My friend Diana and I caught a variety of art exhibits at
the beginning of May. First up were two
immense art fairs, Frieze on Randalls Island and Art New York at Pier 94; both
fairs ran from Thursday, 2, to Sunday, 5 May.
We followed that with a visit to the Museum of Modern Art for Joan Miró: Birth of the World, which
runs from 24 February-15 June.
Diana and I went to Art New York, which was launched in 2015
as an off-shoot of Art Miami (established in 2012), last year (see my report
posted on Rick On Theater on 13 May 2018), and for the most part this
year’s exhibit was very similar to last year’s.
Diana went to 2018’s Frieze on her own, so this was my first trip to
Randalls Island to see that one. Frieze
New York started in 2012. Both fairs are
hosts to exhibits of dozens of galleries from around the country and the
world. We drove to Frieze—Randalls
Island is a city park in the East River off of about East 125th Street in
Manhattan, west of Queens and south of the Bronx—on Saturday afternoon, 4 May (Star Wars Day, May the Fourth); we went
to ANY at the pier, which is at West 55th Street off the West Side Highway, on
Sunday, the 5th.
I provided a description of last year’s ANY in my report on
that exhibition (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/05/art-new-york-2018.html),
and it’s the same for ANY 2019 so I won’t do that again. (Some exhibitors are new and the art on
display at any given gallery’s space may also be different—though there were a
lot of repeats—but the layout and overall experience was the same.)
Frieze, except that it’s in a huge tent instead of a huge
building, was also very similar in set-up.
According to its own PR, Frieze, a media and events company that publishes
frieze magazine, Frieze Masters Magazine, and Frieze Week,
was founded in 1991 with the launch of frieze magazine, a
magazine covering contemporary art and culture. The founders established Frieze London in
2003, which takes place each October. In 2012, Frieze launched Frieze New York, which runs in May; and Frieze Masters, which coincides with Frieze London in
October and is dedicated to art from ancient to modern. In February 2018, Frieze established Frieze
Los Angeles.
Those big art fairs are exhausting. I got back after
Frieze fairly late Wednesday night, about 10:30—and very tired. (The fair actually closed at 6 p.m., but getting
back to Manhattan and then downtown was a long, slow trip!) Then I met Diana at Pier 94 at 2 the next
afternoon for Art New York. I got home from Art New York at 6:30-ish, but I was still bushed! Both ANY
and Frieze are immense exhibits; Frieze hosted 191 sellers and ANY advertised
“more than 70.”
Though Frieze had lots of benches all around the huge tent
that was its pavilion, ANY didn’t provide any rest areas except the café all
the way at the end of the building—and must require miles and miles of walking
(and we only covered maybe a third of the exhibit spaces!) After about three
hours it all becomes a blur. (When I used to go to museum shows with my
mom, we always figured that two hours was the max unless we took a break in the
middle—and that was rare.)
I noticed a couple of things this time that hadn’t occurred
to me when we went to ANY last year, since I had nothing with which to
compare it. Frieze seems to focus on contemporary artists and work—lots of
art dated 2019 and 2018—with the oldest going back only to the ’80s for the
most part (and not much of that). ANY had lots of artists from the early
20th century, like Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Alexander Calder (1898-1976),
and so on, as well as current stuff. (I enjoyed ANY more both last year
in retrospect and this year than I did Frieze. The mid-century moderns
are my favorite art next to Impressionism and Post-impressionism.)
I also see that non-Western artists working in Western traditions—or what might be more accurately called International—rather than the traditions of their native regions have proliferated immensely. Both fairs, but especially Frieze, exhibited lots of Asian, Middle Eastern, and African artists, and even at least one Australian Aboriginal artist, whose works could easily have been mistaken for European or American artists. (In some case, there were homages to the artists’ native cultures embedded in the work—it was mostly painting rather than sculpture—but the styles were very like their Western colleagues.)
I don’t know whether these artists—I didn’t know any of them before—studied or
worked in the West, either here or in Europe, or if they worked from their
native regions. I think this is something of a phenomenon of the last few
decades. A small sample of these artists are Bijan Saffari of Iran, Rachid Koraichi of Algeria, Zhang Hongtu from
China, Tony Wong from China, Izumi Kato of Japan, Anju Dodiya from India, Srijon
Chowdhury of Bangladesh, Katsumi Nakai from Japan, Danh Vō of Vietnam, Thenjiwe
Niki Nkosi of South Africa, Otobong Nkanga from Nigeria, and Warlimpirrnga
Tjapaltjarri of Western Australia.
