French capital. Nevertheless, he remained deeply attached to his native Catalonia, and returned each summer to his family’s farm in the village of Montroig. In 1921, he decided to make a painting of this farm, a painting that he came to regard as one of the key works in his career.
The Farm represents an amalgamation of an intense, even primitive realism with the formal vocabulary of cubism. The painting is a compendium of separate details, each carefully observed and precisely described. This detailed realism, however, is matched by a tendency to simplify forms into abstract, geometric shapes. Moreover, space in The Farm is defined by a ground plane that tilts sharply upward, while individual forms are similarly tilted, so that they sit silhouetted, parallel to the picture plane.
By the mid-1920s, Miró had abandoned the realist manner of The Farm and had created a surrealist style of automatism and abstraction. Elements from The Farm continued to appear in his work, however, and the intensity of vision found in this painting remained a standard for all of his later art.