How does Still Life with Old Shoe elucidate its History?
At the start of the Spanish Civil War Miró spent some time at his house in Montroig del Camp but then left for France. On 16 December 1936 he arrived in Paris with his wife Pilar and daughter Maria Dolores. They lived in a very confined space with nowhere for Miró to work, so he simply noted down ideas on small cards. As he had done when he first went to Paris in 1920, Miró attended the drawing class at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere.
As he still had no space of his own, Miró began to work in a corner of the gallery Pierre where, in the period January–May 1937, he produced one of his strangest and most important paintings, Still Life with Old Shoe, in which he expresses his anguish over the situation in Spain, with a detailed depiction of the rise of evil, invasion by monsters and the decline of the human figure.
 Perhaps the events of the moment, especially the drama of the war in Spain, made me feel a need to penetrate reality. I worked from life every day at the Grande Chaumiere. At that time I felt a need to control things through realism
Miró sided with the Republicans. He showed his mural The Reaper at the Spanish pavilion of the Paris International Exhibition of 1937 where Picasso's famous Guernica was also exhibited. The Reaper, a large picture with a height of 5.5 m (18 ft), was lost after the pavilion was dismantled. In the same year Miró produced a poster with a powerful message in French: Aidez l'Espagne (Help Spain).
The Reaper Montroig del Camp Picasso Spanish Civil War Guernica Académie de la Grande Chaumiere Paris International Exhibition of 1937