(In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was a boy and my
parents were involved in the little modern-art gallery in Washington—see “Gres
Gallery” on ROT, 7, 10, and 13 July
2018—shows like Six Painters of Japan and Contemporary Polish Paintings were notable because they
spotlighted artists working in contemporary Western styles who were from areas
where that kind of art was uncommon or even suppressed. I hadn’t noticed that what had been an
occasional divergence from conventional practice had become mainstreamed.
(Among the Japanese
painters in the 1960 exhibit was Yayoi Kusama, represented at Frieze by her
installation of silver metal globes, Narcissus Garden, 1966, displayed
on the floor beneath to take and to give, 2012, by Chris
Ofili, a British artist of Nigerian heritage. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis,
the sets for which at London’s Royal Opera Ofili designed, To take is a
monumental painting, 17 feet high and 29 feet long, depicting in vibrant
rainbow colors a group of sinuous female figures emerging from the sea from
where a woman, presumably Diana, arises, and climbing, even merging with, a pyramidal
mountain.)
The New York Times asserted that the
fair had a “conservative vibe” in order to sell more art, but then art
reviewers Martha Schwendener and Will Heinrich added, “That said, there are
many islands of daring.” Musée
magazine, a digital quarterly dedicated to emerging artists, attributed the
reserved atmosphere to a “diminished” “urge to present aggressively hip,
over-the-top installations.” Belle
McIntyre reported, “There were a number of really fun things on offer, as
well.” ARTnews’ Annie Armstrong
and Claire Selvin observed that “this year seems to be much more about the
quiet discoveries,” but announced that “there are some more modest spectacles,”
noting particularly Red Grooms’s 1995 The Bus (about which more in a
bit).
In a totally unrelated occurrence connected to the two fairs,
I was interested to learn how variant two people’s response to art can be. I was put in mind of a 19 September 1993
segment of 60 Minutes, the CBS
television newsmagazine, in which correspondent Morley Safer (1931-2016) asked
of modern abstract art, “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” Safer, who died at 84 three years ago this
week, was an amateur dauber himself, but he was bemused at what people in the
art market would buy. He posited that
gallerists and dealers were defrauding an uninformed and gullible art-buying
public. One piece especially exercised
Safer, a painting by renowned artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011), which the TV
pundit characterized as “a canvas of scrawls done with the wrong end of a
paintbrush [that] bears the imaginative title of . . . Untitled.” Safer was
nonplussed that the piece sold for $2 million ($3,540,000 today). (In the interest of full disclosure, Twombly
was born in Lexington, Virginia, and was a 1950 alumnus of my alma mater there,
Washington and Lee University.)
This isn’t that exactly, but Diana kept making the same
comment when she came across something at the art fairs that she didn’t much
like: “What’s the point?” I suspect
that’s something Morley Safer might have contemplated when he confronted an
artwork made up of two basketballs immersed in a fish tank or featuring vacuum
cleaners. It’s a question people have asked ever since Marcel Duchamp produced Fountain, a
porcelain urinal mounted and signed “R. Mutt” in 1917.
At the end of Frieze was a large mock-up of a New York City
bus made of fabric. As we approached it, I said, “That looks like a Red
Grooms, but bigger.” Turned out, it was. Diana asked
what it’s point is and my only response was that, like all Grooms pieces I
know, it was pure whimsy. A little light social commentary thrown in
maybe—the passengers (viewers are encouraged to go on board) were a cross section
of New York denizens in caricature and the ads on the sides of the bus were
parodies of “real” ones (e.g.: “Mister Saigon”).
Diana responded as if that didn’t compute, but I don’t think
all art, even all good art, has a “point.”
What’s the point of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers or even Michelangelo’s David? An evocation of natural beauty on
the one hand and strength on the other—that’s all I see. The Washington
Color School eschewed meaning or representation in their art. The paintings and sculptures had one purpose:
to provide the experience of pure pleasure in the bright, vibrant colors (see
my post “The
Washington School of Color” on 21 September 2014).
