Naked Woman Climbing a Staircase (originally in French Femme nue montant l'escalier) is a drawing done with pencil and charcoal on card

Card stock

Card stock, also called cover stock or pasteboard, is a paper stock that is thicker and more durable than normal writing or printing paper, but thinner and more flexible than other forms of paperboard. Card stock is often used for business cards, postcards, playing cards, catalog covers,...

 made by Joan Miró

Joan Miró

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...

 in 1937. It is part of the permanent collection of the Fundació Joan Miró

Fundació Joan Miró

The ' is a museum of modern art honoring Joan Miró and located on the hill called Montjuïc in Barcelona, Catalonia.-History:...

 in Barcelona

Barcelona

Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...

.

History

Miró painted Naked Woman Climbing a Staircase during the Spanish Civil War

Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

. He was living in Paris and he started to attend life drawing classes at the school of the Grande Chaumiere. Miró returned to constructing the human figure to represent the drama that was then taking place in Catalonia

Catalonia

Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...

. This feeling can be made out in the shapes used to draw this tortured nude woman climbing a staircase. Other works of this period include Still Life with Old Shoe

Still Life with Old Shoe

Still Life with Old Shoe, is an oil painting done by Joan Miró in 1937 and now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work entered the museum as a gift by James Thrall Soby in 1970.- History :...

and Aidez l'Espagne.

Description

According to the Joan Miró Foundation, "Miró's despondency brought about by the moral tragedy of the war can be seen in the violent metamorphosis of the figure, in her heavy limbs and in the effort involved in climbing." At the top right is a kind of window or box where light rays can be seen entering the room. The woman is using her right arm to try to grab a ladder – this was a symbol that Miró used in several of his works to represent evasion or escape. The external genitals of the woman are similar to those of the woman in Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement

Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement

Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement is a 1935 oil painting on copper ​​by Joan Miró.-Description:...

as they are exaggerated in size. This work is said to be related to Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

-External links:* at the Philadelphia Museum of Art* from Life magazine...

, made by Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

, although here the woman is ascending. The distortion and effort of the figure are interpreted as mirroring the Spanish Civil War

Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

. Interestingly Duchamp's painting was not wholly original; it alluded to the earlier photographs by Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard J. Muybridge was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible...

 which were amongst the first to record animal locomotion. Miró first saw this work by Duchamp in 1912, during the Cubist art exhibition held at the Dalmau Gallery (Galeries Dalmau) in Barcelona.

Muybridge's idea of a woman on a staircase caught the imagination of not only Duchamp and Miró but also Miró's contemporary Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

 who created a homage to Duchamp's painting. His model was also shown ascending the stairs like Miró's subject.

