Fundacio Joan Miro - The exhibits, 2

Fundacio Joan Miro - The exhibits, 2

As always I am including the introduction from the first post. If you do not want to read it again, scroll down to the second picture after this.

We really enjoyed the time we spent in this wonderful museum. Even though it's a museum dedicated to the work of Joan Miro, many of the artworks exhibited are by another artist whose work has similarities with Miro's. An interesting way of presenting art, and one that I enjoyed enormously as it gave me an opportunity to find out about artists I did not know, or to see paintings I love once again.

Joan Miro i Ferra, 1893-1983, a Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramicist. His work has been interpreted as Surrealism but with a personal style, sometimes also veering into Fauvism and Expressionism. He was interested in the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike. His difficult-to-classify works also had a manifestation of Catalan pride.  In numerous interviews Miro expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an 'assassination of painting' in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.

He combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy. His mature style evolved from the tension between his fanciful, poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life. He worked extensively in lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries and sculptures for public spaces.

Though often referred to as a Surrealist, Miro considered his art to be free of any 'ism'. He experimented throughout his career with different media - painting, pastel, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, collage, muralism and tapestry - and unconventional materials as a way of making work that expressed the contemporary moment without relying on realism.

Louise Bourgeois, Untited, 1940s

Bourgeois created these totemic Personages as 'a tangible way of re-creating a missed past'.

Joan Miro, His Majesty the King,

These may fruitfully be compared to Bourgeois' Totemic Personages

Herbert Ferber, The Sun, the Moon and the Stars, 1950s

Roberto Matta, Psychological Morphology, 1939

Peter Miller, Ceremonial Objects, 1940

Salvador Dali, The Spectre of Sex-Appeal, 1934, (oil on canvas)

Yves Tanguy, The Minotaur, 1943

Sonja Sekula, African Moonsun, 1945, (oil on canvas)

Joan Miro, Barcelona Series, 1944, (lithograph)

Joan Miro, Barcelona Series, 1944, (lithograph)

Joan Miro, Barcelona Series, 1944, (lithograph)

Louise Bourgeois, Difficut Pivoting, 1947

Stanley William Hayter, 1947

Yves Tanguy, Rabdomancia, 1947

Joan Miro, Sunrise, 1959

Joan Miro, The Ladder of Escape, 1959

Joan Miro, The Morning Star, 1959

Joan Miro, Woman in the Night, 1959

Joan Miro, Still Life with Old Shoe, 1937

Arshiloe Gorky, Garden in Sochi

Joan Miro, Woman and Birds

Joan Miro, Woman and Birds at Sunrise, 1946

Janet Sobel, Illusion of Solidity, 1945

Theodoros Stamos, Untitled, 1946

Fundacio Joan Miro - The exhibits, 1

Fundacio Joan Miro - The exhibits, 1

We really enjoyed the time we spent in this wonderful museum. Even though it's a museum dedicated to the work of Joan Miro, there are a lot of other works by different artists whose work had similarities with Miro's. An interesting way of presenting art, and one that I enjoyed enormously as it gave me an opportunity to find out about artists I did not know, or to see, once again, paintings I love.

Joan Miro i Ferra, 1893-1983, a Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramicist. His work has been interpreted as Surrealism but with a personal style, sometimes also veering into Fauvism and Expressionism. He was interested in the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike. His difficult-to-classify works also had a manifestation of Catalan pride.  In numerous interviews Miro expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society. He declared an 'assassination of painting' in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.

He combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy. His mature style evolved from the tension between his fanciful, poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life. He worked extensively in lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries and sculptures for public spaces.

Though often referred to as a Surrealist, Miro considered his art to be free of any 'ism'. He experimented throughout his career with different media - painting, pastel, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, collage, muralism and tapestry - and unconventional materials as a way of making work that expressed the contemporary moment without relying on realism.

Joan Miro, The Somersault

Joan Miro, Painting

Alice Trumbull Mason, Brown Shapes White

Joan Miro, Figure Throwing a Stone to a Bird

Perle Fine, Ppolyphonic

Joan Miro, Painting

Joan Miro, Painting

Joan Miro, Gouache

Alexander Calder, The Corcovado, 1951, (aluminium)

Miro and Calder were great friends, and there is a lot of Calder's work in the museum.

