Suffused with sunlight, The Tilled Field is one of Modern master Joan Miró’s groundbreaking Surrealist works. Amidst a perhaps perplexing chaos, Miró;’s visionary order juxtaposes the natural and human-made worlds while expressing the artist’s belief that every natural object has a soul. In a flat perspective rooted in Cubism’s shallow planes, a stylized farmer tills the land, a fantastical tree has both eye and ear, and political references flutter free. The playful painting—conceptualizing his family’s farm with iconography from Spanish tapestries, Catalan ceramics, early Christian art, and even earlier cave paintings—is, at heart, Miró’s love letter to his Catalonian homeland.
