Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Taking Joan Miro's notorious declaration of 1927--'I want to assassinate painting'--as its point of departure, this richly illustrated volume is the first to focus on Miro the 'anti-painter,' identifying the core practices and strategies the artist used to challenge painting between 1927 and 1937. Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 surveys the various material, iconographical and rhetorical forms of Miro's attacks on painting by presenting, in chronological sequence, 12 distinct series of works, beginning with a remarkable group of paintings on unprimed canvas and concluding with Miro's return to Realism in 'Still Life with Old Shoe' (1937). Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, stylistic heterogeneity and the use of resistant, ready-made materials are among the key tactics of aggression that are explored in this extraordinary presentation of the interrelated and oppositional series of paintings, collages, objects and drawings Miro produced during this crucial decade of his long career. This volume integrates close scrutiny of Miro's materials and processes with historical and iconographic analysis, leading to an expanded understanding of the underappreciated aggressiveness of an artist long regarded as Surrealism's most lyrical painter-poet.
Joan Miro was born in 1893 in Barcelona. After his first trip to Paris in 1920, and through 1931, Miro generally spent half of each year in the French capitol and half in his native Catalonia, returning to live in France after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. One of the twentieth century's greatest Modern artists, Miro created a pictorial world of intense imaginative power, in which visionary and cosmic elements are inextricably intertwined with the earthly and mundane. He died in 1983 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.









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Rating: - Miro, the "assassin" of painting
This is the catalogue for an exhibition held at Moma in NYC based on the artist's famous 1927 statement that he wanted to "assassinate" painting, thereby meaning that he wanted to initiate a revolt against the traditional ways of making "pretty" paintings. The means he chose to express that revolt were to use new materials in his works, such as "bark, textile, fiber, assemblages of objects...". This corresponded to a very defined timespan in his career, the ten years between 1927 and 1937. The aim of this book is to show and explain the results of this endeavour, twelve series of works, each based on a particular theme, technique or material used by Miro (paintings on unprimed canvas, Spanish dancers, Dutch interiors, collages, constructions and objects,paintings on masonite, etc).

After two introductory essays explaining Miro's attitude towards his art and the different materials he used during those ten crucial years, the book presents the twelve series in a chronological order.

This is a very high-quality publication with short but enlightening essays and beautiful illustrations of famous or seldom-seen works and many close-ups of details which give a good idea of the texture of the works.

Highly recommended.