Word: mir
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...historians have never been comfortable with Joan Miró. A surrealist? The admirers of Dali or Magritte would not agree. An abstractionist? Miró says he never painted an abstraction in his life. Everything "is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else," he insists. The Miró admirers who have now mounted a selection of 45 of his paintings at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum have another proposition: Miró is simply a great painter. Says Hirshhorn Director Abram Lerner: "Miró's place is alongside the most fertile of those...
...show, which moves to Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery in June, supports this notion, embracing as it does nearly every period in Miró's long career (he was 87 last week). The angular planes of Standing Nude, 1918, for example, show that the young goldsmith's son, painting in Barcelona, had already studied reproductions of the works of the cubists in Paris. Because of World War I, Miró could not get to Paris himself until 1919. By then he was 26 and a determined individualist: he remained very much the hedgehog (who knew...
...lesser man could have made a career out of repeating a style of such individuality (Raoul Dufy? Vlaminck?). But once Miró had perfected it, he abandoned it. In a transformation as abrupt as Picasso's switch from the soft-edged, attenuated figures of his blue period to the African ferocities of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Miró launched into his "dream paintings." These were derived partly from his fascination with his new surrealist friends in Paris, Breton and Eluard, and their talk of dream imagery, free association, irrational juxtaposition. And partly from plain hunger. As Mir...
...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...