Joan Miró

Spanish (Barcelona, Spain, 1893 - 1983, Palma de Mallorca, Spain)

Peinture (Painting) [formerly Dark Brown and White Oval]

1926
painting | oil on canvas
On view in the museum, second floor
Peinture (Painting) [formerly Dark Brown and White Oval]

From 1925 through 1927 Miró painted his "magnetic fields": spare, monochromatic canvases inhabited by simple and often whimsical biomorphic shapes.

The lone form in this work beams across the empty, hazy space of the picture. The only spatial definition is provided by a dotted line, which connects one edge to the form and then extends upward. Spontaneous and intuitive, the smiling shape is tenuously tied to a rectangular base, its glazed grin lit by the half-shadowed moon.

The dreamlike atmosphere is a dramatic departure from Cubism into a world defined only by the imagination.


28 7/8 in. x 36 1/4 in. (73.34 cm x 92.08 cm)
Acquired 1980
Collection SFMOMA
Gift of Joseph M. Bransten in memory of Ellen Hart Bransten
© Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
80.428
Keywords

faces, smiling, circles, dots, Surrealism


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