Voyager into Indeterminate Space

By A.T. Baker

A Joan Miro retrospective in Washington

Art historians have never been comfortable with Joan Miro. A surrealist? The admirers of Dali or Magritte would not agree. An abstractionist? Miro says he never painted an abstraction in his life. Everything "is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else," he insists. The Miro admirers who have now mounted a selection of 45 of his paintings at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum have another proposition: Miro is simply a great painter. Says Hirshhorn Director Abram Lerner: "Miro's place is alongside the most fertile of those giants --Picasso and Matisse."

The show, which moves to Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery in June, supports this notion, embracing as it does nearly every period in Miro's long career (he was 87 last week). The angular planes of Standing Nude, 1918, for example, show that the young goldsmith's son, painting in Barcelona, had already studied reproductions of the works of the cubists in Paris. Because of World War I, Miro could not get to Paris himself until 1919. By then he was 26 and a determined individualist: he remained very much the hedgehog (who knew one big thing) amidst the gabbling foxes (who knew many things) of Paris' cafes. He returned to Spain to paint The Farm, 1921-22, which proved he was not too intimidated by his Paris experience: though it had the cubists' flat composition, it was detailed with the intimate knowledge only a farm boyhood could achieve. Ernest Hemingway, who bought the painting, wrote appreciatively: "It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there."

A lesser man could have made a career out of repeating a style of such individuality (Raoul Dufy? Vlaminck?). But once Miro had perfected it, he abandoned it. In a transformation as abrupt as Picasso's switch from the soft-edged, attenuated figures of his blue period to the African ferocities of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Miro launched into his "dream paintings." These were derived partly from his fascination with his new surrealist friends in Paris, Breton and Eluard, and their talk of dream imagery, free association, irrational juxtaposition. And partly from plain hunger. As Miro explains, "Sometimes I hadn't had any supper. I saw things ... I saw shapes in the chinks in the walls and shapes on the ceiling." Typical of this period is Carnival of Harlequin, 1924-25, which squirms with a profusion of shapes--a black, writhing snake with a huge white-gloved hand where its head should be; a startled cat's face in search of a proper body; a jack-in-the-box with bee's wings.

From Miro's poet friends ("I make no distinction between poetry and painting") came other images that he painted and then made unforgettable, such as Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926, a magical vision of a comic canine that never was reaching hopelessly toward a moon that could never be (and has a face).

Enough? Not for Miro, who seems to have had more ideas than he had time to express. And perhaps even he did not exactly know what he was doing. In painting The Birth of the World, 1925, he started with the background, a scumble of brush strokes and hesitations. What he achieved was a space, but one that has nothing to do with the receding perspectives of the Renaissance's vanishing point. It is indeterminate, a cave without walls, a space where a man could wander in his mind's eye and lose his bearings. Contemplating this beckoning No Where, Miro painted on it hard-edged iconographs that pinned the eye to the real surface, the mind to the real world. But not wholly. His image of the earth (a white circle) is only a diagram; the sun (a red circle) is disputed by an aggressive black triangle that symbolizes -- what?

Years later, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock were to seize on this evocative space, with its foreground frieze of totemic shapes, and develop their art upon it. Looking back in 1968, William Rubin of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art said that Miro "is the major European progenitor of abstract expressionism." Miro would never have thought of himself as a progenitor. But the idea of an undefined background space haunted him. Over the years he spread across it an increasingly personalized iconography of symbols, of figures and faces and shapes. Miro's images run back to the ancient drawings from the caves of Altamira that he saw in his youth. "One must refine the magical sense of things," he said, and the symbols and signs he created--a scribble for a bird, a bristle of lines for a star, a target for a breast--were images deeply lodged in the racial unconscious. Those included sexual symbols. There is scarcely a Miro painting that does not somewhere contain his icons for the female and male genitals, as isolated from sensual context as the biologist's symbols, and just as unvoluptuous. Male phalluses are always limp, and female vaginas sharp-edged and abstract, even when surrounded by flaring flames. "The sex organ has a poetic power, like a comet," Miro says. Those figures -- sometimes gay, sometimes grotesque -- that posture against fathomless space are what Miro's latter-day disciples have most tried to imitate. But Miro could not care less. He still feels himself as an explorer. A series of canvases that he produced in 1961 are as empty as any minimalist could wish. In Blue II, a staccato of emphatic black shapes ends in an exclamation point of red, all set against an azure expanse. Says Miro: "Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains, everything that is stripped has always impressed me."

And all his life, Miro loved to put poetic titles on his pictures. Example: The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain, 1940. Find the nightingale? The song? The rain? The viewer may never puzzle out any of these challenges, but he will have been forced to let his imagination investigate the whole of the picture.

In his later work, both that poetry and emptiness are combined, as in Toward the Escape, 1972. But ultimately what comes across is that Miro is supremely a painter qua painter. Matisse observed years ago that it doesn't matter what Miro represents on his canvas. But if at a certain place he has put a red spot, you can be sure that it had to be there and not elsewhere. Take it away and the painting collapses.

--A.T.Baker

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