Some ROT-readers
may remember one of my criteria for good theater: it must do more
than just tell a story. That doesn’t
exclude plays that make you laugh or smile (Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take it With You), shiver in
horror (Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall), or some other response to
frivolity. I argued with my MFA
classmates at Rutgers that theater for the sake of entertainment isn’t second
rate. The Boy Friend (or High Button Shoes, which I’ve just seen) isn’t less
theatrically worthy than Execution of Justice. Entertainment
is a commendable goal for art.
Another thing Diana said when she saw an artist she liked: “She
(or ‘He’) knows what she’s doing.” She meant that the artist was applying
(or so Diana thought) principles of line, color, and form. Diana likes
art (including theater art, i.e., playwriting) that follows “rules,” the kind
of criteria a teacher might inculcate in a class like at the Art Students
League, where Diana has studied. She said this repeatedly at both
fairs. (She also said it at the Whitney when we were there a couple of
weeks ago. Edward Hopper, whose works were on display at the Whitney, is
one of Diana’s favorite artists because she thinks he follows all the rules—and
she’d stand in front of one of his paintings and explain how one field of color
balances another elsewhere on the canvas.)
I don’t even notice stuff like that! I think I’ve said
before that my response to art isn’t analytical—I don’t know those rules in any
case, since I’ve never studied art. It’s purely emotional or
psychological: I respond to a piece of art according to how it makes me
feel. (I respond to music the same way, by the way.) When Diana and I went to a Jackson Pollock
exhibit at MoMA in 2016, she asked me what it is that I like about his
paintings, and the best I could come up with was that I simply find his work beautiful
and it excites me (see my report on Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey:
1924-1954, 4 March 2016)..
Interestingly, in a variation of “he knows what he’s doing,”
my companion occasionally pronounced that opinion about a work or an artist, then
added, “but it’s not working.” That was
obviously her way of saying she didn’t like the art, but couldn’t get around
the apparent fact that the artist checked all the boxes. To me, what this response proved was
that following the rules doesn’t always make good art.
The corollary to this, it seems logical, is that good art doesn’t always
follow rules. Which has been my point
all along!
Which brings me to the MoMA show we saw on Wednesday
evening, 8 May, Joan Miró: Birth of the
World. (Diana is a member of MoMA,
so we went on an evening when the museum held one of its periodic Member
After Hours. The museum reopens at 6:30
p.m. after closing to the general public, and members, who enter free, and
their guests, who pay a $5 entry fee, can enter and stay until 9:30.) It turned out that just as Diana doesn’t like
Jackson Pollock, she doesn’t like Miró, either.
I asked her why she came to the show and she explained that she thought
she might see something to reveal why the artist is so esteemed. (She said at the Pollock that she went
because she hoped I’d tell her why I thought he was so good. I’m sure I didn’t satisfy her.)
She may have found a glimmer of an answer on her own,
however. Birth of the World, curated by Anne Umland, the Blanchette Hooker
Rockefeller Senior Curator, and Laura Braverman, Curatorial Assistant,
Department of Painting and Sculpture, largely from the museum’s collection, is
arranged vaguely chronologically. The
first gallery holds works that start with a 1917 oil portrait, Portrait of
Enric Cristòfol Ricart. Miró’s dates are 1893-1983, so he was about
24 when he painted this Fauvist work, which has echoes of van Gogh and Henri
Matisse and includes a pasted panel of an actual Japanese print that reflects
the Orientalism of Ricart’s striped yellow silk pajamas. (The most recent piece in the show was Maquette
for dust jacket for Joan Miró by James Thrall Soby from 1958.)
The arrangement of
the 60 or so works, which include several sculptures and constructions as well
as printed illustrations for books, a number of drawings and sketches, some
etchings and other prints, and a couple of maquettes (mock-ups) for a poster
and a book cover, permit the viewer to see the development over time of the
artist’s style and his iconic figures and geometric shapes that start to recur
as his work progressed.
When Diana entered
the first gallery and looked at a few of Miró’s early works, her first reaction
was that he didn’t know anything about form and line. In other words, she disparaged his art
because he was apparently not following the rules as she understood them. (I suggested that she didn’t really know that
he didn’t know “the rules”; he could be deliberately subverting them. He wouldn’t be the first artist to rebel
against the established academic standards of his time.) As she had at the Pollock show, Diana asked
me why I liked Miró. Again, my answer was
inadequate: I love his whimsy. Even when
he had something to say—he was a loyal Spaniard and Catalan (he was born in
Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia) and a staunch Republican and
anti-Falangist during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the resulting
Francoist dictatorship (1939-75)—he couldn’t help slipping in a little humor.
