The Last of the Forefathers

By R.H.

Joan Miro: 1893-1983

The death last week of Joan Miro, at 90, was a vivid reminder of the antiquity of modernism. The old surrealist, whose work was once so startling to received taste (a half-century ago, you did not give paintings titles like Two Figures Standing Before a Pile of Excrement without offending someone), received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church; his death was attended by the priests whom surrealism, a profoundly Catholic movement, once despised. Miro was the last of the great modernist inventors, if you concede that neither Salvador Dali nor Marc Chagall, both still alive, is quite in that league. Now they are all dead, the artists born between 1880 and 1900 who reshaped both culture and consciousness. Although it would be pious to suppose that much of Miro's work in the last 25 years of his life compared with what he made in the first 50, his passing is emblematic.

He died on the island of Mallorca, but came from Catalonia, the Spanish province whose language, humor and sights had fueled his imagination all his life. Most great art is rooted in provinciality, and Miro's was no exception. He was a city boy, a goldsmith's son, but he spent part of his youth on the farm that his parents owned at Montroig. Its white, cracked walls, dusty earth and heatstruck furrows--commemorated in lunar detail in The Farm, 1921-22--were the frame of an immense repertory of images that constituted the motifs of his art: hairs and plants, chickens and cats and snails, the moon and the dog howling at it, galumphing limbs and waggling genitals.

When Miro took up art studies in Barcelona (where one of his fellow students was the ceramicist Jose Llorens Artigas, who would later become Miro's chief collaborator in sculpture), he started with the very specific, dense and playful sense of nature that only a country childhood can give.

What Miro did with this fund of imagery after he moved to Paris in 1919 marked his emergence. Miro did not need groups. He became a surrealist because surrealism needed him; it had plenty of poets but no great formal artist (as distinct from vivid dream illustrators like Dali or Magritte). Even allowing for the recent rise in the critical fortunes of Andre Masson, the painter who introduced Miro to the surrealist group, it still seems clear that, as a draftsman and colorist, as an inventor of epigrammatic shapes set in exquisitely pure pictorial fields, Miro had no rival within that movement.

He rejected hard-and-fast distinctions between painting and poetry. He loved words. PHOTO, announces the writing on a 1925 canvas that, being mostly blank, is clearly not a photograph; and then, around a shapeless blob of blue pigment, the wiry script declares that "this is the color of my dreams." Yearning is fixed in a depicted absence. "In my pictures there are tiny forms in vast empty spaces," Miro once explained. "Empty space, empty horizons, empty planes, everything that is stripped has always impressed me."

This emptiness was the right place for creatures that, like the figure in The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), 1923-24, seemed mythic and comic in equal measure. The space could swarm with the creatures of his imagination, relentlessly breeding and recombining. If any artist deserved to be called a modern Hieronymus Bosch, it was Miro. His emotional range was very wide, spanning almost as much psychic ground as his compatriot Picasso's: it went all the way from bawdy jokes to the sense of malignancy and doom that invests such images of the disastrous 1930s as Still Life with Old Shoe, 1937, or Head of a Woman, 1938.

His influence was equally wide. Miro's paintings affected design rather as Mondrian's did; when one looks at those now nostalgic household objects of the 1950s, the kidney coffee table and the ball-on-wire chair leg, one realizes that they owe their existence to the flat, floating shapes and springy calligraphy of Miro's Constellations in the '40s. But that is trivial compared with his effect on painting. Nowhere was this more felt than in America, whose museums (especially New York City's Museum of Modern Art) had collected his work with enthusiasm through the decades when most European institutions ignored it.

Miro was the conduit through which surrealist ideas about instinct, myth and childhood were fed into later modern art. He was more accessible than Picasso; his reputation was not so overpowering, and he did not seem to use up all the air in the room. Largely because of his example, the idea grew in America that an image could be both abstract and psychically eloquent, that it could delve into the profoundest areas of memory and desire while retaining a certain buoyancy and elegance. He helped save American painters from becoming mere illustrators of Freud or Jung. Miro was an inspiration to Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and indeed to every artist, major or minor, who felt the need to preserve the essentially pictorial values of modernism by balancing "mythic" subjects against precisely articulated surface. His legacy is summed up in his name: Spanish for "he looked."

-- R.H.