Day 344 - Abstracts by Miro and Klee



 May 29, 2023

Joan Miro and Paul Klee painted all but one of the works in gallery 912 . (The exception is a  geometric abstract by a Cuba-born painter, Carmen Herrera, who died at the improbable age of 106.)

The Miro painting I' want to write about is a large work, measuring approximately 48 inches across and 40 inches high, executed in tempera on canvas and entitled "Circus Horse."  Against a brilliant blue background, a white horse appears in side view;  its curved body and long neck remind me of the elemental figures of horses I've seen in Cycladic art. The description of the painting states that the yellow line that curves across the painting evokes the horse trainer's whip, while "the polka-dot eyes and a wide smile [the red arc at the bottom, I suppose] create a playful arena for a dancing horse." Maybe that was Miro's intent. But my first association to the  "polka-dot eyes" set against a pentagonal white ground is, as with Soutine's ray, to the hood of a Ku Klux Klansman. It's a good example of how our previous experience informs the way we view works of art; in this case, an image that Miro may have intended to appear  benign has an unsettling quality for me.

I have no such reservations about Klee's 1925 painting, which he called "May." Much smaller in format than the Miro (about 28 inches across and 20 inches high) and painted in oil on cardboard (!), it is composed of perhaps 180 small squares of different colors arranged in a grid. The palette consists mostly of  restful shades of green, gray, and blue, but Klee avoids visual boredom by scattering bright touches of carmine red and a few squares of a startling light green  throughout.  That the squares aren't perfectly aligned - and that at least one shape is a rectangle on the diagonal - also adds visual interest. In fact, I think I could look at this panting every day and never be bored; I wish it were mine.

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