Oh, well. To each his (or her) own, I suppose! Toward
the end of Birth of the World, however, Diana came around a little,
repeating a couple of times that she had to acknowledge that the artist had a
sense of humor. She said it with a
smile, almost as if she was embarrassed to admit it. Now, I don’t think Diana is a convert to the
Joan Miró Fan Club—but I’d like to think that she’s not so ready as she was to
dismiss angrily all the artists in whose works she doesn’t see “a point.”
By the way, just
because Diana or I don’t see the “point” of a piece of art, it doesn’t mean
there isn’t one. Maybe we just missed
it. I have no doubt I have—often. In a very early post on ROT, I wrote
that when I was writing regular theater reviews, “I have even admitted when I
didn’t understand a play, suggesting that others with different sensitivities
might tune in where I couldn’t. It’s
simply that I don’t feel comfortable dismissing something I haven’t understood—I
don’t know everything, after all, and try to be honest enough to admit it in
print” (from “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009).
In another blog report, “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk
Woodward, Part 2” (8 November 2009), I acknowledged that “when I’ve had to
review shows with which I know I’ll have trouble [because of a personal bias],
if I couldn’t get out of the assignment, I’ve always tried to admit right up
front that I probably wasn’t the best person to assess the performance.” When that happened, I would describe the
experience rather than evaluate the production.
The MoMA holdings
of Miró works is one of most extensive in the world and Birth of the World
is judiciously augmented with some apt loans.
(I’ve posted two previous reports on Joan Miró exhibits; “Van Gogh & Miró at MOMA (2008),” 12
October 2016, recounts my visit to MoMA’s Joan Miró: Painting and
Anti-Painting 1927-1937 and “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” 5
October 2012 [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2012/10/joan-Miró-ladder-of-escape.html], on an exhibit
at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, includes a short bio of the artist.)
Two things about
Miró’s art of which Birth of the World gives evidence are that the
artist was a Surrealist and that before that, he was a Dadaist. (For a discussion of Dadaism, see my report
on Dada, a large exhibit at the National Gallery in 2006 and MoMA in
2007, posted on 20 February 2010; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/02/dada.html.) From
Dadaism, Miró learned an anti-aestheticism and a disdain for established art
techniques and styles. I suspect that
this is where Diana picked up the notion that he didn’t know the standards of
line, form, and color she looks for in good art. He’d discarded them when he threw over the
conventional art of painting (see my report on Painting and Anti-Painting, https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2016/10/van-gogh-Miró-at-moma-2008.html) in order to reinvigorate
it. “I want to assassinate painting,”
the artist is alleged to have said in 1927.
Surrealism, the art style Miró began practicing in about 1924 after he
came to Paris in 1920 and found this new form in its infancy, is derived from
dreams and the subconscious (greatly influenced first by the theories of
Sigmund Freud and later of Carl Jung). His
dreamlike images, which are compiled from squiggly lines and small, carefully
hued shapes, may be hard for a viewer
to understand because they aren’t the viewer’s dreams. This may account for Diana’s feeling that
Miró’s works have no point. They do, but
it’s a very subjective point. For this
reason, as Carl Daher Delnero, arts correspondent for the Rutland Herald,
pronounced: “Miró is a painter to be seen, not explained.”
There’s another attribute of Miró’s art that obtains here as well. “I make no distinction between painting and
poetry,” the artist asserted. He
considered making visual art the same as writing poems. Just as poetry isn’t a straightforward verbal
communication medium, neither, then, is Miró’s painting and sculpture. It has to be interpreted and that
interpretation has to be sussed out carefully and deliberately. Both art forms have an emotional and an
intellectual or rational component and all of the signals are not immediately
comprehensible. And one viewer’s reading of a Miró canvas won’t be the same
another’s—and both are as likely to be right (if there is such a thing).
