Landscape (The Hare)

Paysage (Le lièvre) arrived in late 1927 and we now refer to it with the translated English name of Landscape (The Hare). It is amongst the simplest abstract artworks created by Miro and bears a resemblance to Dog Barking at the Moon.

The artist uses only two colours for the background, a dark brown for the land, and an orange sky. We then see the hare placed centrally, with to its left, a spiral of dots which drift upwards to a curved objects which is a sort of horn shape - but what does it all mean? The artist is known to have found inspiration from all manner of different sources for his work, from Catalan tales, to his own imagination as well as art from the past. On closer inspection, we can see perhaps a small bird in the centre of the trail, and the hare is far from an accurate depiction. Its ears look more like an insect, perhaps a snail, whilst the overall head could more likely be a seahorse - without the title we would be struggling to decipher this piece, even though there is much less detail than many of his other works. Compare this to Le Coq, where we immediately dissect the ingredients with a single glance.

Miro loved the Catalan countryside and would use it as inspiration for his work on many occasions, just as found here. We saw the same with Dali too, who would often configure backgrounds with bright colours that came directly from his own childhood region, Figureas. Although his early depictions were fairly subdued as he learnt his craft, one can see the landscape's beauty much better in the famous Surrealist artwork, Persistence of Memory. Miro incidentally mentioned that he would often see hares dart across his local landscape, normally in early evening whilst he was out for a stroll as the temperatures started to drop to more comfortable levels. He also described the comets which explains the white element near the top of the painting. Without his own explanations, it would be hard to know anything like this much about what we see in this work.