Boundaries of horror: Joan Miró and Georges Bataille, 1930–1939
This thesis represents an original contribution to art historical scholarship in its investigation of the overlaps between the art of the Catalan artist Joan Miro and the writings of French philosopher Georges Bataille in the period 1930–1939. I examine three series of intimate, private works undertaken by Miro in 1930, 1935-1936, and 1938-1939 through the lens of contemporary Bataillean texts in order to identify corresponding themes, imagery, and operations. I argue that not only does Bataillean thought represent a direct source of influence on Miro’s work of this time, but also that the artist deliberately turns to this more violent, un-idealised aesthetic in order to visually confront his own professional crisis, the rise of fascism in his homeland, and the Spanish Civil War and start of the Second World War. 
 
My research has uncovered that Miro and Bataille share an interest in the anti-retinal. Miro demonstrates this interest through his ‘assassination of painting’ and attacks on bodily representation, and Bataille in his obsession with blindness—which Miro references in 1930 in his use of imagery from Bataille’s Story of the Eye and through his employment of the informe. Bataille and Miro both use parody in advancing their aesthetic and political missions. Bataille parodies the transpositional nature of Surrealist image-making, while Miro mocks his own earlier artistic output. To this end, both employ ‘parodic landscapes’ that use the image of the volcano as a metaphor for political upheaval and to celebrate ‘real,’ non-transpositional base matter. I argue that the work of both figures exhibit qualities of the carnivalesque, in their interest in parody, ‘sacred’ (liberating) laughter, and excremental imagery. A further, significant, consideration in this thesis is the transgressing of taboos in Bataillean eroticism (and the overlaps between eroticism and war), of which I have identified parallels in Miro’s work. 
 
By considering Miro’s use of Bataillean themes in tandem with the artist’s passionate Catalan nationalism, I argue that the influence of Bataille’s parody, eroticism, and violence provided Miro with the tools to personally respond to the Civil War. This thesis opens a new line of inquiry into Miro in the 1930s, and invites future considerations on Bataille’s influence on Miro’s oeuvre.