Monday, June 21, 2010

The Spaniard Who Loved a Dutchman

Oh Miró... I will always love your awkwardness.

So, here is the deal: Miro (Spanish dude) goes to the Netherlands. He becomes oddly obsessed with the Dutch artists' strange attention to detail (I attribute it to a lack of imagination, but that's just me). He travels home and transforms this new found infatuation into some quirky and spectacularly entertaining pieces.

He claims he never meant to make fun of Steen (the Dutchman he "copied") but just by looking at Miró's painting, you get a sense of otherwise.


---Jan Steen's painting---


---Miró's Interpretation---

Upon first glance, my thoughts fell upon the nursery rhyme "The Cat and the Fiddle":

Hey, diddle, diddle!
The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.


Every line except the third is depicted...On purpose? Perhaps, probably not, but the rhyme was written over two hundred years before so Miró did have a chance to draw influence from it. Most likely he was just cooky enough to come up with everything on his own.

Other things I found awesomely hilarious:

- Mustache.
- the depiction of the woman, who in Steen's piece is transfixed by the player, yet Miró conceptualized her to be more whorish, kinda like how teenage girls drool over guys who can play the guitar and admire how brooding and deep the boy appears to be. I guess Miró had a thing against lusty teenage girls...
-foot.

Yeah...