(3 of 4)
Native Son. To understand Miró it is perhaps more important to remember that he is a native of Spain than to try placing him in a particular artistic movement. The Farm, finished in 1922 and bought soon afterward by Novelist Ernest Hemingway for $200 in Paris, is one of Miró's earliest efforts to distill the essence of Spain and the way in which its savage, whimsical, 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."
Between 1925 and 1930, Miró tried dozens of different ways to express "the spirit of the thing." Some ornate fantasies, like The Harlequin's Carnival, became popular immediately, but others had to wait decades for their audiences. His 1930 Painting is as elemental and totemic as a mobile by Calder —or any painting that would be turned out by New York's abstract expressionists in the 1950s.
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 and, by means of painting of another kind, to get in closer contact with the masses, whom I have always kept in mind."
In the 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 as a place where visitors can amuse themselves with Miró ceramic grotesques, a fountain and Miró images on Japanese screens.