… wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvelous.
–Joan Miró
A little Miró to kick off the post-Labor Day portion of our program.
Here’s a song from Dave Brubeck and his classic album Time Further Out which is subtitled Miró Reflections and featured Miró artwork on its cover. The song is Bru’s Boogie Woogie which I chose after a friend featured the modern Boogie Woogie piano of Henri Herbert in her blog, Lagniappe, yesterday. The title of her post was It’s Time to Boogie into Fall.
She isn’t wrong. And here’s Bru to help you get started.
Joan Miro, Constellations 1959
Redtree Times 
While I was doing some reading this weekend, I came across this from a MOMA page. You may have mentioned it before:
“Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, one of the many European artists who moved to the United States to escape World War II. He immediately fell in love with the city and with boogie-woogie music, to which he was introduced on his first evening in New York. Soon he began, as he said, to put a little boogie-woogie into his paintings…
[His painting] Broadway Boogie Woogie omits black and breaks Mondrian’s once uniform bars of color into multicolored segments. Bouncing against each other, these tiny, blinking blocks of color create a vital and pulsing rhythm, an optical vibration that jumps from intersection to intersection like traffic on the streets of New York…
Mondrian’s appreciation of boogie-woogie may have sprung partly from the fact that he saw its goals as analogous to his own: “destruction of melody which is the destruction of natural appearance; and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm.”
Thanks for the mention!
Thanks, Linda. I have written of Mondrian here and showed his “Broadway Boogie Woogie” but have never mentioned how the music influenced his work.