Joan Miró (i)

• Year : 1937
• Media : Oil (i)
• Size : 81 x 117 cm

Museum of Modern Art (New York, United States) (i)

Still Life with Old Shoe, is an oil painting done by Joan Miró in 1937 and now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work entered the museum as a gift by James Thrall Soby in 1970. When started the Spanish Civil War Miró was going to his house of Mont-roig del Camp for a while. Then Miró went to France. On 16 December 1936 he arrived in Paris with his wife Pilar and the little daughter Maria Dolores. They lived in a very small living space with a complete lack of a place to work. At the time, Miró could do nothing but collect ideas and write them to litle sketch cards. To exercise in drawing, Miró, as he had done in 1920 when he arrived in Paris, joined the class of the Academy de la Grande Chaumiere. The painter, though no studio or apartment, started working in a corner at the gallery Pierre, and it took five months from January to May 1937, in produce one of the strangest and most important paintings of the his work, Still Life with Old Shoe, a oil painting where he expressed his anguish over the situation in Spain. The artist provides advertising and painted with great detail the rise of evil, the invasion of monsters, the metamorphic decline of the human figure. Perhaps the events of the moment, especially the drama of the war in Spain, I did feel the need to penetrate reality. I used to go every day to work at the Grande Chaumiere in nature. At that moment I felt a need to control things through the reality — Joan Miró Miró sided with Republicans. He entered the mural entitled The Reaper in the Spanish pavilion of Paris International Exhibition of 1937 where Picasso's famous Guernica was also exhibited. The Reaper was large picture of 5.5m tall but was lost after the pavilion was dismantled. In the same year, Miró published a poster of a very strong visual sign on which the message in French Aidez l'Espagne (Help Spain) was placed.