Distance and Distortion: Amadeo Souza Cardoso's and Joan Miró's War-years Painting and the Words that Fail Them

This essay considers art historical discourses on the work produced during the First World War by two painters born and living in the Iberian Peninsula: the Portuguese Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (1887–1918) and the Catalan Joan Miró (1893–1983). It considers the dialogues and relations maintained by these painters in their war-affected national artistic milieus and with the equally disrupted, international avant-garde circles, while discussing historiographical biased assumptions about production-places and their meanings, namely how localness was read as expressing isolation, distance, and lack of aesthetic significance.