Word: mir
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Genghis Cohn, a Yiddish music-hall comedian, is on his last stage. The stage is Auschwitz, and his audience is a German firing squad. But he seizes the opportunity for a last punch line. He turns his naked rump to the executioners and says: "Kush mir in tokhes!," which in Yiddish means "Kiss my ass!" Herr Captain Schatz, the man who has been placidly shooting Jews down on order, is so shaken that he accords Cohn the unusual respect of examining the corpse and ordering it clothed. Seeing an opportunity to keep his act going, Cohn's ghost slips...
Eventually, "getting beyond the plastic aspects" came to mean abjuring the use of paint on canvas altogether. Proclaiming that it was time "to wring the neck of painting," Miró in the early '30s embarked on the production of oddly haunting "poetic objects," which were meant to suggest the improbable juxtaposition of objects that occurs in dreams. Many of his sculptures remind observers of the combines produced by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the 1950s...
Memories of Astarte. Miró has always loathed politics and avoided them. But as a Spaniard who throughout his life has spent most of each year in his native land, he was deeply embittered over the Spanish Civil War. For five months in 1936-37, he labored over one canvas, the Still Life with Old Shoe, which would, he hoped, be simple enough for the humblest Spanish peasant to appreciate. His anguish is mirrored in the lines that crisscross the face of his 1938 Self-Portrait. "I'd like," he wrote, "to try my hand at sculpture, pottery, engraving...
...years since World War II, Miró's partner in realizing these ambitions became Llorens Artigas, a lifelong friend and master potter. At his kilns north of Barcelona, Miró fired many ceramics, including the 1958 murals that decorate UNESCO's Paris head quarters. He is currently working on ceramic murals for the Barcelona air port and for a West Berlin broadcasting center. He is also preparing a poster for the 1972 Olympics, and will meet this week with Japanese representatives to discuss a "laugh room" for the 1970 World's Fair at Osaka, which he envisions...
...1960s, Miró has also turned to huge bronze totems, cast in molds made from found objects, that brood like so many legendary rocs amid the gardens of the Maeght Foundation. One of his most recent sculptures is the massive marble Moonbird, who, in Miró's language, is meant to suggest not only moon and bird but also woman. Moonbird summons up half-forgotten racial memories of fertility-cult objects, altars, Astarte and menhirs. In so doing it suggests the deeper roots of Joan Miró's art. Through dream symbols and childish cartoons, through the very...