Word: snails
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...passionate people still cling close to the earth. The scene depicts the farm bought by his father, a Barcelona goldsmith, at Montroig, a coastal village in Catalonia. For all its literalness, the painting is anything but realistic. By its microscopic stylization, it turns each detail, including the lizard and snail in the foreground, into a symbol. "I wanted," recalls Miró, "to penetrate into the spirit of objects. I realized the cubists had made a great revolution, but it was strictly a plastic revolution. I wanted to go beyond the plastic aspect, to get to the spirit of the thing...
...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 of Iberian Everyman. "I'm always in a state of dreaming," says Miró, suggesting that his night vision discerns what others cannot...
Symbol in a Snail. Curator William S. Rubin, in his "Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, went all out to pry little-known but major Mirós from private collectors. Rubin now feels that Miró's 1925 The Birth of the World-is in many ways as significant a painting as Picasso's first major cubist painting, the 1907 Demoiselles d'Avignon. A subtly seething, 8-ft.-high panorama, The Birth of the World, says Rubin, is "in retrospect the point of departure in modern painting," making...
Gaudi's acknowledged chef-d'oeuvre is the Church of the Sagrada Familia, still abuilding at snail's pace in Barcelona. But many of the revolutionary structural concepts he employed there, including columns shaped like so many free-form caryatids, received their baptism in the crypt of smaller Guell colony chapel, built on the city's outskirts. Says the American architect, Peter Harnden, who has been hired by Barcelona's Society of the Friends of Gaudi to help restore the building to Gaudi's original design: "It is a continuing surprise and delight...
...substitute for substance. Most of what made the original story compelling-Tonio's long, self-probing speeches to Lisaveta and his conception of the writing man as both artist and bourgeois, free spirit and square-has been so compressed and truncated that it is lost in the snail's-pace atmosphere of the film. The result, unfortunately, is not so much Mann as it is mannered...