Betting on ‘the farm’: hemingway and miró | thearticle

Hemingway met the Catalan painter Joan Miró (1893-1983) through Gertrude Stein in the early 1920s.  The tall solid Hemingway and the short thin Miró both boxed in Paris, and the painter

sometimes kept time when the writer was in the ring.  In 1922 Miró completed _The Farm_ and showed it to several dealers, but no one bought it.  He then hung it in a Montparnasse café that

allowed artists display their work to attract customers, but it also failed to sell.  In October 1925 Hemingway’s friend Evan Shipman, habitué of bar and racetrack, saw the painting and

wanted to buy it.  In _Cahiers d’art _(1934), Hemingway described how he acquired _The Farm_ (1922) for 5,000 francs, the equivalent of $250, as a birthday present for his first wife,

Hadley: If Miró was to have a dealer he had to let _The Farm_ go with his other pictures.  But Shipman, who found him the dealer, made the dealer put a price on it and agree to sell it to

him.  This was probably the only good business move that Shipman ever did in his life.  But doing a good business move must have made him uncomfortable because he came to me the same day and

said, “Hem, you should have _The Farm.  _I do not love anything as much as you care for that picture and you ought to have it.” . . . So we rolled dice to decide and I won and made the

first payment.  We agreed to pay five thousand francs for _The Farm_. Hemingway made the down payment and the picture stayed with the dealer.  When the final payment was due, he, Shipman and

John Dos Passos had to borrow the money from friends in bars and restaurants.  Hemingway added that as they took the large 4-by-4 1/2 foot picture home “in the open taxi, the wind caught

the big canvas as though it were a sail and we made the taxi driver crawl along.  At home we hung it and everyone looked at it and was very happy.  I would not trade it for any picture in

the world.  Miró came in and looked at it and said: ‘I am very content that you have _The Farm._” Miró painted the picture in his native town Montroig, near Tarragona in northeast Spain, in

Barcelona and in his Paris studio.  He even brought some grass from his town to Paris as a concrete symbol.  Jacques Dupin writes, “this work is grounded in the earth of Montroig that

moulded him, and is bathed in the transparency of its light and air.”  _The Farm_ is one of Miró’s last realistic paintings.  It portrays in precise intense detail the manifold activities of

the farmyard at his country house.  It is illuminated by the high-hanging sun, echoed in the round black disk below the tree, and colored by the ocher of the earth and cobalt of the sky. 

The water tank and the trickling brook in the right foreground are also blue; the large wheel of the cart and spout of the watering can are bright red. The picture is dominated by the

gnarled spikey-branched eucalyptus tree that shoots out small explosions of leaves.  This central tree separates the family house with cracks and lichens in its façade, and the farm house

and yard, fenced with chicken-wire, teeming with life: hens, a rabbit, rooster and pigeon.  The tiled and curving foot-printed path runs past a barking dog to the wife wearing a pleated

skirt and washing clothes in a tub near the water tank.  Her naked infant is seated and spread-eagled on the ground behind her.  Miró balances the two houses, agricultural implements and

domestic animals on both sides of the tree: two A-shaped ladders, a donkey in the cellar of the house and a circling mule threshing wheat in the background, a dog and goat as well as a tiny

green lizard and curly snail in the right foreground.  He also portrays the essential farm implements: plow, ax, buckets and pails.  In the background luxuriant foliage erupts in front of

sharp mountain peaks.  There are no shadows: everything seems cut with a knife. _The Farm_ conveys the impression of stark vitality and, like _Death in the Afternoon_, captures the essence

of Spain.  Hemingway, who loved and lived with the picture for thirty years, said: “No one could look at it and not know it had been painted by a great painter. . . . It has in it all that

you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there.  No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.” He moved the

painting to Hadley’s new flat in Paris when they separated in 1926.  In 1934 he asked her if he could borrow the painting for five years, and never returned it.  His fourth wife, Mary,

inherited it and later gave it to the National Gallery in Washington.  Critics agree that _The Farm_, the masterwork of Miró’s entire career, is at the heart of his poetic work.  Miró

himself regarded _The Farm_ as the foundation of and key to all his art.  In 2012 a less important Miró, _Blue Star, _sold at Sotheby’s for $36.62 million.  Hemingway knew other Parisian

artists and also owned works by Braque, Gris, Masson and Klee.  Masson told me that Hemingway had good taste and a sound knowledge of modern painting. In July 1929, after watching the

bullfights in Pamplona, Hemingway visited his old friend in Montroig and wrote Shipman, “He has a lovely place there.”  Miró said that his recent plans for marriage “would have been a great

mistake.”  Using a boxing metaphor, Hemingway added, “it was called off just as the gong was about to ring.  Now he is going to marry a fine girl this fall.  From Palma de Mallorca.  We saw

her pictures and she looks lovely.”  In October 1929 Miró married his distant cousin Pilar. In chapter 20 of _Death in the Afternoon _(1932), Hemingway gave a lyrical (and grim) description

of the landscape, vistas, wine and food of the farm that had inspired _The Farm:_ [We sat] in the heavy twilight at Miró’s; vines as far as you can see, cut by the hedges and the road; the

railroad and the sea with pebbly beach and tall papyrus grass.  There were earthen jars for the different years of wine, twelve feet high, set side by side in a dark room; a tower on the

house to climb to in the evening to see the vines, the villages and the mountains, and to listen and hear how quiet it was. In front of the barn a woman held a duck whose throat she had cut

and stroked him gently while a little girl held up a cup to catch the blood for making gravy.  The duck seemed very contented and when they put him down (the blood all in the cup) he waddled

twice and found that he was dead.  We ate him later, stuffed and roasted; and many other dishes, with the wine of that year. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s

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