THE PUREST DREAMER IN PARIS

Miro, in Spanish, means ''he saw'' -- an absurdly good name for a painter. Joan Miro died 10 years ago, and 1993 marks the centenary of his birth. It has been celebrated by a number of exhibitions in Spain, where the centerpiece was a large retrospective in Barcelona. This week an even bigger Miro show goes on public view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: 291 paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics, put together by art historian Carolyn Lanchner. Miro got his first retrospective, at MOMA, more than half a century ago, and now he is getting the treatment reserved for the heaviest guns of 20th century art: Picasso in 1980, Matisse last year. If the show doesn't carry you along to the very last picture with its current of narrative expectation, as Matisse's did, it's hardly an occasion for blame. Miro was a marvelous artist -- some of the time. But he was also a painter with definite limitations, which began to show when, fairly late in his career, he started working on what one thinks of as an American scale. It is hard to bring to mind any of those big late canvases -- a blue field with a few dots on it and a squiggle or two -- that one would willingly swap for one of his fiercely impacted little canvases from the 1920s, like Petri dishes swarming with bizarre and emblematic microorganisms. Wisely, Lanchner has concentrated on the best years of Miro's career, from 1915 to about 1960, and skipped the enormous output of prints and the flood of repetitious paintings he turned out in the last quarter-century of his life in his role as a sacred cash cow for the Galerie Maeght in Paris. Late Miro is dull fodder, except episodically; its high points are rare and generally have to do with civic decor, of which the big sculpture raised in the '80s in the Parc de l'Escorxador in Barcelona is probably the best. But this takes nothing away from the brilliance, even the genius, of his earlier work -- especially in the '20s and '30s, when he was in Paris and making the finest paintings associated with the Surrealist movement. Miro always used to be referred to as ''the great Spanish artist,'' which is technically true but culturally wrong. He was a Catalan artist, and the difference -- as anyone who knows Catalans will know -- mattered greatly to him. Catalunya, that triangle in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula whose capital is Barcelona, has always prided itself on its differences from the rest of Spain. They begin with language, for Catalan is no mere dialect of Castilian Spanish but a distinct language, closer to Provencal and Italian. They pervade the region's history, politics, folklore and sense of itself, from the 11th century down to the present day. Catalans like to think of their culture as both older than most of Spain's (Barcelona was a great medieval city when Madrid was mud huts) and newer as well -- the roof on which the rain of north European avant-gardes fell before its patter reached the rest of Spain. If there's one artist who exemplifies this, it's Miro, in whose work the archaic and local got fused to the new and unpredictable, with scarcely a cushion between the two. Miro's ''internationalism'' was largely the result of fame and an art-distribution system that became pan-European and then, after World War II, transatlantic. But the real stem of his imagination was intensely provincial, rooted in the Catalan compost; it was shaped, it is true, by the influence of Cubism and then by his immersion in the Surrealist avant-garde during the '20s, but drew its tenacious fantasy from sources as deep as those of his great Catalan predecessor, the architect Antoni Gaudi. Miro's work is Catalan and French -- rather as that of border-crossing troubadours in the 15th century had been. It constitutes one of the great oeuvres of modernist painting, and it probably would not do so if he had not been exposed to the challenge of Paris and the stimulus of Surrealism. But it was also part of a specifically Catalan cultural renaissance that had been gathering speed since the 1870s, and was only driven underground by Franco. Miro was born and raised in Barcelona. But his parents had a farm near Tarragona, at Montroig, and although he wasn't by any definition a country boy, he did spend a good part of his youth there from 1911 on, starting with recovery from an attack of typhoid fever coupled with a mild nervous breakdown. It is tempting to relate the extraordinary sharpness of focus, the dreamlike distinctness of Miro's early rural images to the fevered impressionability of a convalescent mind. The countryside in general, and Montroig in particular, would always exercise a peculiar fascination for Miro. The farm was the symbol of what Catalans call enyoranca -- a sort of global, unappeasable nostalgia, a longing for the past and for one's roots. Miro was set on going to Paris, knowing perfectly well -- as any young painter did at the end of World War I -- that the French avant-garde set a standard against which his own burgeoning inventiveness could be tested. But it is significant that when he finally got there in 1921, he took with him a handful of dried grass from Montroig as a talisman of memory, to help him with the big painting he rightly considered his first masterpiece: The Farm. Frontal as a nursery ark, bathed in the raking dreamlight of early morning and constructed with the geometrical clarity of a Renaissance townscape, this was Miro's summation of memory. As its first owner, Ernest Hemingway, wrote, ''It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.'' It was Miro's power of recall as much as anything else that caused the Surrealists to adopt him. His art seemed to open a direct line to the repossession of childhood through unedited memory. His own habits consorted oddly with the Surrealists'. He was shy, abstemious, almost obsessively neat and faithful to his wife. But he was the purest dreamer in Paris, and they needed him. Miro had none of the Surrealists' political interests; the closest thing to a political painting he ever produced was a highly abstracted comic figure of a horse-policeman, with one red hand, presumably imbrued with blood, which may refer to Catalan street violence in the '20s. And his premonition of civil war was expressed in a single gloomy still life with an old shoe and a murderous-looking fork. Like most art that is genuinely inventive, as distinct from passingly novel, Miro's images grew from the past and drew on it for their strength. His sinuous and elastic line took part of its character from Art Nouveau calligraphy, the pervasive civic style of Barcelona in his boyhood. His use of huge feet or hands as autonomous symbols of the body comes to mind at once when you see the exaggerated limbs of the Catalan Romanesque frescoes he loved and often consulted. (At one point his work