Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA

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.]

Van Gogh & Miró at MOMA (2008)

[Eight years ago next month, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in mid-town Manhattan, just four years after it reopened following an extensive renovation that added nearly one third again as much space to the existing museum.  Accompanied by my late mother and my frequent theater companion (whose guests we were in reality), our purpose was to see two new exhibits of artists Mom and I have always liked tremendously: Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Joan Miró (1893-1983).  I originally wrote this report, part of a longer one covering other events as well (including Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian at the National Museum of the American Indian in 2008, on which I blogged on 20 March 2011), on 10 December 2008, before I started ROT; I pulled it from my pre-blog archives because, first, I thought the look back at one of my most pleasurable art experiences would be interesting in its own right and, second, I’m working on a play report for next week and haven’t finished anything suitable for posting this week.  (Hey, sometimes necessity is just a mother!)  I hope ROTters will agree with my estimation and enjoy the time trip.  ~Rick]

On Wednesday, 27 November 2008, the day before Thanksgiving, my friend Diana invited my mother and me to join her as her guests at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she had taken out a membership this year, so we wouldn’t have to stand on line for Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night (21 September 2008-5 January 2009) and Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 (2 November 2008-12 January 2009).  We readily took her up on the gesture because both artists are favorites of both my mom and me.  (In fact, Vincent van Gogh is one of my all-time favorite artists of any genre and any period.) 

Fortunately for us, the van Gogh show is small so we could manage both exhibits in one go—with a lunch break in between as a respite.  We’ve learned from experience—we’re veteran gallery-hoppers from way back—that we can’t do two large exhibits at a time without our legs and focus giving out.  I love to read all the wall panels, and most of the plaques with the individual pieces, and that can draw out even a moderate-sized show to a two-hour walk.  (Sometimes the curatorial texts are more informative and interesting than other times.  The Dada show a few years back at the National Gallery of Art and, later, MoMA, in 2006, reported on ROT on 20 February 2010, was like a fascinating lesson in both cultural history and world events and put the art in context; the van Gogh texts were nearly valueless this time around.)  Also, with works like the Dada pieces and Miró’s, it’s interesting to see what media the artists used—those guys were all such experimentalists that they had habits of using really odd materials.  Miró, for instance, includes a lot of tarpaper and sandpaper in the works at MoMA and painted several works on exhibit on copper or Masonite (either the rough side or the smooth side, depending on what effect he was after).  One of Miró’s assemblies includes a painted (blue) chickpea!

We started out at Colors of the Night, whose focus, as the title suggests, is the nighttime paintings of the artist, starting, chronologically, with The Potato Eaters (1885).  The show, of course, included the gorgeous Starry Night (1889, and the only painting I can think of that inspired a rock ’n’ roll song: Don McLean’s 1971 “Vincent,” known as “Starry, Starry Night”), possibly my favorite of all the paintings by van Gogh.  Covering both exterior scenes and interior scenes lit by gas or candles, some dark and shadowy, like The Potato Eaters, others artificially bright, like Dance Hall in Arles (1888), the exhibit includes only 23 painting (plus 9 drawings and several letters by the artist). 

The curators want to make the point that night was a special inspiration to van Gogh (though we know that what attracted him to Arles and Provence was the extreme brightness of the southern sun and the colors that virtually assaulted him in that yellow light).  I suppose there’s a legitimate argument to be made for that point (if art needs an argument to justify an exhibit), but my suspicion is that someone wanted to mount a van Gogh show and, there having been so many just in recent years, that she or he decided there had to be a “unique” perspective to justify a new exhibit.  Anyway, that’s what it looked like to me.  Not that I care, of course.  I’ll accept any excuse to mount a van Gogh show; all I want to do is see the paintings.  And if The Starry Night’s there, or his sunflowers, or some of his portraits, I don’t even need a rationale.

This is why I said that the explanatory texts are nearly worthless in this show.  The justification of the displays and the brief discussions of the inspirations van Gogh had for painting some of the scenes (drawn, obviously, from his letters to his brother and others, some of which are also on display with the art) are often interesting on their own merits, but it isn’t really helpful in appreciating the paintings, which are fully self-explanatory as far as I’m concerned.  (When it came to Miró, his art is so complex and idiosyncratic—and he often had ulterior motives for his work—that the curatorial texts are more revealing.) 

The letters, which I have read before, are remarkable in their own right anyway.  I don’t think there is a similar kind of documentation for any other artist because van Gogh wrote his brother (especially), other family members, and artist friends and colleagues detailed descriptions of some of the paintings on which he was working or scenes he’d seen which he wanted to paint.  He wrote about their emotional reverberations as well as the technical aspects, sometimes even including sketches of the painting he was making.  The letters also often included specific indications of the colors van Gogh was working with or intended to use, and in some cases he has labeled the sketch itself with the color designations he was contemplating.  Now, the pertinent letters, unlike the wall plaques (which often quote from the letters), are fascinating commentary on the artist’s work; but we don’t need a rationale to line up the letters with the paintings.

