The Policeman

Joan MiróWW-1925-013830

1925·Oil on canvas·248 × 194.9 cm (97 5/8 × 76 3/4 in.)

<p>Soon after Joan Miró moved to Paris from his native Barcelona in 1920, he met a group of avant-garde painters and writers who advocated merging the everyday rational world with that of dreams and the unconscious in order to produce an absolute reality, or surreality. To release images of this higher realm, the Surrealists embraced automatism, a spontaneous working method much like free association. Miró experimented with automatism: “Even a few casual wipes in cleaning my brush,” he said, “may suggest the beginning of a picture.” Between 1925 and 1927, his experiments unleashed a revolutionary series of works called the “dream paintings,” which straddle abstraction and representation in freely moving, calligraphic compositions. In <em>The Policeman</em>, a large canvas from this group, two biomorphic shapes spring to life as a policeman and a horse, their forms defined by thinly applied white paint against a neutral ocher ground. The form on the left has sprouted five buds that act as fingers, and both forms extrude curves that suggest torsos or mouths. With sketch-like dots and squiggles added to their heads to make eyes and a mustache, Miró’s shapes come to life in a liquid space as animated equivalents of a policeman and his horse.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1925
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 248 × 194.9 cm (97 5/8 × 76 3/4 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Joan Miró

Artist

Joan Miró

Painting

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramist from Spain. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma, Mallorca in 1981. Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism but with a personal style, sometimes also veering into Fauvism and Expressionism. He was notable for his interest in the unconscious or the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike. His difficult-to-classify works also had a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.

Palma de Mallorca, Spain

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