New Wonders Out of an Old Craft

By A.T. Baker

By any reckoning, Joan Miro is probably the greatest living painter, at least of the generation that produced Picasso, Matisse, Gris and Dali. Amidst these driven men, Miro was always the elf, an antic poet who took Surrealism and made it gay, an irreverent abstractionist who planted sexual symbols in wide fields of indeterminate space. He is already so enshrined in art history that it is easy to assume that he is dead. But Miro is alive, and at 80 has taken off in a new creative direction.

He found inspiration about four years ago when he walked into a Barcelona gallery and saw some tapestries --"hangings," in the current vernacular --by a young Spaniard called Josep Royo. They were insouciant works, with various objects sticking out of the wool. Miro decided at once that with Royo he could and would create a new style, in a career that has had many styles. He sought out the young man, told him briskly: "Let's start working together at once. We are going to break traditional molds." In the next years, the two worked in close collaboration. Every few weeks, Miro traveled from his house in Majorca to Royo's studio, a converted flour mill in Tarragona, outside Barcelona. There Royo would spread his newest tapestries on the floor. Miro studied each, with all its intricate twists, sworls, braids and tailings. Then he might splash a design across the rhythmic shapes, or snatch up some scrap of cloth to provide an accent or an assertion, using material from among the detritus lying around the studio. These were appliqued into the tapestry itself.

Humble Burlap. For one tapestry, Miro picked up a metal stencil for the letter G and splashed it on upside down in brown against bright yellow canvas. Then he hung the stencil itself on the fabric--also upside down. A handy whisk broom was slapped onto another tapestry. Working on a third, Miro's eye lit upon an empty paint bucket; he rammed it into the composition then, as an afterthought, added a fake spill of paint made of canvas. He proposed scorching certain areas to darken the hemp, and soon the studio flared with gouts of kerosene fires, quickly lit then doused.

He told Royo where to add a canvas patch, where to drape a cascade of wool, where to drop coils of fishermen's rope. Says Miro: "Wool and weaving give me a great sensual feeling." Agrees Royo: "When he picks up a skein of wool, he closes his eyes to feel it, and cries, 'C'est formidable!' "

The result was a series called Sobreteixims, now on exhibit at Manhattan's Pierre Matisse Gallery. All the name means is "on top of tapestry." The craft of tapestry is as old as palaces, as durable as moths will allow. But the collaboration of a young crafts man and a modern-day old master have transformed it into something bold and new. Bright color plays against the hemp's rich browns, big shapes against the intricacy of woven texture, gay in genuity against humble utilitarian bur lap. Formidable.

Sober Suit. Miro has "done" tapestries in the past; that is, he made small paintings, and tapestry makers in Aubusson or Gobelins reproduced them. "That does not interest me any more," says Miro. With Royo, he is in at the start. For his part, Royo is pleased and amazed: "We both work from 7 in the morning until 1 o'clock, then from 3 to 8 or 9 at night. I'm often exhausted, but he never seems to get tired."

Small as a gnome, now white-haired, Miro lives and looks, or tries to look, like a conventional bourgeois (even in his Paris days when his friends were Picasso and the wilder Dadaists, he was always the one in the sober suit and tie). He is in search of no publicity at all; he has more commissions than he can handle, more monographs on his work than he can count, more requests for interviews than he cares to consider.

Instead he works day long and night late in the Majorca house designed for hun by a fellow Catalan, Jose Luis Sert, former dean of the Harvard School of Design. The walls are studded with photographs of still another Catalan, Pablo Picasso. Miro is preparing for his huge retrospective to be mounted in Paris' Grand Palais next May. "Age does not exist," he says. "It is all a question of the mind, of the spirit. As I grow older, I work harder than ever." His studio is studded with some two dozen unfinished canvases. "I'm working on them all the tune in my head."

He still works in ceramics, an art he practically revolutionized in a col laboration with Pepito Artigas that began in 1944. They decided that ce ramics should be monumental and pro duced major works like the double free standing walls at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

Among Miro's current projects are two new Sobreteixims -- one hung with umbrellas, another so big (20 ft. by 36 ft.) that Royo has had to construct a special loom to make it. "It will be the largest tapestry ever woven," says Miro proudly. "It is une folie. But then you have to be crazy."

His pride is justifiable. Seldom have sophisticated design, magisterial color and gaiety of spirit been so well combined. With Sobreteixims, Miro has transformed the Royo tapestries from admirable folk art into perhaps master pieces. But after all, Miro is only 80. What next?

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