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This is one of my favourite Joan Mir� lithographs, mostly because of the strength of the image with its vivid colour and lively composition, but also because of its hilarious title. It was created in 1952 in atelier Mourlot for the art revue Verve, published by T�riade. The double issue in which it appeared (no. 27-28) is one of the most sought-after issues of this legendary publication, as it contains not just this astonishing work by Mir� but also Chagall's Visions de Paris (8 lithographs), Matisse's La tristesse du roi, L�ger's La partie de campagne, and additional lithographs by Braque, Henri Laurens, Alberto Giacometti, Andr� Masson, Francisco Bor�s, and Marcel Gromaire. Joan Mir�, The Dog Barking at the Moon Lithograph, 1952 The full title of the Mir� is lithographed in Mir�'s hand on the reverse of the print: Le chien aboyant � la lune reveille le coq le chant du coq picote le crane du fermier Catalan pos� sur la table � cot� du pourron. The dog barking at the mo

"Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder," wrote Paul C�zanne. It was the major C�zanne retrospective in Paris in 1907, together with Picasso's discovery of African and Oceanic art around the same time, that gave rise to the Cubist movement which propelled art into the twentieth century and the machine age. Picasso's famous 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shows Cubism in its earliest formative stage; its fractured perspectives derive, I believe, from Picasso's memories of the endless reflections he had glimpsed in the heavily mirrored brothels of the barrio chino in Barcelona, where the painting is set. In 1907 and 1908 Picasso, in close collaboration and friendly rivalry with Georges Braque, worked out the template for Cubism, an art in which the single perspective of a static onlooker is replaced by the multiple perspective of an all-seeing eye. Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians Pochoir after a painting from Eugen