Joan Miro, Message from a friend, 1964

Joan Miro, Mural, 1951, (oil on canvas)

Alexander Calder, Untitled, 1941

Alexander Calder, Portrait of Joan Miro, 1930

The reflection of Miro's face kept changing with subtle changes in the atmosphere in the gallery

Alexander Calder, Black Polygons, 1947

From Monet to Warhol - 5: Surrealism, Pop Art

From Monet to Warhol - 5: Surrealism, Pop Art

at the Goulandris Foundation, Athens.

This is the last post on this exhibition. If you want to see the previous posts, you can go here for Impressionism, here for Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, here for Japonisme and Nabis, and here for the Unclassifiables. If you do not wish to read the introduction to this post again, move down to the Surrealism section.

A wonderful exhibition, which gave me great pleasure. Firstly because it was great seeing paintings that I had seen before and loved. Secondly because some of it was new to me, and this includes artists I had not come across before, artists like Maurice Denis whose work was such a pleasant surprise.

The ensemble of eighty three works of forty five artists, mostly paintings,  which is on loan from the Swiss private collection, was assembled over three generations, affording us the opportunity to retrace the history of modern art from the 1880s until the present day.

Most of the major movements, currents and trends that have marked the evolution of painting are touched upon here in varying degrees of detail: Impressionism, Symbolism, Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Japonisme, Synthetism, the Nabis, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. They reflect the increasing changes imposed on perspective, colour and figuration, as well as the historical context in which they were conceived.

Surrealism:

In 1924 a group of young European artists and intellectuals gathered in Paris and decided to create a new artistic movement. Under the aegis of Andre Breton who drew up their founding manifesto, it expressed their refusal to allow logic a central role in the course of their lives that must henceforth be ruled by the power of imagination or chance. The term Surrealism, first pronounced a few years before by Guillaume Apollinaire, was chosen to designate their line of thinking. 

Breton organised and managed this movement with an iron hand, and it would reach its summit in the 1920s and 1930s, expanding internationally. However, the increasing disagreements within the group led its members, notably Max Ernst, Man Ray and Rene Magritte, to take their own separate paths.

Max Ernst, Yellow Seashell, 1928, (oil with graphite on paper on canvas)

Rene Magritte, The House, 1947, (gouache on paper on cardboard)

Man Ray, The Wall, 1938, (oil on canvas)

Domesticated Egg, 1944

Domesticated Egg is part of an ensemble of 37 works - readymades, drawings and photographs - that Man Ray assembled under the title Objects of My Affection. Through this selection the artist confirmed that he had not lost his colourful sense of humour and reclaimed his lotyalty to the Dada spirit of his beginnings.

Pop Art:

At the end of the 1950s in New York, as well as in London and Paris, young artists wanted to put an end to the supremacy of Abstraction by reintegrating in a thundering way, figuration and the everyday life into their work. This collective effort was dubbed Nouveau Realisme in France, and Pop Art in the USA and met with resounding success.

Not one of the painters affiliated with this movement acknowledged belonging to a group. Nevertheless, the points in common that connect works of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, without mentioning Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg, make them the representatives of a new art. 

Andy Warhol, Man Ray, 1974, (screeprint in colours on wove paper)

Man Ray was for Andy Warhol both a model and a source of inspiration. Warhol created six portraits of Man Ray along with an edition of 100 silk-screen prints.

Tom Wesselmann, Mouth Study for Minneapolis Catalogue Cover, 1968, (oil on canvas)

Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, 1965, (porcelain enamel on steel)

Roy Lichtenstein, Yellow and Black Brushstroke, 1970, (marker, coloured pencil and graphite on paper)

Roy Lichtenstein, Water Lily Pond with Reflections, 1992, (screeprinted enamel in colours on processed and swirled stainless steel).

From 1968 Lichtenstein began drawing inspiration from the works of Claude Monet. First, he concentrated on his Haystacks, then his Rouen Cathedrals, and finally his Water Lilies that he associated with his own earlier series Reflections.

Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait Triptych, 1974, (left and central sheets: coloured pencil and graphite on paper. Right sheet: coloured pencil and paper collage on paper)