It struck me as strained, too, that the exhibit of night scenes lumps outdoor painting like The Starry Night and the equally striking The Starry Night over the Rhône (1888) with indoor scenes lit by gas or candles, like Dance Hall in Arles and Night Cafe (1888), or even The Potato Eaters, which is barely lit at all.  The hour may have been the same, but the techniques van Gogh used to create the impressions were vastly different (especially the early work, The Potato Eaters, one of the painter’s first paintings). 

There also seems to be a significant difference, in a painterly sense, between the true night scenes, The Starry Nights, and the twilight landscapes like The Stevedores in Arles (1888) and Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon (1889), which have their own fascination because not only are they depictions of evening over the Provençale countryside, but they include workers at their labor, a subject that really did occupy van Gogh both artistically and philosophically.  (He believed that artists were also laborers, just in the fields of culture.  Artists, farmers, and dockworkers were kin, and labor was an ennobling endeavor.  The Potato Eaters was a subject van Gogh chose not because of the nighttime lighting, but because they were a family of farmers ending their work day with a meal in their homestead.  This was a subject worthy of art to van Gogh.  At least that’s how I understand the work.)  Further, the difference between depicting star- and moonlit night and rendering evening under the dying sun seems as great to me as capturing night is from painting bright day under the Provençale sun.  It’s a little like comparing apples and oranges by saying they’re both fruit!

By the way, it’s not true that the explications were totally useless.  I learned (or was reminded, I don’t know) that when van Gogh painted his night scenes, whether indoors or out, he used the available light at the scene and painted live, as it were.  It’s not so astonishing to picture the artist sitting in a corner of the cafe with his easel and palette while the drinkers and revelers enjoyed their evening.  Others had done that, of course, most notably Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).  But to imagine the strange, red-headed pastor’s son sitting in the peasant family’s little parlor while they ate supper and drawing them, night after night for several evenings as the text describes, is certainly an odd image.  What must they have been thinking of this odd duck?  And to picture van Gogh standing on the edge of town or down by the riverbank at night, peering at his canvas as he tries to capture the stars twinkling above the town or the lights on the water without even a lantern to help him discern the colors of the pigments on his palette . . . well, it’s no wonder the Arlesians were sure this foreign artist was a fou roux (“crazy redhead,” Van Gogh’s nickname).  But what a fou roux! 

(Antonin Artaud, 1896-1948, by the way, insisted that van Gogh wasn’t nuts.  In his 1947 piece Van Gogh: the Man Suicided by Society, Artaud asserted that it was all a conspiracy of the establishment, especially the medical establishment, to keep him out of society because he saw too clearly and told the truth.  Of course, Artaud was nuts himself, so from inside his head, van Gogh probably did seem perfectly rational.  If genius can look like insanity, it’s no great leap to figure that insanity can look like genius, too.  Not that the two are mutually exclusive.  Being neither insane—at least, I don’t think so—nor a genius—that one I’m pretty sure of—what the hell would I know?)

Anyway, aren’t we lucky van Gogh passed among us, tortured though he was, for however brief a time.  You can have your Sistine Chapel and your Mona Lisa . . . give me The Starry Night any time.  (Really—give it to me.  I’ll take it.  No joke.  I will.  I already use it as wallpaper on my computer’s desktop!)

After our lunch break in the little MoMA Cafe 2, conveniently just outside the exit from the van Gogh galleries, we went up to Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937.  (This had been a week for exhibits of opposites in art: Indian vs. Not Indian; Painting vs. Anti-Painting; and—by implication—Night vs. Day.  I just made all that up, of course; doesn’t mean a damn thing!)  Anyway, the Miró covers only ten years of his long life but is a much bigger show than the van Gogh (whose whole painting career lasted only ten years—though he produced around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings, most of them in the little over a year he spent in Arles). 

Painting and Anti-Painting explores 12 of Miró’s sustained series from the decade of ’27-’37, and includes some 90 paintings, collages, objects, and drawings.  It’s also a harder show because, first, Miró, like Fritz Scholder, eschewed pretty pictures and was deliberately working to “assassinate painting,” as he put it, and, second, the 90-plus works in the exhibit, though they cover only ten years of the artist’s prolific career, have an intellectual subtext.  It is possible, even desirable from my standpoint, to see the van Gogh show as a walk through a selection of his work and just let the experience of the paintings affect you however it will.  But with the Miró work on display, even if you were inclined to do only that—a much harder task, I submit, with this artist’s work—you would miss a lot of the point of the exhibit, the experience.

Unless you just don’t like van Gogh—and I don’t want to hear about it if you don’t!—it’s hard not to enjoy, even revel in The Colors of the Night, regardless of the curatorial gloss.  First of all, I find van Gogh’s work almost entirely emotional—and I think he painted that way, too.  He didn’t intellectualize or rationalize much—he was a creature of feelings and senses.  (I think, at base, Impressionism is predominantly emotional: it’s a rendering of what the artist feels about a subject, her or his reaction to it.  Impressionists want to convey what they felt, not what they saw.  It’s more Stanislavsky than Brecht, if you will.) 

