Miró in America

 Miró in America is the title of an exhibition curated by the famous art critic and historian Barbara Rose at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1982. Almost fifty years later Miró in the United States, a travelling exhibition which premiered at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona just opened at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The Catalan painter visited the United States seven times during his lifetime starting in 1947 when he was invited to work on a mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati. He was already famous, preceded by his works which crossed the Atlantic as early as the 20's introducing Surrealism to an American audience through a small circle of collectors and art critics. With a first solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse gallery in 1932 and a first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, his influence in America kept growing as he intermingled socially and professionally with American artists in Paris or during his sojourns in the United States. The exhibition underlines the fertile exchanges between American artists and Miró through seventy three works from more than thirty artists and includes paintings, sculptures, a video and archival material.

Set in a niche along the staircase leading to the third floor, Personage with Birds (1970) a late bronze sculpture from Miró, model cast of a 55-foot steel public sculpture erected in Houston, is followed higher up by a group of three decorated wooden sticks, derisory portraits of royalties (His Majesty the King, Her Majesty the Queen and His Highness the Prince, 1974), alluding to the Spanish political climate at the end of Franco's dictatorship. Gently swaying under the stairwell oculus, two "mobiles" from Alexander Calder and his wire portrait of Miró at the entrance of the show highlight the lifelong friendship between the artists who first met in Paris in 1928.

Two totemic white sculptures from Louise Bourgeois take the center stage of the main gallery with, in the background along the wall, a scaled down facsimile of an oil painting titled Mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel, Cincinnati (1947). It leaves little room to view three major early works from Miró on the opposite side of the gallery. Le Renversement (1924) translated as Somersault was Miró's first painting seen in the United States during the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1927. The floating drawings on a monochrome yellow background are rich in symbols and tell of a spiritual journey with a falling horse, reference to Saint Paul's conversion, a mustachioed stick figure ancestor of emojis shouting exclamations of surprise, a flaming sacred heart at the bottom right and above, the Japanese inspired sketch of a steep mountain with an erupting volcano on top. In the middle of the painting, a tuft of green grass evokes a restful place like Montroig, Miró's retreat in Spain. Alongside, Painting (Fratellini) (1927) features scattered clownish profiles on an intense blue background divided by a thin black line, a life line? Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird (1926) was shown at Miró's first museum retrospective at the MoMA in 1941. The cartoonish painting filled with Dada-esque humor and irony left the audience perplexed at first. The three paintings were made during a difficult period for the starving artist subject to hallucinations who talked about his "dark nights of the soul". 

Prominently displayed in the next gallery side by side, Still Life with Old Shoe (1937) from Miró and Garden in Sochi (c.1943) from Arshile Gorky reunite two artists who claimed a mutual appreciation of each other's work. Gorky's reinterpretation of Miró's composition, by substituting his father's Armenian slippers to the old shoe and his mother's butter-churn to Gorky's gin bottle, is a way to pay homage to his distant mentor he finally met in 1947, shortly before his death by suicide. Works from Alice Trumble-Mason, Sonja Sekula and Perle Fine put the spotlight on three less known female artists, loosely inspired by Miró's surrealism, veering toward geometric abstract and abstract expressionism. On a pedestal, Contoured Playground (1941), the bronze model of a project for a playground in Central Park from Isamu Noguchi reminds of Miró's interest in architecture.

The twin gallery is filled with the Constellations (Jan.1940-Sept. 1941), a series of 23 gouache and oil on paper perfectly aligned on the walls, unfortunately obscured by the glare of the protective glass. A closer look at the paintings transforms the display into a metaphysical adventure, a plunge into the realm of dreams and the universe. Each painting deserves a long contemplation to read its content filled with birds, stars, suns, biomorphic shapes, ladders, escapes from a brutal world. Started in Varengeville at the onset of WWII with ten paintings, the series was completed in Spain where Miró fled the German invasion. During his stay in his country of birth then under Franco's ruling, he stayed completely anonymous. Meanwhile the small paintings travelled in a diplomatic pouch all the way to the Pierre Matisse gallery for a landmark exhibition in 1945. They were received with enthusiasm, bought by collectors and museums, and dispersed. In 1959 pochoir prints of the originals were authorized by Miró and the set in the room is one of 150 of a limited-edition portfolio which includes poems inspired by the paintings, Proses Parallèles by André Breton. 

