Still Life with Old Shoe facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Still Life with Old Shoe |
|
|---|---|
| Catalan: Natura morta del sabatot | |
 |
|
| Artist | Joan Miró |
| Year | 1937 |
| Catalogue | 80555 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 81.3 cm × 116.8 cm (32.0 in × 46.0 in) |
| Location | Museum of Modern Art, New York City |
| Accession | 1094.1969 |
Still Life with Old Shoe is a 1937 oil painting by Joan Miró, now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The work was given to the museum by James Thrall Soby in 1969.
History
At the start of the Spanish Civil War Miró spent some time at his house in Montroig del Camp but then left for France. On 16 December 1936 he arrived in Paris with his wife Pilar and daughter Maria Dolores. They lived in a very confined space with nowhere for Miró to work, so he simply noted down ideas on small cards. As he had done when he first went to Paris in 1920, Miró attended the drawing class at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere.
As he still had no space of his own, Miró began to work in a corner of the gallery Pierre where, in the period January–May 1937, he produced one of his strangest and most important paintings, Still Life with Old Shoe, in which he expresses his anguish over the situation in Spain, with a detailed depiction of the rise of evil, invasion by monsters and the decline of the human figure.
Perhaps the events of the moment, especially the drama of the war in Spain, made me feel a need to penetrate reality. I worked from life every day at the Grande Chaumiere. At that time I felt a need to control things through realism
— Joan Miró
Miró sided with the Republicans. He showed his mural The Reaper at the Spanish pavilion of the Paris International Exhibition of 1937 where Picasso's famous Guernica was also exhibited. The Reaper, a large picture with a height of 5.5 m (18 ft), was lost after the pavilion was dismantled. In the same year Miró produced a poster with a powerful message in French: Aidez l'Espagne (Help Spain).
Description
On the left there is an apple impaled by a fork, then a bottle, a loaf of bread and the shoe of the title. The main colours are black, red and acidic yellow, which symbolize an apocalyptic landscape, all in flames (the fire being actually outside the painting). This infernal sight is underlined by the shades in the horizon. The silhouettes of all objects can be clearly defined and the round-shaped lines of the whole composition create dynamism.
See also
In Spanish: Bodegón con zapato viejo para niños
