The artwork “Still Life with Coffee Mill,” created by Joan Miró in 1918, is an embodiment of the cubist and fauvist art movements. Miró, a renowned visual artist, employed these movements’ styles to craft a still life genre painting that captures the essence of the subjects through geometrical abstraction and bold coloration.
In this artwork, Miró portrays an array of objects spread on a surface, presumably a table, with a strong sense of geometric fragmentation typical of Cubism. The centerpiece is the coffee mill, whose boxy form and handle are depicted with a perspective that bends and twists, challenging the conventional representation of space. Surrounding the coffee mill is a scattering of other items, which may include a box with what seems to be dominoes spilling out, a piece of fabric with striped patterns, a container filled with spherical objects resembling fruits or beads, and a sheet of paper or label announcing a three-for-twenty-five cents sale, hinting at a commercial context or the mundane transactions of daily life. The color palette is relatively muted, with earthy tones dominating, punctuated by splashes of more vivid colors, such as reds and yellows, that break through and draw the eye, characteristic of the fauvist influence. Overall, the composition is a harmonious blend of abstracted forms and surfaces that evoke the materiality of each object while inviting viewers to consider them in a new, less literal light.
