Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem |
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Joan Miró
Spanish, active Spain and France, 1893–1983 Painting (Spanish Dancer) Oil on canvas 146 x 114 cm Gift of Sylvia and Joseph Slifka, New York, to American Friends of the Israel Museum © ADAGP, Paris Accession number: B03.0825 |
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In this witty, fanciful painting, Surrealist Joan Miró combines vivid symbols of Spanish dance—a colorful mantilla, a flared skirt, and a pointed shoe—to convey the rhythm and subtle provocativeness of the dancer. Floating in a cloudlike white patch, a bull-like creature composed of fish- and foxlike elements recalls similar animal forms in Miró’s fantastical menagerie. Subverting conventional technique, the artist leaves the majority of the canvas bare, using the white pigment to represent perhaps the dancer’s skirt and to emphasize the surface of the painting. Miró’s fascination with Spanish dancers was manifest in at least nine works produced in Paris between 1921 and 1929. They draw on symbols and imagery recurrent in his oeuvre, yet they are rendered in a profusion of artistic styles, from Realism and Cubism to Surrealism and abstract collage. One of them, Spanish Dancer (1924), also in the Museum’s collection, conveys a dancer’s spinning movement and costume through a simple, geometric, steplike line an Publications: The Israel Museum, Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005 Kamien-Kazhdan, Adina, Surrealism and Beyond in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2007 Kamien-Kazhdan, Adina (ed.), Modernism in Dialogue: 20th-Century Painting and Sculpture in the Israel Museum, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2010 Exhibition: Dada Surrealism and Beyond in the Israel Museum, 2007 Surrealism and Beyond in the Israel Museum, Weisbord Exhibition Pavilion, February - June 2007 Digital presentation of this object was made possible by: Ms. Joan Lessing, New York and Jerusalem |
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