Abstract expressionism, surrealism, color field, the collection of works in the next galleries reunites more than twenty artists, almost half of them women. The selection of tightly hung paintings and their wall texts makes for a challenging viewing. Spanning twenty years starting in 1947, the works represent the Gotha of abstract expressionism lead by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Willem and Helen de Kooning, Franz Kline.... Their intertwined social and professional connections with Miró are sometimes tenuous for artists like Grace Hartigan or Joan Mitchell. In contrast, Lee Krasner, an early admirer, proclaimed after her visit at MoMA in 1941 "I was mad for Miró" and after seeing the Constellations at the Pierre Matisse gallery in 1947 described each painting as "a little miracle". Here, we can find one of her Little Image paintings (1947-48), a series inspired by the Constellations. History is reclaimed with Illusion of Solidity (1945) from Janet Sobel, an underrated artist who impressed Pollock with her "all-over" paintings and inspired his drip technique. Dreamy works from Theodoros Stamos and William Baziotes side by side fit in Miró's world, ... or Paul Klee through Miró? While frequenting Atelier 17 in New York City Louise Nevelson interacted with Miró, so did Louise Bourgeois who already knew him in Paris. Nevelson is represented by a modest sized sculpture featuring a star on top as a lackluster wall sculpture from Herbert Ferber with sun, moon and stars from 1956 is given a prime spot next to a the notable painting from Miró The Red Sun (1948). The Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo with his cosmic imagery collected Miró's work and Adolph Gottlieb found inspiration in Miró's biomorphic shapes for his symbolic pictographs so did Barnett Newman for  Pagan Void (1946), a rare pre-zip painting. A 1945 painting by Mark Rothko shows the heavy influence of Miró, becoming elusive in his work from the early 60's. Works from younger admirers like Helen Frankenthaler and her husband Robert Motherwell show a more subtle Miroesque influence as, exposed to other aesthetic movements, they developed their own style. Miró is present throughout the show, his sculptures and paintings smothered by the busy display of uneven pieces. A vestibule at the end of the gallery holds an assortment of small paintings made in 1972 in which Miró embraces action painting while keeping his favored themes. His self-portrait (1937-1960) nearby faces three shadow portraits (1947) and a video from the experimental photographer and filmmaker Len Lye crammed in the small space with the addition of a glass case filled with archival material.

With a heavy involvement from the Fundació Joan Miró which gathered 130 works for the show in Barcelona, the exhibition at times feels somewhat biased or at least stretches the visual dialogue between the works. It also limits the impact of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, André Breton, Salvador Dalí to name a few who also imported Surrealism to the United States. It is undeniable that inspired by the Surrealist poets, Miró created a unique spiritual, poetic language of symbols, pictograms, calligrams, biomorphic shapes, picture-poems, color fields, heavily borrowed by others. In return, he mingled with American artists and incorporated their style and techniques over the fifties and sixties in a cross-pollination with back and forth East-West exchanges. Of opposite character to his Catalan compatriot Dalí, quiet and humble, he saw his career as a painter similar to a peasant's hard labor and did not seek fame. Fame came to him through his works and flourished with his large-scale public art. Two quotes resume his interaction with the United States. Following his first visit he wrote in a letter to his art dealer: "I am in the midst of work after this stay in America, which I loved so much and which gave me new strength and energy" and toward the end of his life: "It was really American painting that inspired me." 

photographs by the author:

Joan Miró "Self-Portrait" (1937-60)

Arshile Gorky "Garden in Sochi" (c.1943)

Joan Miró "The Migratory Bird from the Constellations Series" (1940-41)

Mark Rothko "Untitled" (1945)

Adolph Gottlieb "Vigil" (1948)

View of the exhibition

The Other Miró

From the Tate in London to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the works of Joan Miró are travelling with the exhibition Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape. The text at the entrance makes it clear, the visitor will discover a politically engaged artist, an often ignored side of Miró's work.

