In 1932 Miró left Paris and moved to Barcelona. There he became associated with a new generation of Catalan avant-garde artists who were organising themselves through associations such as the ADLAN and the GATCPAC, encouraged by friends of Miró such as Joan Prats and Josep Lluís Sert. Miró returned to painting at this time, although now focusing on a quest for radically experimental procedures and increasingly interested in the public function of the work of art. This interest would encourage him to reflect on the idea of the fusion of the arts that European art and architectural movements had been proposing since the 1920s. This period was also marked by enormous political uncertainty both in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, culminating in the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Aware of the climate of the day and obsessed with avoiding a merely aesthetically pleasing type of art, in 1934 Miró began what he termed his “wild paintings”. In these works the earth seems to be transformed into the subterranean universe of the dead, the realm of Pluto. The figures, which are the same peasants that we saw in the 1920s landscapes, are twisted and distorted to the point of losing all human references. In his “wild paintings” Miró continued his interest in experimenting with materials initiated in the previous period. Here he plays with unusual and difficult supports such as cardboard, copper and Masonite, while also combining normal oil pigments with industrial ones or with materials used for their tactile qualities such as sand and tar.
