Standing Nude 1921

Joan Miró's 'Standing Nude' is an early painting, made during a period when the artist was living between Paris and his native Spain, searching for his own artistic language. Miró painted this nude with clear influences from Cubism, but with an added playfulness. The figure is assembled from geometric forms; with dislocated breasts and what appears to be an open, yet empty womb. The painting is not so much about the female nude as it is about the artist's emotional and intellectual response to the female form. What does it mean to fragment the body, as modern art insisted on doing? What does it mean to rearrange its parts with a blatant disregard for accurate representation? Miró said he aimed to "break down, deform reality," and he did so here, perhaps in order to investigate the shifting boundaries of identity and representation. While this work challenges traditional representations of the female nude, it also invites us to consider how these forms reflect the shifting terrain of human experience in the modern world.