Word: mir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...diminutive white-haired man bowed humbly before the towering figure of the Spanish King. "Mi amigo, Don Juan Carlos," he called the monarch familiarly. The King, who stands 6 ft. 3 in., could not object. For within the domain of painting, Joan Miró is himself a reigning giant. Miró, 5 ft. and 87 years old, was honored last week in a day of ceremonies crowned by the presentation by Juan Carlos of Spain's gold medal of fine arts. Among the other events: the opening of an exhibition of Miró's works in Madrid...
...From Miró'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 Miró, 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...
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 Miró "is the major European progenitor of abstract expressionism." Miró 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. Miró's images run back...
...life, Miró 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...