“My stories would all come back with rejection slips and Miró’s unsold canvases were piled up all over his studio,” Hemingway later recalled.

At the time, both were struggling to make it. Though hopelessly mismatched, he and Hemingway also sparred at the Cercle Américain boxing club on the Boulevard Raspail. “We often went to dinner at the Nègre de Toulouse, and there we would see Joyce, who was blind, accompanied by his daughter,” Miró told his French biographer, Jacques Dupin. Then a bachelor in his late 20s, the artist was small, taciturn, restrained, obsessively neat Hemingway, six years younger and married, was large, exuberant, hard-drinking, gregarious.

Like Hemingway, Miró arrived in Paris soon after World War I. And almost nothing went according to plan. In the years around the Cuban revolution and Hemingway’s subsequent suicide, however, the painting took up all the strategic resources that the world’s most important museum of modern art could muster. Immaculately restored and protected under glass, it betrays little of its long entanglement with the writer, his wives, MoMA, and one of the major political upheavals of the Cold War. This month, The Farm goes on view in a major Miró retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais. “Don’t bother working on her because I have the say,” he told him. But before he got on the elevator, he pulled Barr aside. After they finished talking, Hemingway left the museum, leaving Mary with Barr to look at more art. The painting hung in the dining room of the Finca, and whether he was entertaining guests or dining alone with Mary, he generally sat where he could see it. At one point, she suggested turning over The Farm to MoMA immediately. Hemingway was even more enthusiastic about the proposed gift than her husband. “I replied with poorly restrained excitement that we certainly would be interested,” Barr told MoMA curator Jim Soby the next day.Īs they continued talking, Barr noticed Mrs. It also hadn’t been shown in public in more than 20 years. It was one of the signal paintings of the modern era. The Farm was not only one of Miró’s most important works. Especially The Farm, the early Joan Miró masterpiece he’d acquired during his marriage to Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, his first wife.īarr found the couple in the museum galleries, and after some banter about Cuba, Hemingway came to the point: was the museum still interested in his Miró? Barr almost fainted. He’d recently begun a score-settling memoir of his Paris years-the book that became A Moveable Feast-and was thinking about his art collection. But Hemingway, who was nearing 60, had something else on his mind, too. They’d flown up from Havana a week earlier to sit ringside at the Carmen Basilio-Sugar Ray Robinson boxing match at Yankee Stadium. At the time, they were spending much of the year at Hemingway’s home outside of Havana, the Finca Vigía, where he kept his African-big-game trophies and the small number of avant-garde paintings he’d collected back in the 1920s and 30s. They asked to see Alfred Barr Jr., the museum’s legendary founding director. One October afternoon in 1957, Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The farm miro