Exhibitions

Start	End	Exhibition	Place	City	Ref
1964	1964		Tate Gallery Tate Gallery The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...	London
1964	1964		Kunsthaus Zürich Kunsthaus Zürich The Kunsthaus Zürich houses one of the most important art museums in Switzerland and Europe, collected by the local Kunstverein, called Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, and holdings running from the Middle Ages to contemporary art, with an emphasis on Swiss art.Kunsthaus is also the name of the tram stop...	Zurich
20 September 1978	22 January 1979	Dessins de Miró	Centre Georges Pompidou Centre Georges Pompidou Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...	París
1 June 1980	31 October 1980		Palacio de Velázquez	Madrid
21 November 1986	1 February 1987		Kunsthaus Zürich	Zurich
14 February 1987	20 April 1987		Städtische Kunsthalle	Düsseldorf
24 November 1988	15 January 1999	Impactes. Joan Miró 1929–1941	Fundació Joan Miró	Barcelona
3 February 1989	23 April 1989	Joan Miró: Paintings & Drawings 1929–1941	Whitechapel Gallery Whitechapel Gallery The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, it was founded in 1901 as one of the first publicly-funded galleries for temporary exhibitions in London, and it has a long...	London
4 July 1990	14 October 1990		Maeght Foundation	Saint-Paul de Vence
20 April 1993	30 August 1993		Fundació Joan Miró Fundació Joan Miró The ' is a museum of modern art honoring Joan Miró and located on the hill called Montjuïc in Barcelona, Catalonia.-History:...	Barcelona
6 October 1993	11 January 1994		Museum of Modern Art Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...	New York
11 February 1995	17 April 1995		Städtische Kunsthalle	Düsseldorf
12 May 1995	16 July 1995		Kunsthalle Wien Kunsthalle Wien The Kunsthalle Wien is an institution in Vienna for temporary exhibitions of contemporary international art. It opened in 1992, and was originally located on Karlsplatz, in a container-shaped building designed as a temporary site by the Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz...	Viena
28 July 1995	22 October 1995		Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea de Verona	Verona Verona Verona ; German Bern, Dietrichsbern or Welschbern) is a city in the Veneto, northern Italy, with approx. 265,000 inhabitants and one of the seven chef-lieus of the region. It is the second largest city municipality in the region and the third of North-Eastern Italy. The metropolitan area of Verona...
26 February 1996	5 May 1996		CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona is one of the most visited exhibition and arts centres in the city of Barcelona.Situated in the Raval district, the Centre’s core theme is the city and urban culture...	Barcelona
7 June 1997	11 November 1997	Miró, ceci est la couleur de mes rêves	Fondation Pierre Gianadda	Martigny
15 May 1998	30 August 1998	Joan Miró. Creator of new worlds	Moderna Museet Moderna Museet Moderna museet, the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden, is a state museum located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, that was first opened in 1958. Its first manager was Pontus Hultén...	Stockholm Stockholm Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
18 September 1998	10 January 1999	Joan Miró. Creator of new worlds	Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Louisiana Museum of Modern Art The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located directly on the shore of the Øresund Sound in Humlebæk, north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is the most visited art museum in Denmark with an extensive permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, dating from World War II and up...	Humlebaek
4 July 2000	5 November 2000		Maeght Foundation	Saint-Paul de Vence
23 October 2001	27 January 2002	Rèquiem per les escales	CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona is one of the most visited exhibition and arts centres in the city of Barcelona.Situated in the Raval district, the Centre’s core theme is the city and urban culture...	Barcelona
6 March 2002	24 June 2002	La Révolution surréaliste	Centre Georges Pompidou Centre Georges Pompidou Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...	París Paris Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
20 July 2002	24 November 2002		Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is the art collection of the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, located in Düsseldorf. United by this institution are three different exhibition venues: the K20 at Grabbeplatz, the K21 in the Ständehaus and the Schmela Haus...	Düsseldorf
25 November 2004	6 February 2005	Joan Miró. Arquitectura d'un llibre	Fundació Joan Miró	Barcelona
25 October 2007	27 January 2008	Joan Miró. 1956–1983 Sentiment, emoció i gest	Fundació Joan Miró	Barcelona
14 April 2011	11 September 2011	Miró.	Tate Tate -Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States...	London
15 October 2011	18 March 2011	Miró i l'escala de l'evasió Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape was an exhibition organized by the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London. The exhibition was at The Tate from April to September 2011 before moving to the Joan Miró Foundation to open in October 2011 until March 2012... .	Tate Tate -Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States... , Fundació Joan Miró Fundació Joan Miró The ' is a museum of modern art honoring Joan Miró and located on the hill called Montjuïc in Barcelona, Catalonia.-History:...	London & Barcelona
6 May 2012	12 August 2012		National Gallery of Art National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...	Washington Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

2011 exhibition

The exbibition L'escala de l'evasió

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape was an exhibition organized by the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London. The exhibition was at The Tate from April to September 2011 before moving to the Joan Miró Foundation to open in October 2011 until March 2012...

that opened in October 2011 was supported by access to Wikipedia using QRpedia

QRpedia

QRpedia is a mobile Web based system which uses QR codes to deliver Wikipedia articles to users, in their preferred language. QR codes can easily be generated to link directly to any Uniform Resource Identifier , but the QRpedia system adds further functionality.QRpedia was conceived by Roger...

 codes that allowed access to visitors in Catalan

Catalan language

Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...

, English and several other languages.