Word: mir
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Bach & the Beatles. Though Joan Miró is now 75, the freshness and fascination with which his blue eyes see the world around him have not changed. For 60 years, he has been painting these forms-sun, moon, star, woman, man, birds, flowers, sparks. Of course he paints them in his own way-and they are instantly recognized the world over. Though he insists that he only draws what he sees, his images are usually a surreal shorthand. An asterisk denotes a star, a curlicue a snail, a cartoon figure with popeyes and a Minnie Mouse behind becomes a kind...
...same time, Joan (pronounced Jo-ahn) Miró is wide awake. He rises early in the morning, puts in a quick ten minutes of exercise, by 8 a.m. is hard at work in the white stucco studio in Majorca designed for him by Architect Jose Luis Sert, in 1956. Both the studio and the 13-room, 200-year-old stone farmhouse behind it which serves Miró as an annex, are crammed with his new paintings and sculptures. Among them stand the found objects that furnish at once a touchstone to reality and the impetus to further dreams: a child...
...past three years have been among the most fecund in his life. "I'm in a state of euphoria," he reports, having completed more than 80 paintings and ten sculptures. Many of these go on view in a massive Miró exhibit that opens this week at the Maeght Foundation near Vence in Southern France. As always, he works, as he puts it, "in part by hazard; the main thing is the first breath, with great attack...
...inspiration comes from music. "Right now I'm in a Bach mood," he reports. "Tomorrow it could be Stockhausen. I'm very fond of the Beatles, too." Then, after the first spontaneous burst of creation, come the months-and sometimes years-of revision. "A line," says Miró, "has to breathe. If it doesn't, it's dead, and if you see a corpse, you smell...
...never flamboyant, Miró has always been in danger of being dismissed as merely playful. Happily married, reluctant to engage in polemics, disliking grand gestures, he has never been one to charm and bedevil the public as have his fellow Spaniards Dali and Picasso. As one of the earliest and most abstract of all the surrealists, Miró was already a near-legendary figure among his fellow painters by the 1930s. But even in the 1960s, there are still critics who argue that his art is too shallow, too cheerful, too clever and, above all, too personal and too eclectic...