Impressionism is all about feelings and your response to an
Impressionist painting or sculpture hits you right away—it washes over you as
soon as you look at it. You have to work
out Miró’s point. Just as Miró labeled this focus on the smallest elements
of the work his “slow understanding,” his
intent grows on the viewer gradually, maybe even after leaving the gallery or
on repeated viewings. Understanding
accumulates for both the artist and the viewer.
One of Miró’s most
pervasive subjects in his art was unconditional freedom. Remembering what I said earlier about Miró’s
political loyalties, we should note that he fled Spain for France when the
Spanish Civil War broke out because he was a Republican and a foe of the
totalitarian forces led by General Francisco Franco. He was in Paris when France was occupied by
the Nazis and, now sandwiched between two fascist forces, was forced to return
to now-Francoist Spain. It’s little
wonder that from 1936 to the end of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorship in
1975, Miró’s interest would be in the evocation of personal, intellectual, and
artistic liberty.
A Surrealist in
style for most of his career, Miró was
an anarchist in his artistic approach, so his works here are representations of
uncompromising freedom, from the amoebic shapes to the seemingly haphazard
arrangement of his images to the choice of his palette. One good example in Birth of the World
is The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) (1923-24), a fantastical,
mesmerizing scene of intricate geometric shapes atop beds of soft rose and pea
green. The landscape is not meant to be
a reflection of what Miró called “outer reality”; the effect is vertiginous and
idiosyncratic. The painting is centered on a flesh-pink eye that seems to stare
at the viewer. It “is the eye of the
picture staring at me,” Miró declared.
The imagery of Miró’s
work, especially in his Surrealist paintings, can baffle viewers because the artist
saw his art as a spiritual act. He asserted,
“Before taking up paper and pencil I carefully washed my hands, and then worked
as if performing a religious act.” He read
works of Christian mysticism and poetry and when Picasso looked at Still
Life II (1922), he declared, “This is poetry.” A trapezoidal patch of ochre suggests a shaft
of sunlight from a window falling on a flat, gray surface—perhaps a table or
the floor—Still Life II was reportedly Miró’s first attempt to put
recognizable, everyday objects into his paintings. A realistically rendered slice of tomato
rests in the lower left corner of the trapezoid, beneath an equally representational
carbide lamp; an iron stand overlaps the right edge of the light patch.
Though a few of
Miró’s pieces in the MoMA exhibit show signs of Dadaist nonsense, such as Still
Life II, the works all reward careful viewing. The Birth of the
World (1925), the show’s title work, and Portrait of Mistress Mills
in 1750 (1929), two works from the
time the artist was transitioning between Dadaism and Surrealism, both demonstrate
Miró’s blending of the two styles, as does Mural Painting (1950-51), a later
work that was commissioned for Harvard University’s graduate dining hall.
Mural Painting,
which Miró replaced with a ceramic-tile mosaic ten years after the its
installation because it was less destructible (MoMA bought the original oil-on-canvas
painting in 1963), is approximately 6¼
feet tall by 19½ feet long. The
mural shows bullfighting figures—which the artist identified as a bull with a banderillero on
the left and a matador on the right—floating over an atmospheric ground of
browns and blues. The figures are
contoured with thin black lines, some of which are filled in with flat colors
while others remain transparent.
In Portrait of Mistress Mills,
based on a c. 1786 portrait by British artist George Engleheart (1750-1829) of
the singer and actress Mrs. Isabella Mills (1734/35-1802; Miró humorously
recast her as “Mistress” rather than “Mrs.,” a manifestation of the artist’s Dadaism), Miró
rejected the naturalism of his source imagery, aggressively simplifying and
distorting it. Whereas the Engleheart
original (produced as a hand-colored mezzotint) is painted in the muted hues of
Neoclassicism, Miró’s figure and background are vividly colored with odd shapes
and bright, flat colors which are afforded weight by negative space on the canvas.
As abstract as Miró’s rendering is, the
shape of the subject’s wide-brimmed hat and the paper she’s holding in her
right hand are recognizable echoes from Engleheart’s portrait.
(Also in the
exhibit is Final study for Portrait of Mistress Mills in 1750, 1929, a
charcoal-and-pencil sketch on paper. The
study, drawn on a numbered grid for transfer to canvas, is even more reflective
of the 18th-century portrait, with a representation of the plume in Mrs.
Mills’s hat and some facial features, however distorted.)
