Betting on ‘The Farm’: Hemingway and Miró
The Farm, 1921-22 painting Joan Miró (d. 1983)
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.
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