The Cosmological Vision of Joan Miró

Joan Miró (1893-1983) is one of the giants of twentieth-century art, and for many, one of its most spiritual artists. Miró’s fellow Catalonian, Antoni Tàpies, pointed to one of the keys of Miró’s greatness: "Miró offered us the continual, changing and infinite flux of nature; faced with immutable laws, [he offered us] the rhythms and spontaneous ebb and flow of the waves in a living world.... He showed us that we are all equal because we are all made from the stars themselves. He made the wretched see that they carried all the riches of the universe within themselves. He told us that, before things could grow bigger and better, love had to impregnate everything . . . that we ought to seek once more for the purity and innocence of the first day."

Tàpies is not the only one who holds Miró up as one of the essential artists of the twentieth century. It is becoming more and more clear that, as Michael Kimmelman suggests in his 1993 New York Times review of the Museum of Modern Art’s Centennial Miró show, the artist "gave free rein to an imagination that has no parallel in the history of art" and adds that "it gave to the world . . . an unforgettable and entirely original vein of comic and erotic fantasy." Kimmelman goes on to proclaim Miró the most "accessible painter among the great figures of twentieth-century art. . . . His paintings can be so joyous and hilarious that you laugh out loud in front of them. But they have their darker side, too, and the two sides of the artist’s imagination mixed."

In another New York Times piece, Hayden Herrera reminds us that in 1924, after Miró had discovered his own "formal language," Picasso told him that "he was the only artist after Picasso himself to have carried painting forward." Acclaimed as the "greatest surrealist of us all" by Andre Breton, hailed by Pierre Alechinsky as one of the chief inspirations of the COBRA movement, and acclaimed by critics like Clement Greenburg and Arthur C. Danto as the artist whose 1941 show at the Museum of Modern Art overwhelmed the New York painters who saw it because "it answered questions that were inchoately felt, namely how to make the next move." As Lee Krasner, one of the leading Abstract Expressionist painters and the wife of Jackson Pollock, put it, Miró’s paintings were "little miracles."

Barbara Rose perhaps best explains Miró’s importance when she notes, "Miró’s contribution to current painting is inestimable," and adds: "surrealist space, at least as it was developed by Miró, is open, expansive, indeterminate, as opposed to the closed, finite restrictive space of cubism, with its layered planes and silhouetted shapes. Surrealist space is as fluid as the thought process involved in the technique of free association that inspired surrealist automatism. Certainly it is no accident that the discovery of the unconscious, as well as man’s initial experiences in exploring atmospheric outer space, coincided with the conceptualization of a new kind of pictorial space that is both continuous and unbounded."

Our show includes a number of Miró's early surrealist pochoirs from the 1930s and 40s, and an extensive selection of over 100 pieces (often rather large) from 1934-1981. Miró has always been one of our favorite artists, and for this show, we will be putting out as many of our favorite pieces (the best of the best) as the walls will hold. This will be Madison's last chance to see these pieces except over the internet—we are still planning on being in Upton by the beginning of July.

Select Bibliography: Miro's Lithographs are catalogued in a 6-volume set published by Galerie Maeght; all numerical references begining with (M. ) are to these volumes. His aquatints, drypoints, etchings, linocuts, and woodcuts have been catalogued by Jacques Dupin in a 4-volume set published by Lelong Editeur. Miro contributed many original prints to books and catalogues; he was also a lover of poetry and fine books and collaborated in a number of deluxe livres d'artiste. These are catalogued by Patrick Cramer (who also edited the last two volumes of the lithograph catalogue raisonné above). Cramer numbers refer to this volume. The single best visual tour of Miro's artistic career excluding prints and drawings is that published on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s Centennial Miró retrospective by the Museum of Modern Art and edited by Caroline Lanchner. The standard critical biography is Jacques Dupin's Joan Miró: Life and Work (NY: Abrams, 1962), updated in 1992 as Joan Miró.

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Last updated: 8/02/2018
The Cosmological Vision of Joan Miró | A Virtual Tour of "Miró 2006," Part I | A Virtual Tour of "Miró 2006," Part II | Gallery News