By any reckoning, Joan Miró is probably the greatest living painter, at least of the generation that produced Picasso, Matisse, Gris and Dali. Amidst these driven men, Miró was always the elf, an antic poet who took Surrealism and made it gay, an irreverent abstractionist who planted sexual symbols in wide fields of indeterminate space. He is already so enshrined in art history that it is easy to assume that he is dead. But Miró is alive, and at 80 has taken off in a new creative direction.
He found inspiration about four years ago when he walked into a Barcelona gallery and saw some tapestries —"hangings," in the current vernacular —by a young Spaniard called Josep Royo. They were insouciant works, with various objects sticking out of the wool. Miró decided at once that with Royo he could and would create a new style, in a career that has had many styles. He sought out the young man, told him briskly: "Let's start working together at once. We are going to break traditional molds." In the next years, the two worked in close collaboration. Every few weeks, Miró traveled from his house in Majorca to Royo's studio, a converted flour mill in Tarragona, outside Barcelona. There Royo would spread his newest tapestries on the floor. Miró studied each, with all its intricate twists, sworls, braids and tailings. Then he might splash a design across the rhythmic shapes, or snatch up some scrap of cloth to provide an accent or an assertion, using material from among the detritus lying around the studio. These were appliquéd into the tapestry itself.
Humble Burlap. For one tapestry, Miró picked up a metal stencil for the letter G and splashed it on upside down in brown against bright yellow canvas. Then he hung the stencil itself on the fabric—also upside down. A handy whisk broom was slapped onto another tapestry. Working on a third, Miró's eye lit upon an empty paint bucket; he rammed it into the composition then, as an afterthought, added a fake spill of paint made of canvas. He proposed scorching certain areas to darken the hemp, and soon the studio flared with gouts of kerosene fires, quickly lit then doused.
He told Royo where to add a canvas patch, where to drape a cascade of wool, where to drop coils of fishermen's rope. Says Miró: "Wool and weaving give me a great sensual feeling." Agrees Royo: "When he picks up a skein of wool, he closes his eyes to feel it, and cries, 'C'est formidable!' "
The result was a series called Sobreteixims, now on exhibit at Manhattan's Pierre Matisse Gallery. All the name means is "on top of tapestry." The craft of tapestry is as old as palaces, as durable as moths will allow. But the collaboration of a young crafts man and a modern-day old master have transformed it into something bold and new. Bright color plays against the hemp's rich browns, big shapes against the intricacy of woven texture, gay in genuity against humble utilitarian bur lap. Formidable.