David Hopkins 'The Spanish Peasant According to Surrealism: Miró and Buñuel'

Talk details:

The Spanish Peasant According to Surrealism: Miró and Buñuel

In 1924/25 the Catalan modernist painter Joan Miró produced several drawings and paintings on the theme of the Spanish peasant. Reduced to a set of rudimentary signs, Miró’s peasant is, at the same time, a figure of elementary simplification and of visionary expansion. In many ways this dichotomy accords with Miró’s artistic vacillation between the transcendental poetics of Bretonian surrealism and his association of rural labourers with the soil and with bodily processes derived from Catalan traditions.

The contradictions of Miró’s simultaneously robust and ethereal peasant are contrasted, in the second half of this paper, with the darker ‘documentary’ vision of the peasant’s lot presented in Luis Buñuel’s film ‘Las Hurdes’ or ‘Land Without Bread’ of 1933. Following in the wake of Buñue’s two previous surrealist films, co-authoured with Salvador Dalí, ‘Land Without Bread’ offers a pseudo- documentary account of rural dwellers isolated from the modern world and reduced to a condition of near-starvation: a conception that is not far removed from the image of Italian peasants of around the same period presented in Carlo Levi’s novel ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ (1945). Although the reductiveness and Bataillean ‘bassesse’ of Buñuel’s conception of his rural inhabitants might take us back to Miró, there is no redeeming dimension to his vision. This ties in with the politics of his practice. In the final analysis, Buñuel’s communist, anti-Fascist sympathies are shown to produce an alternative construction of the peasant to that produced via the imperatives of Miró’s earlier Catalanism.

Speaker biography:

David Hopkins

David Hopkins is Professor Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Glasgow. His books include: Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared (Oxford University Press, 1998); Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004); Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp (Yale University Press, 2007), A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (edited: Blackwell, 2016) Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada (co-edited with Michael White, 2014) and After Modern Art 1945-2017 (2nd edition, 2018). As well as writing widely on twentieth century art and theory he has published extensively on William Blake. His latest books are Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood (Yale University Press, 2021) and Contagion, Hygiene and the European Avant-Garde’ (2023), co-edited with Disa Persson, for Routledge.

This event is part of the Research Seminar Series organised by Durham University's Zurbarán Centre with the ARTES Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes and the Embassy of Spain in London.

The series provides an open forum for engaging with innovative research and exhibition projects relating to the visual arts in the Hispanic world.

The sessions usually take place on Wednesdays, 6.00-7.00 pm (UK time). 

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