The Birth of the World, considered one of the artist’s iconic works, is simple, with a
grayish-brown background on which appear a small red circle (perhaps a balloon)
and a white circle (which appears to be the head of a stick figure with thick, black
legs), a black triangle (perhaps a kite) and a shooting star. Pencil-thin black lines shoot out like projectiles
ejected from an explosion. Miró applied
paint to an unevenly primed canvas in a manner that anticipated the experiments
of artists 35 years in the future, pouring, brushing, and flinging the pigment so
that the canvas absorbed it in some places while it stayed on the surface in
others. According to the wall panel, “Miró
once said that The Birth of the World describes ‘a sort of genesis,’ an
amorphous beginning out of which life may take form.” (Sounds like a point to me!)
Arguably, the work
in Birth of the World that’s most
demonstrative of Miró’s sense of humor, even with respect (or, maybe, disrespect)
to his art, is 1950’s Portrait
of a Man in a Late Nineteenth-Century Frame. According to Miró, his
childhood friend Joan Prats (1891-1970) found an elaborately framed, pretentious
academic portrait by an anonymous artist and sent it to him as a joke. The subject’s pose and garb, the medal and
ribbon of some award on the table, his fixed gaze of authority, and the rose
garden through the window epitomize the bourgeois taste and confidence of the fin de siècle. Within
this orderly, rational, and humorless world, Miró mischievously sanded the
frame down in spots and inserted his own creatures and signs. As if to suggest the man’s puzzlement at this
unexpected interruption, he punctuated his forehead with a small swirling form
(which put me in mind of the twirling-finger gesture suggesting someone’s nuts).
Miró’s unusual
painting-and-frame combination ties the original image and the frame into a
single composition that harks back to the artist’s anarchic Dadaist days,
thumbing his nose at a whole culture he saw as self-satisfied. (Portrait
of a Man is halfway to the kind of art, like Duchamp’s “readymades,”
to which Morley Safer took such exception in 1993. I wonder what he’d have said about Miró’s Portrait
if he’d seen it.)
Miró’s paintings of
the female form, radically free expressions unbound by logic, render the body
unrecognizable with elongated and undefined body parts painted in glaring colors.
Bather (1932), with its bright yellow figure on a geometric background
composed of three horizontal bars of blue, yellow and white, and dark green is vividly
painted. The backdrop is hard to
interpret, but the blue strip at the top could be read as the sky, with a red
sun hanging just above the center strip.
The yellow and white blocks in the middle strip might be the sea (though
why two colors and those in particular, I couldn’t begin to guess), and the
shore is green so dark it almost looks black. Because of its title, the painting suggests a
weird beach scene.
A boldly colored beach-goer,
her head enormous and her contorted limbs pulled out grotesquely, sits in the
center of the wood-panel painting, sun-bathing. While the bathing woman’s
profile is decipherable, the rest of her body is more difficult to read. One reviewer described Bather “as if Miró
took the knuckle of his subject and expanded it like a balloon, placing it next
to an elongated crease of an elbow,” adding, “It may not make sense, but Miró’s
painting was Miró’s mind.”
After having
returned to Barcelona in 1932 after his sojourn in Paris, Miró and his family returned
to the French capital in 1936 for a visit and, as the civil war in Spain expanded,
stayed as voluntary exiles. The next
year, he created Still Life with Old Shoe (1937), a painting that’s
both dark, with a black or dark charcoal-gray background, and bright, with
psychedelic-colored patterns that would have seemed familiar in the 1960s.
Feeling uprooted and
increasingly anxious, according to the Birth of the World curators, Miró
decided “to do something absolutely different,” and Still Life with Old Shoe
is both a still life and a landscape: the back edge of the tabletop across the
center of the canvas can be read as a horizon line. The painting is divided into four quadrants
and the objects—a fork stabbed into what could be a roll or a vegetable, a loaf
of bread, a bottle, and the titular shoe—are isolated in their own cells
(possibly as a reflection of the way the artist felt being separated from his
favorite surrounding, the Catalan countryside).
Against the somber background, the colors are “acidic, highly saturated,
and dissonant.”
Miró was not a
political activist, which is why he left Spain despite his intellectual and
emotional support of the Republican cause, but Still Life with Old Shoe,
a depiction of an apocalyptic landscape, clearly conveys a sense of tension and
anguish over the fate of his native land.
