"Klee, Tanguy, Miró. Three approaches to landscape"
1999-11-19 until 2000-01-30
Joan Miró Foundation
Barcelona, , ES Spain

The Joan Miró Foundation, with the sponsorship of the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya, will be presenting Klee, Tanguy, Miró. Three approaches to landscape, an exhibition of around one hundred paintings and drawings by Paul Klee, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró, three of the major artists of the twentieth century. Landscape has always been one of the traditional genres of painting, but contemporary landscape cannot, however, be considered as a vision of our surroundings in the manner of a stage set. After the Impressionists, landscape was transformed into an artful artistic construction that uses Nature merely as a stimulus for the formal arrangement of the picture. The exhibition focuses on those landscapes considered metaphorically as visions of the artists’ inner world.

Paul Klee (München-Buchsee, Berne, 1879 – Locarno, 1940) stands as a lone figure in the panorama of twentieth-century painting. A member of the Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, he was also a teacher at the Bauhaus. In the 1920s he began to take an interest in Freud’s and Jung’s theories on the subconscious, which had a large following among the Surrealists.

Yves Tanguy (Paris, 1900 – Woodbury, Connecticut, 1955) is the only one of the three who can be considered to have really belonged to an artistic movement: Surrealism. His paintings show strange landscapes peopled with disturbing, unreal figures and objects that recall the world of dreams.

Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1893 – Palma de Mallorca, 1983). His early figurative phase developed into a personal language of signs that was basically defined during the time he spent in Paris, when he came in contact with the Surrealists and their theories. However, Miró was to always remain independent of any artistic movement.

Despite the fact that all three painters belong to different artistic styles, they have one feature in common: their special fascination with poetry. This led each of them to create his own particular universe – a landscape filled with figures and signs that were elements of a highly personal language – each very different from the others.

Three approaches to landscape is a reflection on the differences and the points of contact in the work of these three artists, as seen through such a classic genre as landscape.

A catalogue will be published of Klee, Tanguy, Miró. Three approaches to landscape containing colour reproductions of all the works on show and an article on each of the artists: Hideo Nishida will be writing on Paul Klee, Dawn Ades on Yves Tanguy, and Vicenç Altaió on Joan Miró.

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