Catalan Landscape by Joan Miró 1924

On May 2nd, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art for a brief and enjoyable visit. Upon arriving, I came with a friend to browse around art work between the 1890’s to the early 1920’s. I had found a lot of unique and fascinating art work that grasped my attention the moment I walked in. But the painting I acquired to be the most enticing was the “Catalan Landscape”. The “Catalan Landscape” was an oil on canvas created by Joan Miró in the time period between 1923-1924. Joan Miró was a Spanish painter, sculptor, print maker and decorative artist. Despite not understanding the whole painting at first, I connected the description displaced with the landscape.

I encountered this artwork while glancing work upon the 1920’s modernist paintings in the gallery. This piece in particular stood out to me because of the unusual placement of figures across the landscape. Not only did this fascinate me but I was curious to decipher what it stood for and what it meant. At first this artwork looked like a range of body parts and objects across the painting. But after I discovered it’s real meaning I was enticed to write about this individual piece. Some questions that arose to me was his intentions to portray the hunter in the landscape.

Miró’s style had a relationship between art and nature which lies behind all his work and account in good measure. Throughout his career, he developed a Surrealist language of colors and symbols that is widely regarded as one of the main influences for Abstract Expressionism. Surrealism basically defies the dreams and visions envisioned displayed on artwork. This type of style was established to go against traditional art work and what it stood for. “Catalan Landscape” is an excellent example of Joan Miró’s personal surrealist style.

Joan Miró’s The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) may seem abstract, but a closer look reveals a landscape populated with a assortment of human and animal figures and natural forms that together comprise an iconography of the artist’s life. The two different colors on the background are displayed as the sky and the earth. On the left side of the painting there’s a figure of the hunter, with a Catalonian beret and a pipe. Even though, it’s difficult to decipher where the images are in the painting, the description leads us to imagine and correlate the painting to it’s meaning. “Catalan Landscape” was of great importance in Miró’s career, having a great influence on his series of “imaginary landscapes”.