TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84mir37

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 5.3 KB | 100 lines

                                                                                January 9, 1984

The Last of the Forefathers

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 genteel 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 heat-struck 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-shaped
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."

--Robert Hughes