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- Herausgeber: Tate Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
The bright colours and graphic strength of paintings by Joan Miro have made him an immensely popular modern painter, but the artist would have been extremely disappointed to see his work treated as little more than interior décor. In this accessible survey of the artist's life and career, Iria Candela explains the complex roots and darker shades that lie behind the evolution of Miró's work, from the culture of his Catalan homeland to his exposure as a young man to the latest experiments of the avant-garde in Paris and the rise of Fascism in Spain. She examines not only Miró's paintings but also his sculpture, prints and murals, quoting from many of the artist's own revealing statements. For anyone wanting to explore the legacy left by the artist who declared that he wanted to 'assassinate painting', this concise introduction is the perfect guide.
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Joan Miró
Iria Candela
Contents
Frontispiece - Portrait of Joan Miró, Palma de Mallorca, 1967
Iria Candela
The artist of paradox
In recent years, a common perception of Joan Miró’s work has reduced his rich output to a few iconic examples. While this has boosted the popularity of the Catalan artist among global audiences, it has also led to the simplification of a far wider-ranging artistic project. Beyond the apparent simplicity and naivety of his most famous paintings, Miró’s oeuvre is the complex result of a multidisciplinary career in constant evolution. It is also the reflection of an ambivalent and enigmatic artistic personality.
In conversation with a French journalist in the late 1960s at his studio in Palma de Mallorca (Photographic Archive F. Català-Roca, Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya), Miró declared: ‘I might look calm, but underneath I am tormented’.1 Indeed, further analysis of his works reveal them to be simultaneously serene and agitated, impulsive and meticulous, dream-like and super-real. These paradoxes within Miró’s aesthetic undoubtedly stem from his character and personal history. Interviews and encounters with the artist recorded for film and television also reveal a man who was distant yet kind, silent yet expressive; a zealous guardian of his privacy and, at the same time, a tireless collaborator in collective projects. ‘Miró’, as his biographer and close friend Jacques Dupin pointed out, ‘was at once the most spontaneous and the most constrained of men’.2
Early years in Barcelona
Joan Miró i Ferrà was born on 20 April 1893 at number 4 Passatge del Crèdit in Barcelona. His father, Miquel Miró i Adzerias, was a goldsmith and watchmaker, the son of a blacksmith from the Tarragona region, and his mother, Dolors Ferrà i Oromí, was the daughter of a cabinetmaker from Mallorca. A descendant of a family of commercial craftsmen, his father wanted Miró to become a businessman. He attended the Barcelona School of Commerce between 1907 and 1910 and shortly after took a job as a bookkeeper with an importer of colonial products.
The young Miró, however, had little interest in the business sector. Since childhood he had demonstrated an ability for drawing which, when he turned fourteen, saw him combine his studies with art lessons at the renowned La Llotja School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where Pablo Picasso had also been trained a few years earlier. Among his teachers there were Modest Urgell and Josep Pascó, who taught him to draw from a sense of touch by giving him objects that he was not allowed to look at. Some of his works from this period of apprenticeship already reveal a remarkable ability to reproduce tiny forms through a profuse variety of colours.
By 1911, tensions with his father had increased owing to Miró’s discontent with his current job. ‘When I went hunting with him’, he would recall years later, ‘if I said the sky was purple, he made fun of me, which threw me into a rage’.3 A nervous breakdown the same year, together with a bout of typhoid fever, eventually persuaded his parents that the young artist was unable to work as an accountant. Miró could not cope with the alienation of the office environment. The art world, however, clearly offered him an escape from the rigid conventions of a bourgeois lifestyle.
During the following three years, he studied at Francesc Galí’s Escola d’Art in Barcelona, where he met artists such as José F. Ràfols and Enric C. Ricart, and his future lifelong friends and collaborators Joan Prats and Josep Llorens Artigas. Miró also took life-drawing lessons at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, founded in Barcelona in 1893 by a progressive group of Catalan artists led by the architect Antoni Gaudí. In fact, Gaudí’s organic forms and their free rhythm would later prove to be very influential for Miró, who at the time was also discovering the powerful and expressive images of Catalan Romanesque art and the joyful spontaneity of the popular handicrafts produced on the island of Mallorca.
