![]() The big guns of the surrealist movement turned out at the gallery opening on June 12, 1926, when The Farm returned to public view. Clark called Picasso’s most truthful, and of the still-lifes Murphy painted at the same time. This evenly illuminated, tightly rendered adherence to form is also the essence of the large-scale still lifes that T.J. She praised the way they conveyed “the flatness of the continuous present,” a phrase that could be applied as well to both her writing and Hemingway’s. Miró nonetheless had major supporters early in his career, including Gertrude Stein, an admirer of the still life and landscape paintings he made in Horta, his home village in Catalonia. It was offered to two galleries (those of Léonce Rosenberg, best known for representing the cubists, and Pierre Loeb), but the sheer scale of the work made it difficult to sell. It was completed in 1922 and shown at the Salon d’Automne the next year (a show in which Murphy had two paintings), and in a letter written many years later Hemingway said he was smitten by the painting right at the opening. It took Miró ten months to paint in his studio on the Rue Blomet. ![]() The large (four feet by four and a half feet) painting was the main attraction in Miró’s one-man exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in the spring of 1926, but connoisseurs had begun talking about it five years before. Miró had actually been timekeeper during some of Hemingway’s boxing workouts, and Hemingway visited the Miró family farm in Montroig, Spain, near Tarragona, in 1929 after he bought the work. His acquisition of Joan Miró’s greatest painting, The Farm, is more than just an anecdote illustrating a little-known artsy side to “Papa” Hemingway, so different from the machismo stories of his pounding poor Morley Callaghan in the boxing ring, cycling with Dos Passos, drilling tennis balls through the racket of Pound, boozing with matadors, and eventually slaying lions. The highlight of his experience as a collector of art offers insight not just into his range of intellectual interests, but also into what he was trying to do as a writer. When all is said and done, I would give up a LOT to be in a room with both Hemingway and Miró.The ravishing descriptions in A Moveable Feast give a strong taste of the powerful role that art played in the life and thought of Hemingway. “I wanted to put everything I loved about the country into that canvas-from a huge tree to a tiny snail.” ( Here’s a photo of the real thing in case you’re curious like I was.)įamously, Miró’s vision resonated with Ernest Hemingway, who wrote that the painting “has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there,” and that “no one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.” Miró himself described this painting as “a summary of my entire life in the country,” which perhaps explains the nearly maniacal attention to detail. ![]() It depicts a traditional masía (Catalan: mas), essentially a familial farming compound commonly found throughout Catalonia. Joan Miró painted The Farm between the summer of 1921 in Moint-roig del Camp and winter 1922 in Paris, devoting as many as eight hours per day for nine months to its completion.
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