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...more I work, the more I want to work," he says, recalling Picasso-but without the fear of death. Miró has always been a reclusive figure. The stubby squared-off head above the plain business suit could belong to any Barcelona merchant. What has issued from that head is a different matter: despite many trivial or self-parodying works, Miró is the last of the great stylists of early modern art, the most poetic and formally gifted of all the surrealists. His imagination, filled with juicy ironies and wry eroticism, has enriched generations of younger artists, including Pollock...
Column and Hawser. The present retrospective in Paris, of Miró's work, organized by the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs at the Grand Palais (through Oct. 13), is for all practical purposes definitive. It contains some 350 works, including last year's sculptures and beginning with early cubist-influenced paintings. One striking example is the superb Nude with a Mirror-solid as a column with those interlocking planes of pink flesh, the Khmer eyes, the thick hawser of plaited hair, and perched on a hassock whose needlepoint butterfly sums up Miró's pleasure in decorative...
With Gris and Picasso, Miró is one of the three great modern artists Spain has produced. Both Picasso and Gris immersed themselves in the cosmopolitan culture of Paris. They became European rather than "Spanish" artists. But, as Miró pointed out in a letter to a friend, he remained "an international Catalan." Miró without Catalonia would no longer be Mir...
...inimitable shorthand, it discovers how deeply regional an artist he was. His leanest years were in Paris in the early '20s when, he claimed later, he was obliged to live on dried figs and use the hallucinations caused by hunger to loosen up his imagery. Even then Miró managed to raise the money to journey back to his family village of Montroig, a community of farmers and peasant craftsmen, where he spent six months of every year...
There is a very specific, dense and playful sense of nature that only a rural childhood can give. The bawdy animism of Miró's early paintings, done with a sharp, quizzical line that chirrups like a grasshopper in the Catalan dust, is a matter of detail and observation: getting the nose in and keeping it there. When he was working on one of his first great paintings, The Farm, a compendium of animal, vegetable and human life at Montroig, Miró even brought back some dried grasses from Catalonia to Paris to serve as a model. Ernest Hemingway...