The National Gallery of Art's website provides a detailed overview of the exhibition, with an outline of the    different periods presented by chronological order. What strikes the visitor is the rapid maturation of the artist. The Portrait of Vincent Nubiola, 1917, inspired by Cézanne, is followed by naive, primitive paintings depicting Miró childhood's surroundings, among them The Farm, 1921-22 (bought later by Ernest Hemingway). The styles collide with obvious influence from Cubism (which Miro found too bourgeois) and Surrealism like in The Hunter, 1923-24. After meeting with André Breton, Max Ernst and other members of the surrealist movement in Paris, the artist assimilated their theories and put them in practice. His subjects stayed regional with the Catalan peasants series which became a symbol of oppression. The message is subtle with its description of peasants: red hat (the barretina which alludes to the red phrygian hat worn by the sans-culottes during the French Revolution), mustaches, eyes and pipes. The shapes are getting leaner with stick like bodies. A closer look shows symmetrical lines built on a grid lightly delineated on the background. The canvas is pierced several times with a blunt object, a call for rebellion?

In the same room, three Animated Landscapes look peaceful and poetic with their monochrome backgrounds animated by a few floating objects, moon, hare, dog and the symbolic ladder, a way to escape from reality to an imaginary world.

Following these, the political message becomes louder. Wars, politics, social upheavals influence paintings like Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement, 1935 or The Two Philosophers, 1936, clouds gather on the horizon with the start of the Spanish civil war which lasted till 1939. Miró uses bright, angry colors, convoluted shapes to create beastly creatures and an hallucinatory landscape. Across these, the "savage" pastels, which sounds like an oxymoron, works of small format on paper, oil on copper, collages, masonite, tar, caseine and sand, six Metamorphosis dark, with a rough texture. Then, several symbolic paintings like Still Life with Old Shoe, 1937 introduce new objects: a fork piercing an apple to represent oppressive regimes, bread, a shoe to represent the people. The colors are screaming on a black background and express violence, anguish, destruction. The artist's use of simple symbols  evokes propaganda posters. The following paintings made in 1939 are dada in their absurdity. This is the end of a terrible war...and the start of another. The Constellation series made in 1940-41 is a nice break after these dark works. The automatic drawings, a total of twenty-three, are of small format, cosmic with stars, abstract symbols, ladders, eyes, birds, female shapes on soft colored backgrounds. 

 But the painter's preoccupation with war, dictators, is always present and The Barcelona series (1939-1944) line up a wall, threatening lithographs in black and white. Suns are black, shapes have teeth, angry features, sexual appendages hanging of noses. In contrast, across the room, the gigantic triptych Mural Painting I-III, made in 1962, in the Color Field painting technique, is blinding with the uniformly saturated canvas orange-yellow, green and red with a few cryptic signs, a dot, a line.

The last room erupts with protests: May 68 inspired by the French riots is a colorful green, red, orange, yellow, blue painting defaced by thick black lines.

The painter is all action, splashing grey paint on the canvass for the triptych titled Fireworks,1973, a firework of doom and ashes. Two works from the Burnt Canvases series (five total), made also in 1973 conclude the exhibition. In a dramatic gesture of despair, the artist well-known by then, burned five paintings. His message never changed just got stronger. The visitor leaves the exhibition with these few words from Miró:

"When an artist speaks in an environment in which freedom is difficult, he must turn each of his works into a negation of the negations" (1979)...The artist became very good at this.

photographs were not allowed
"The Farm", 1921-22, Wikimedia
"Head of a Catalan Peasant", 1925, Wikimedia
"The Morning Star" (from Constellations series), 1940-41, Wikimedia

"Persons in the Presence of a Metamorphosis", 1936, photograph by the author: permanent collection, New Orleans Museum of Art