Woman (1934)

Woman (1934) is a pastel drawing by Joan Miro which features a fairly shocking image that will not easily be forgotten. The artist produced a large number of simply titled artworks that year, often simply called Woman, making it hard to differentiate the different items.

This era was known as Miro's wild period, and it is easy to see how that term ended up being used. We find in front of us here something that could appear in a child's nightmare, a monster of bizarre appearance. It is the head, with small, pointy teeth which first alerts us as to the nature of this image, and we can then spot various limbs to the side of the main torso. The torso itself is constructed of a number of different objects, seemingly randomly placed together and might remind some of a stack of tyres. Behind this creature are a few simple touches of detail which relate to cosmology and the night sky, with a star to the left and a sun or planet to the right. The artist chose not to cover the background for this pastel drawing, and so we can see the original colour as it was when the artist purchased a number of pages together.

This artwork is believed to now be owned by the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA, having been given to them at the bequest of Richard S. Zeisler in 2007. It therefore is one of the most recent additions to their collection of Miro artworks. Some have actually compared this item to the work of Hans Arp, in how bones and organs are displayed in a horrific but exciting manner. The whole theme seems different to other work by Miro and so is an important addition, even though this particular drawing is not as famous as much else that he produced across his long and distinguished career. The arms and legs are also paddle-like in nature, similar to pre-historic creatures who were yet to undergo centuries of development and improvement. There were also political disturbances at the time, which some have connected to several of his paintings, including Woman from 1934.

During a visit to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, you may also come across some of the institution's other Miro items, if they happen to be on display at the time. Potato, Constellation: Toward the Rainbow and Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona offer a good variety of some of the styles in which the artist worked, and Miro's items tend to be given a good period of display time because of the significance of his career. That said, the Met own many hundreds of thousands of items within their collection, making it necessary to make some tough decisions over what to put out on display at any one time. This is the case for many large art galleries and museums, hence why many set up satellite galleries elsewhere in order to increase their display space, as well as loaning out items to provincial galleries from time to time.