Joan Miró’s Dutch Interiors & De Kooning’s Women
Joan Miró’s Dutch Interiors
INSIDE HOLLANDÈS
Document Genesis
- Chronology: 1928
- Style: Surrealism
- Technique: Oil
- Support: Canvas
- Dimensions: 92cm x 73cm
- Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Historical Context
Surrealism, an artistic movement, appeared in the early twenties around André Breton. As an intellectual movement, Surrealism aimed to perform a full revolution. As a result of studying Freud, the Surrealists tried to reflect a more authentic reality through the expression of the unconscious. The basic concept of automatism was that poems and pictures arise from a kind of magical dictation from the unconscious. We can say that there are two variants of surrealist painting: one that implements a more figurative approach, and another, pure automatism, where oneirism and the realization of dreams are key. Joan Miró, the author of this work, represents automatism.
Formal Analysis
Plastic Items
Miró amends Sorgh’s painting to make it respond to his chromatic and formal grammar. The colors are very bright, pure, and flat, and the forms are distorted.
Composition
Interior Hollandès translates Sorgh’s painting into Miró’s own language. In both the original painting and Miró’s, we can see the lute, the man who plays it, the dog in the foreground, the cat under the table, and the window with the landscape. The musician is an organic shape that extends into space as a white spot. What is harder to appreciate is the woman, who is now a silhouette above the table.
The end result is a naturalization of the house, invaded by characters and animals that come from the rural world.
Style
In “Dutch Interiors,” Miró had already discovered his particular language. The Catalan painter reduces objects and figures to their essence, seeking a proximity to the innocence of children and how they express themselves.
Content and Interpretation
Miró wanted to be realistic, and the figures, strangely, always referred to something specific: a person or an animal. Miró’s realism was a process of removing items from the painting. That same year he painted this work, Miró held an exhibition at the Bernheim gallery where he sold everything, and critics considered him one of the most important artists of the time. Joan Miró and André Masson are considered the most distinguished representatives of Surrealist automatism.
Willem de Kooning’s Woman II
WOMEN
Document Genesis
- Chronology: 1952
- Style: Abstract Expressionism
- Technique: Oil
- Support: Canvas
- Dimensions: 1.50m x 1.09m
- Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Historical Context
Abstraction develops from the USA in the 1940s with Abstract Expressionism. The term was first applied to the works of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the author of this work. In general, they created large-format works, very dynamic, based on signs and lines that are very vigorous, almost aggressive. De Kooning’s work has maintained a reference to organic and human forms, neural and deformed by long brushstrokes, as seen in the Women series.
Formal Analysis
Plastic Items
He often painted with thick, violent brushstrokes to achieve excitement. He also used a distinctive range of colors: Pompeian pink, ochre, yellow, and blue, with some touches of red.
Composition
Kooning draws the shapes of women with a clear misogynistic attitude. The indeterminate background is confused with the figure of the woman. Formally, de Kooning was concerned with the conciliation of pictorial space between the figure and the painting, which led him to establish a fluid relationship between the two. The Dutchman had been in contact with Neoplasticism and the Expressionists, but settling in the United States changed to the anguish of Abstract Expressionism. The treatment of the face of Woman II with angular planes recalls Picasso’s Cubism.
Content and Interpretation
The series of six Women is about women, and their portrayal is very violent. The monstrous figures are terrible and frightening.
Feelings of anger are perfectly manifested in Kooning’s painting. The ugliness of the women reveals the sexual obsessions of its author. The large breasts are usually a prominent feature of his paintings, and the eyes are disturbing, with a rictus of the mouth that gives a terrible, burlesque expression.
Function
Kooning was one of the leading representatives of American Abstract Expressionism. Now, viewers no longer read something in the works, but had to delve into them.