There is a significant difference between an artist who has no real experience and one who has no experience. The real naïve is where you start: finding your way, experimenting, experimenting, finding your voice. The faux naïve is cunning, seeking approval under the guise of arrogance and superiority. Joan Miró is a true subject and remained so throughout her life. As a child, he played, and canvas and paint were his tools. Louise Bourgeois, who knew him, wrote about his personality that “he was what he was and he did not pretend or want to be someone else. He believed in himself, and that is a great compliment. He really accepted himself. With true knowledge there is no difference between a person and a work. Miró was his work.
This is also a fitting description of Miró’s paintings, which express a childlike wonder. Seeing 50 of the Phillips Collection in “Miró and the United States,” you can’t help but be filled with that same wonder. I heard laughter in the galleries and happy conversations—a sure sign of happiness. His is not the muted works of Rothko or the glittering expanses of Frankenthaler, which are also on view in the exhibition. Miró’s paintings explode with joy and happiness, and the joy is contagious. They just make you happy.
“Miró and the United States” |
But Miró is not pretending; he follows the flow of his play with shapes, drips, splatters, sweeps, thin lines and swirls, dancing with color. He was in conversation with the marks and lived up to what they could stand for. This is a two-dimensional movement, and he follows, often confused by Miró’s invention. Take his Constellations series. Created between 1940 and 1941, 22 pochoirs (hand-colored stencils) on paper of his oil and gouache paintings decorate one gallery in a straight line, uniform in size and frame. You walk down the line, watching the flying shapes form fish, women, birds, acrobats, stars, stairs, snails. The paintings gave Miró a break from the horrors of war, which forced him to flee France after the German invasion of World War II. He valued them so much that he carried the first 10 in his bag when he ran away. They, and those who would follow, were finished on their family’s farm in Montroig, Spain. The series was first exhibited in New York at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, his dealer, and all were sold. Matisse wrote to Miró, “The opinion is unanimous, the public finds your exhibition impressive.” The joy of the work is not only in the paintings themselves but also in their subjects: A Woman With a White Armpit Combs Her Hair in the Light of the Stars, The Song of the Nightingale at Midnight and the Morning Rain, Women at the Edge of a Pond Made to Wander Through the Passage of a Duck, Pink Dusk Caressing Female And Bird Sex. At work you continue as arousing joy, and the artist’s joy begets yours.
The Phillips Collection exhibition features works by many of Miró’s contemporaries who were in New York during his American visits, and his influence on their work is clear. According to the curator Elsa Smithgall, she and her team “looked for the best examples of artists who had a strong relationship with Miró’s creative methods, vision, and/or aspects of his structured language. Our desire was to have a lively mix and not only include well-known artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Louise Bourgeois, and Lee Bourgeois, Lee Bourgeois established with Peter Tonya U Sekula, and Alice Trumbull Mason, among others, to communicate An important aspect of the exhibition was bringing to light the many women artists who were deeply involved in Miró’s work and ideas, but whose contributions were not always focused on post-war contemporary issues.
There is a growing, moving, exploratory feel to the exhibition, similar to Miró’s work. You walk up a sweeping staircase into a large first room painted in New York State of Mind Blue, and through many small galleries that invite wandering. “This exhibition includes many voices that are meant to embody the spirit of exploration,” Smithgall said. “As visitors ascend the spiral staircase, they marvel at some of Miró’s sculptural works before finding at the top of the stairs, two cell phones, a wired portrait of Miró, and a large walkway—all by Alexander Calder.
Finding an artist’s work in chronological order is always an added pleasure, as you can follow their evolution. Miró’s lovely and provocative portrait was also active from 1937 to 1960. The end result captures the essence of the man. Oil and pencil on canvas with a dense, textured black background with signature shapes, cool shading with fine detail. Above sits a thick black circle on the head with three thick black hairs sprouting, two large black circles for eyes and two lines connecting the two curves of the body, with smaller circles of bright pink, blue, yellow and red. It is a child’s interpretation of the body—real ignorance.
This is a comprehensive, important exhibition that provides a fascinating demonstration of Miró’s importance and influence on American artists. As Barnett Newman said after seeing an exhibition of Miró’s gouaches in 1945, “Miró is a pioneer in a new field that will change the landscape of art for years to come.” His work continues to impress.
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