{"id":1420,"date":"2019-10-23T10:54:57","date_gmt":"2019-10-23T09:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/?p=1420"},"modified":"2019-10-23T11:00:46","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T10:00:46","slug":"horses-and-automobiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/en\/2019\/10\/23\/horses-and-automobiles\/","title":{"rendered":"Horses and Automobiles"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1918, Joan Mir\u00f3 painted a portrait of his friend Heribert Casany sitting in a blue wooden chair against a flat sunflower-yellow background on which he placed a small painting of an automobile. Mir\u00f3 had Casany sit with a bowler hat on his head like the ones many chauffeurs wore at the time. The piece, owned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas<\/a>, is currently catalogued as Portrait of Heriberto Casany,<\/em> although previously it had also been known as The Man in the Hat <\/em>and The Chauffeur.<\/em><\/p>\n

The car and the chauffeur’s hat are the painter’s nod to the Casany family business. Heribert’s father Francisco Casany was the owner of the Compa\u00f1\u00eda General de Coches y Autom\u00f3viles, the largest horse-drawn carriage and automobile rental company in Barcelona in the early twentieth century.<\/p>\n

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Carriage of Casany company<\/p>\n

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Picadero Americano<\/em>, horse riding school owned by Casany family<\/p>\n

Mir\u00f3 was drawn to the image of the automobile. He imagined that in the future there would be paintings of streets “with big houses, the sound of car horns […], people running around madly and trolleys and buses,” as he wrote in a letter to his friend R\u00e0fols during that period. Heribert didn’t seem to care a straw for cars: by then, he had disengaged entirely from the family cab business. He lived for art. He wanted to be a ceramist.<\/p>\n

The Man in the Hat<\/em> was shown in Barcelona in 1918 and two years later it travelled to Paris. The canvas was included in an exhibition \u2013 Joan Mir\u00f3’s first show abroad \u2013 at Galerie La Licorne, near the Champs Elys\u00e9es. We then lose track of the painting until 1928, when it travelled to Brussels along with other works by Mir\u00f3 for an exhibition at Galerie Le Centaure, where Ren\u00e9 Magritte had shown his first paintings a few years earlier.<\/p>\n

Magritte, a contemporary of Casany and Mir\u00f3, painted many men in bowler hats \u2013 dozens of them in bowler hats and black overcoats, all identical and motionless as mannequins. His characters were alone or accompanied by moons, pipes, candles or umbrellas. The reiteration of certain themes is very frequent in Magritte’s work and images of jockeys are also recurrent. In the mid-1960s, the painter took on a subject that was enigmatic, like most of his works, in a painting of an early twentieth-century automobile with a chauffeur driving a man wearing a bowler hat in the back seat. On the roof of the vehicle, a jockey rides his horse in parallel. Referring precisely to this canvas, the artist wrote in a letter to a friend that when he painted it he had imagined an automobile with a steering wheel made of bacon.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, aside from this anecdote \u2013the interpretation of which is more enigmatic still \u2013 and from the bowler hats, jockeys and automobiles, Magritte also painted Ren\u00e9 Gaff\u00e9, the Belgian collector who bought Heribert Casany\u2019s portrait. He placed Gaff\u00e9 in front of an unreal, flat, sea-blue landscape with a rock protruding from it. As dapper and elegant as a businessman in the City of London, hair parted and wearing round wire-rimmed glasses, Gaff\u00e9 seems to be imbued with the cold blueness of the canvas.<\/p>\n

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Portrait of Ren\u00e9 Gaff\u00e9<\/em>. Ren\u00e9 Magritte, 1942\u00a0\u00a9 Adagp, Paris, 2019<\/p>\n

A few years after he purchased the portrait of Casany, Ren\u00e9 Gaff\u00e9 sold it to the art dealer Pierre Matisse, the son of the painter Henri Matisse. In December of 1937, Matisse showed the painting at a Mir\u00f3 exhibition he held at his gallery in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

The painting was on its way again. Two years later, it was bought by the king of the automobile industry, Walter P. Chrysler, who kept it until 1950. The piece changed hands twice again, until finally, in 1984 \u2013 just a few months after Mir\u00f3’s death \u2013 it was purchased by the Kimbell Art Foundation in Fort Worth, where it is currently on exhibit.<\/p>\n

As fate would have it, the nod that Mir\u00f3 had begun by placing an automobile in the portrait of the son of the owner of the Compa\u00f1\u00eda General de Coches y Autom\u00f3viles \u2013 a young man with no interest whatsoever in horses or cars \u2013 continued until his death. First, when the two European galleries that showed the portrait bore the names of imaginary creatures with the essence of a horse: a unicorn and a centaur. Then, when Magritte, the painter of the enigmatic piece with a jockey galloping on top of a car, painted the portrait of the collector who bought Heribert Casany’s portrait. Later, when the painting was purchased by a car manufacturer. And, last of all, when the portrait ended up at a museum in Fort Worth, a city famous for its rodeos.<\/p>\n

Horses and automobiles followed Heribert throughout his life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1918, Joan Mir\u00f3 painted a portrait of his friend Heribert Casany sitting in a blue wooden chair against a flat sunflower-yellow background on which he placed a small painting of an automobile. Mir\u00f3 had Casany sit with a bowler hat on his head like the ones many chauffeurs wore at the time. The piece, … Continue reading Horses and Automobiles<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":1414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[153,29,53],"tags":[367,195],"class_list":["post-1420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collection","category-free-voice","category-miro-en","tag-literature","tag-museums"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHorses and Automobiles - Blog Fundaci\u00f3 Joan Mir\u00f3<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/en\/2019\/10\/23\/horses-and-automobiles\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Horses and Automobiles - Blog Fundaci\u00f3 Joan Mir\u00f3\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In 1918, Joan Mir\u00f3 painted a portrait of his friend Heribert Casany sitting in a blue wooden chair against a flat sunflower-yellow background on which he placed a small painting of an automobile. 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