Like almost any
exhibit of Miró’s work, the MoMA show challenges the viewer’s imagination and
powers of interpretation and understanding. The few pieces of Miró’s art I’ve tried to
describe here—a small sample of this artist’s broad and deep interest in forms
of artistic expression, not to mention that sense of humor that prompted him to
tweak the noses of both the pompous and self-satisfied, but also his viewers—is
hardly adequate to capsulize Joan Miró: Birth of the World.
My visits to Frieze
and Art New York were a flurry of brief encounters with art I knew and art I
didn’t, a gallimaufry of impressions, a kaleidoscope of art. It was the mixed grill of art—what my father
described as too much of some things and not enough of anything. The visit the MoMA Miró show was
intense. On one hand, I wish I could
have stayed longer than the two hours we had—there was so much in those 60
works to contemplate; on the other, I couldn’t have taken much more. I was wrung out, my brain was
overloaded. (Writing this report has
helped me sort out the experience some, I’m pleased to report.)
In the Wall Street Journal, Michael
FitzGerald observed, “Miro’s status as one of the great underappreciated
artists of the 20th century extends to the Museum of Modern Art, whose
remarkable collection of his work—arguably the best in the world—is rarely
shown in depth. So MoMA’s . . . ‘Joan
Miro: Birth of the World’ is an exceptional gift.” The New York Times’ Roberta Smith
proclaimed, “Periodically the Museum of Modern Art orchestrates what I call a
Miró Immersion, one of those experiences that can make you an art lover for
life or, if that’s already the case, prompt you to renew your vows.” So, “thanks to MoMA’s extraordinary holdings
in Miró’s work and its curatorial familiarity with them,” Birth of the World,
said Smith, “achieves a pervasive, extra-visual intensity.”
Barbara Hoffman of the New York Post wrote, “Before there were
Colorforms, there was Joan Miró. Few
artists before, during or after left such a colorful legacy, let alone a work
built around a stuffed parrot.” She
explained, “That last, a taxidermied bird the artist perched above a derby hat
with a plastic fish in its brim, is the star of ‘Object’ [1936]. It’s one of many dada-esque delights in the
Museum of Modern Art’s new show, ‘Joan Miró: Birth of the World.’” Miró “’called himself a proud international
Catalan,’” Hoffman quoted curator Anne Umland. “However he saw himself, he’s given us a world
of joy.”
In the Brooklyn Rail, Jessica Holmes reported that MoMA’s Birth
of the World exhibit “proceeds in laying out a case for the evolution of
the artist’s visual poetics, an alphabet of forms that he developed into a
singular language.” Nora Quintanilla
wrote in the Los Angeles Times that MoMA’s exhibit “is giving devotees
of Spanish painter Joan Miro (1893-1983) an opportunity to immerse themselves
in dozens of artifacts from the period when he developed his pictorial
universe.” Birth of the World “aims
to shed light on the artist's formative years,” she explained.
Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker dubbed Birth of the World an
“enchanting show” and insisted, “Miró is fun. He earns and will keep his place in our hearts
. . . with abounding charm.” In the Art
Newspaper, Nancy Kenney reported, “The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has dug
into its extensive holdings of pieces by Joan Miró for a show that demonstrates
how one major work can be a turning point in an artist’s career.”
On DailyArtMagazine.com, Howard Schwartz declared, “This
collection of Joan Miró’s paintings and sculptures is magnificent.” He added, “The art is so wonderful, it does
not need an interesting theme to warrant attention.” Sandra Bertrand called Birth of the World
a “dazzling exhibition” and asserted that Umland and Braverman “have done an
exemplary job in helping to elucidate this complicated Catalan genius.”
[A few words
about two of the shows discussed in this post: Frieze Sculpture is a new public
art initiative, presented at Rockefeller Center in partnership with Frieze New
York. It opened on 25 April will run through 28 June. Frieze Sculpture will exhibit new sculptures
by 14 international artists across the Rockefeller campus.
[Joan
Miró: Birth of the World closes on 15 June, after which the Museum of Modern
Art will shut down for four months for a major reconstruction
project. The doors will close on 15 June
and reopen on 21 October to a museum with increased exhibit space and a new
plan for the display of its art.]
