| Artist: | Miro, Joan |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) | |
| Date of Work: | 1923-1924 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Post-War Fantasy | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: nature greatly abstracted according to Miro's own form of psychic automatism and dream imagery. The entire surface is linked in a tracery of highly animated forms. On the left is the stick figure of the hunter with his triangular head, one ear, one eye, moustache and beard. He smokes a pipe and we can see his heart beating and his hairy genitals. One hand holds the rabbit he has just killed; the other holds a highly abstracted gun, still smoking from having been fired, with a giant black bullet at its side. On the far left, the French and Catalan flags cross, balanced on the far right by the Spanish flag. In the lower left, a squiggly turd is juxtaposed alongside a hard-edged triangle (the biomorphic and the geometric). Stretched out across the lower portion of the field is a highly schematized fish creature, which sticks its tongue out of the water to lap up an insect, which pees as it takes flight to get away. Miro shows us the food chain as everything in this lively scene either eats, is eaten, or shits. At the center of it all is the disembodied eye, functioning both as an outer and inner eye, the source for all this imaginative imagery. Everything is renderd as a calligraphic sign or picture symbol. For instance, the carob tree next to the eye is depicted only as a circle with one leaf. Miro substitutes a part or fragment for the whole; all the foliage of the tree is shown as only one leaf. The hunter is not represented as a body or volume in space, but indicated only through calligraphic lines in space. For Miro, the unconscious is not representable as a Dali cinemascope image; it is structured more like a language of abstract pictorial signs. Style: highly abstracted and schematized pictorial sign-symbols that, for Miro, are traces of the unconscious. The scene is conceived as an animated, allover linear tracery covering the entire flattened field with a lyrical abstraction that is fantastic and overcharged with the marvelous. Miro free associates to come up with his stream-of-consciousness dream imagery. He embraces the surreal idea of psychic automatism, the undirected play of thought. Focus is on what unfolds in the creative process (as in the surrealist game, "The Exquistie Cadaver"). Context: Miro offers us a more playful, stream-of-consciousness, abstract surreal vision than the highly calculated, technicolor, precisionist images of Dali's paranoaic-critical method. Miro puts the emphasis on process (dream painting) rather than product (painted dreams), but both affirm the unconscious as a valid source of creativity. Miro pictures a world overcharged with the erotic and "the marvelous" at every turn. As the painter Robert Motherwell said: "His pictures breathe eroticism, but with freedom and grace . . . a true sensual liberation. . . . nothing sexual is repressed or described circumspectly . . . hair waving in the wind as sensitive to the touch as an insect's antenna . . . dancing with ecstasy. They have a life of their own. . . . no creatures ever had so many openings to ge into, and so many organs with which to do it." | ||