These early influences nurtured his imagination, as did the series of French paintings that he saw at the 1917 Exposition d’Art Français organised by Ambroise Vollard in Barcelona, which included works by Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. Actually, most of the works that Miró created before 1918 mimicked the techniques of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism: the landscape The Path, Siurana 1917 and Portrait of Enric Cristòfol Ricart 1917 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), for instance, were both painted with dense brushstrokes of vibrant colours.4 However, the public presentation of such works proved a complete failure; at his first solo show, organised by the art dealer Josep Dalmau in Barcelona in February 1918, Miró sold none of his paintings and the reactions of the public and the critics were very hostile – to such an extent that a few works were defaced.
These adverse responses probably prompted Miró to create a new painting style. From July to December 1918, inspired by the landscape of Mont-roig del Camp – the Tarragona village where his family had acquired a masía (farm) – he painted four works with meticulous attention to detail. One of them, House with Palm Tree (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid), showed the artist’s exhaustive efforts to capture even the most insignificant elements of the house and its garden, which were reproduced using a miniaturist technique.
Together with his interest in detail, Miró developed an original artistic approach defined by a disregard for the hierarchical representation of natural scenes. In August 1918, he wrote to Ràfols: ‘Joy at learning to understand a tiny blade of grass in a landscape. Why belittle it? A blade of grass is as enchanting as a tree or a mountain’.5 The 1919 painting Mont-roig, the Church and the Village (Private collection, Spain) demonstrates how, as part of a gradual process of disdaining realist techniques (still prevalent in the upper section of the canvas), Miró achieved a schematic composition where the traditional perspective gives way to a stylised representation of furrows and ears (as seen in the lower half).
Miró’s 1919 Self-Portrait (Musée Picasso, Paris) is also characterised by a new style that broke with the constraints of realism. In this work, he is not concerned with a detailed reproduction of the features of his own face, but rather with capturing his inner, enigmatic self. The two-dimensional and static frontality of the figure, together with the sharp pleats of his red jacket, emulate the transcendental style of the representation of Christian deities in Catalan Romanesque frescoes – in particular those at the Sant Climent de Taüll church.
While searching for a personal style, Miró became familiar with the artistic experiments of the European avant-garde movements. He read Guillaume Apollinaire’s collection of poems, Calligrammes, and, through Dalmau, met artists Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia. Miró’s contact with the French artists confirmed his rejection of the dominant, regressive art world of Barcelona. It was evident that if he wanted to establish links with the art of his time he had to go to Paris. As he noted to Ricart in September 1919, ‘I should a thousand times prefer – I really mean it – to be an utter failure, to fail miserably in Paris, to being a big frog in the stagnant pond of Barcelona’.6
Between Paris and Mont-roig: The Farm
On his first trip to Paris in Spring 1920, Miró visited the Musée du Louvre, attended the Dada Festival at the Salle Gaveau and met several artists (such as Picasso, who immediately appreciated Miró’s early paintings and even purchased his 1919 Self-Portrait). In May, Miró wrote: ‘This Paris has shaken me up completely. Positively, I feel kissed, like on raw flesh, by all the sweetness here’.7 His appreciation of the city lasted for life; in fact, over the following fifteen years Miró divided his time between the Parisian cosmopolitan atmosphere and Mont-roig’s rural environment. The city offered him a much-needed intellectual stimulus, as well as the prospect of socialising and promoting his work; in contrast, the farm provided the perfect isolation for artistic production.8
In March 1921, Miró rented the Paris studio of the Spanish sculptor Pablo Gargallo, who also divided his time between France and Catalonia. It was there, at 45 rue Blomet, that Miró met the Surrealist artist André Masson, who lived and worked in the studio next door and who introduced him to artists and writers, such as Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris and Roland Tual. Through active contact with this group Miró discovered French poetry, reading work by Comte de Lautréamont, Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry. In May, he held his first solo exhibition in Paris, organised by Dalmau for the Galerie La Licorne. Despite not selling any work, a small catalogue was published with a preface by the important French art critic Maurice Raynal. In a text written many years later, Miró declared: ‘The Rue Blomet was a decisive place, a decisive moment for me. It was there that I discovered everything I am, everything I would become’.9
