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Sober Suit. Miró has "done" tapestries in the past; that is, he made small paintings, and tapestry makers in Aubusson or Gobelins reproduced them. "That does not interest me any more," says Miró. With Royo, he is in at the start. For his part, Royo is pleased and amazed: "We both work from 7 in the morning until 1 o'clock, then from 3 to 8 or 9 at night. I'm often exhausted, but he never seems to get tired."
Small as a gnome, now white-haired, Miró lives and looks, or tries to look, like a conventional bourgeois (even in his Paris days when his friends were Picasso and the wilder Dadaists, he was always the one in the sober suit and tie). He is in search of no publicity at all; he has more commissions than he can handle, more monographs on his work than he can count, more requests for interviews than he cares to consider.
Instead he works day long and night late in the Majorca house designed for hun by a fellow Catalan, José Luis Sert, former dean of the Harvard School of Design. The walls are studded with photographs of still another Catalan, Pablo Picasso. Miró is preparing for his huge retrospective to be mounted in Paris' Grand Palais next May. "Age does not exist," he says. "It is all a question of the mind, of the spirit. As I grow older, I work harder than ever." His studio is studded with some two dozen unfinished canvases. "I'm working on them all the tune in my head."
He still works in ceramics, an art he practically revolutionized in a col laboration with Pepito Artigas that began in 1944. They decided that ce ramics should be monumental and pro duced major works like the double free standing walls at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
Among Miró's current projects are two new Sobreteixims — one hung with umbrellas, another so big (20 ft. by 36 ft.) that Royo has had to construct a special loom to make it. "It will be the largest tapestry ever woven," says Miró proudly. "It is une folie. But then you have to be crazy."
His pride is justifiable. Seldom have sophisticated design, magisterial color and gaiety of spirit been so well combined. With Sobreteixims, Miró has transformed the Royo tapestries from admirable folk art into perhaps master pieces. But after all, Miró is only 80. What next?