Baked Surprises

Holed up in a centuries-old farmhouse outside Barcelona, Spanish Surrealist Painter-Sculptor Joan Miro and Potter Josep Llorens-Artigas three years ago embarked on one of the strangest pottery-sculpture adventures since the ancient Zapotecs cooled their kilns. As Artigas described the process to the French art review L'Oeil, "Miro had collected objects over the years . . . an empty sardine can flattened by a truck, odd pieces of cork, rubber, glass, rocks . . . These chance encounters became sculptural elements to be translated into pottery." Artigas and his 18-year-old son would shape these elements in clay; Miro would add his "signs": a star, a circle, a crescent.

Often pieces were fired as many as eight times as Miro experimented with additional glazes, smashing all works that displeased him. "Sometimes accidents in baking would suggest new forms," Miro recounts. "What had started out to be a vegetable form would be distorted in a way that made me think of a face. I would add a nose and a bit here and there, and it would turn into a human figure . . . there was a constant metamorphosis."

Out of this three-year collaboration in an animal-mineral-or-vegetable approach to sculpture came 238 "pebbles and rocks," a collection of baked surprises. Thirty of the pieces--rocklike gods, fetishes, masks and totems ranging in height from 3 in. to more than 8 ft.--are on show this week in Manhattan's Pierre Matisse Gallery. Among them are some surprisingly delightful forms, e.g., a small dancing figure whose facial features show up on the sole of its upraised foot, a 6-ft. 3-in. Palm Tree topped with a suitable bird with Miro hieroglyphics scrawled on the richly glazed bark, some bug-eyed figurines that look as if they had just swallowed the pits with the cherries. Most successful are those that, like the 20-in. bull's head, derive their texture and form from the fantastic rock shapes abounding in Catalonia. Miro himself feels that his works, placed out of doors, "immediately form a unity with nature."

Out of the show comes the overall impression that the only thing taboo in Joan Miro's weird world of pixilated fantasy and around the kiln in Barcelona is a deficient sense of humor.

ANDREW WYETH: SUBJECTIVE REALIST

AT 39, Andrew Wyeth can lay claim to being the most successful painter of his generation. He is the youngest painter ever to be inducted into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, and although his formal schooling during his ailing childhood never went beyond first grade, he holds an honorary doctor of arts degree from Harvard. Comfortably completing the picture of success is the fact that a full-scale Wyeth tempera today brings $8,000 to $12,000, and his watercolors, sometimes dashed off in 20 minutes, bring up to $2,400.

Wyeth has won acclaim (TIME, July 16, 1951) despite the fact that his painstaking realism, his romantic, nostalgic overtones and meticulous brushwork flout nearly every tenet of the paint-for-paint's-sake schools of abstraction and impressionism now in vogue. He paints what he knows best: his latest tempera, titled Chambered Nautilus,* is a portrait of his mother-in-law.

Owned by Television Producer-Actor Robert Montgomery, Chambered Nautilus is currently on exhibit in Manhattan's Whitney Museum Annual. Four and a half months in the painting, it is a real Wyeth tour de force. Its breeze-blown, transparent valances swaying from the old-fashioned fourposter, its daring use of bare wall and blank window contrasted with the meticulous rendering of wicker basket and window-shade drawstring, require skills and technique that few modern artists even claim to possess.

What gives power to the 47-in.-by-24-in. painting is the fact that it is obviously rooted in reality. The frail figure of 72-year-old Mrs. Merle Davis James is just as Wyeth saw her last summer in her house a mile from Wyeth's summer place in Gushing, Me. Stricken successively with a severe muscular disease, a heart attack and pneumonia, Mrs. James had finally climbed out from under an oxygen tent, snapped at the nurse, "All this is ridiculous." Wyeth, impressed and moved by her spirit and courage, set out to paint her during her twice-daily rest periods.

As the work progressed, Wyeth suddenly realized that the sea shell set by chance at the foot of the bed was in fact symbolic of his subject. The nautilus builds additional "chambers" on its shell as it matures; so, he felt, Mrs. James "had built another room on the series of rooms that is her life." The painting gives substance to a Wyeth principle: "So many artists tell me they reached the bottom of realism too fast. They reached the depth of their own emotions, but not of the object. What the subject means is the important thing."

* Going on view next week at the Delaware Art Center, in a show sponsored by the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, are more than 50 Wyeth works. For Wyeth, whose winter painting quarters are only eight miles from Wilmington, in a nine-room remodeled schoolhouse at Chadds Ford, Pa., the show is a triumphant homecoming: he exhibited his first professional work there in one of the society's annual shows when he was 15.

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