Miró isn’t about what he feels so much as what he thinks—and what he wants you to think.  We may see that his impulses are destructive, as far as art is concerned, but he has made rational choices about what to include in his art, what materials to use, what to leave out.  It’s not that Miró has no passion or doesn’t display it—he’s no Vulcan with suppressed emotions—but he decides rationally how he will convey his emotions as well as his thoughts and ideas.  This not only makes his work, especially when assembled in the numbers of the MoMA show, hard to encounter, but very dense.  A van Gogh painting hits you pretty much all at once as soon as you see it.  It’s a gut response, reacting to the artist’s reaction.  A Miró grows on you, your response or understanding accumulates; knowing some background or explication helps, too. 

I don’t need anyone to tell me what The Starry Night means, but with Miró’s 1927 canvas titled Un Oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse I needed some clues.  First off, it is one of the few pieces in the exhibition whose French title isn’t translated, which suggests something.  (The words are actually written across the canvas atop the images Miró painted, suggesting that the words are important.)  I looked on the Internet to see if there was an “official” translation of the phrase, and there really isn’t.  One site said that the words are essentially untranslatable into English (and another actually provided a translation that’s wrong).  So I went about translating it myself.  The first part is easy: “A bird pursues a bee and . . . .”  At first I mistook the last two words as a noun with the definite article: la baisse means ‘the fall’ or ‘the drop.’  (What our stock market has just gone through here was une baisse.)  In context, that doesn’t make much sense, though: “A bird pursues a bee and the fall.”  No synonym works any better.  Then I realized that the end of the phrase isn’t an article and a noun but a pronoun and a verb; la refers to une abeille.  As a verb, baisser means ‘to drop,’ ‘to knock down,’ or words to that effect.  So the phrase now means, “A bird pursues a bee and knocks it down.”  (The incorrect translation on the ’Net was: “A bird pursues a bee and kisses it”; the translator confused baiser, ‘to kiss,’ with baisser, ‘to knock down.’  Silly wabbit!) 

Now, the painting is extremely abstract—there’s no actual bird or bee on the canvas—but it’s easily possible to see the blobs and splotches Miró painted as representing such a picture.  As long as you’re armed with the interpretation of the words the artist put in the painting.  You can also certainly say that the painting bears no resemblance to a bird doing anything at all to a bee—but the process is still intellectual in part.  (A Frenchman wouldn’t need to go through the translation tsuris, of course, but he’d still have to do the interpreting and apply the text to the image and decide if there’s any correlation.)  This is the starkest example of what I mean, but it’s emblematic, I think.  And, at least for me, that’s why the Miró show is more arduous than the van Gogh, which is more exhilarating.  Not that both aren’t worthy—just different cognitive experiences.

The van Gogh exhibit is also a random excerpt of his work, taken from the whole decade of his career.  It may be a study of a certain technique—the painting of night—though I dispute it’s cohesive enough to be that, but the Miró is chronological and carefully arranged and selected so that it provides a view of the process the artist went through to get from where he began in 1927 to where he ended in 1937.  I could have started the van Gogh exhibit at the end and gone backwards, or careened randomly from painting to painting and had the same experience for the most part that I had going from start to finish.  If you don’t follow the Mirós in the order they are arranged, you miss the progression, the changes the painter went through as he experimented and developed new ideas.  (This is particularly where the wall texts help.  Not only do they point out the variations in technique and focus, they provide commentary from both Miró himself and contemporaries, including critics and other artists.)  What Painting and Anti-Painting does is reveal the arc, the throughline, of one artist’s journey at a significant point in his creative life.  Aside from the art itself, which can, of course, speak for itself, that’s a terrific perspective to have.

In Miró’s case, what he was up to in this decade was tearing down and rebuilding the art of painting.  (I’m not sure he had intended to do the rebuilding—I think it just happened despite his intentions.)  The exhibit is arranged into 12 groups of works, each set demonstrating one sortie in Miró’s effort to “assassinate painting.”  He approached this task as a sort of anti-Grotowski of painting: whereas Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99) examined theater and discarded what he determined was inessential, Miró examined painting and began to expunge what was essential, including, first, paint itself—many of the early works include bare spots of raw canvas—and even eliminating, as Holland Cotter’s New York Times review (“Miró, Serial Murderer of Artistic Conventions,” 31 October 2008) puts it, the artist himself.  (To continue the theatrical analogy, there’s something Artaudian in Miró’s drive to destroy painting, just as Artaud wanted to destroy theater.) 

At 34, Miró had already established himself as an artist.  He had succeeded as a Surrealist, having moved to Paris in 1920 when the movement began, and had also been influenced by Surrealism’s predecessor, Dadaism—a resolutely anti-aesthetic cultural movement that grew out of the aftermath of World War I and the devastations of mechanized war and the mechanized society.  Restless and endlessly inquisitive, Miró needed to move on to something new, even radical (a trait he shared with his fellow Spaniard and another influence, Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973), but there wasn’t anything on the horizon, so he realized he’d have to invent it for himself and the first step, he famously declared, was to erase what had gone before.  The ten years that followed were occupied by the painter’s efforts to overthrow the established forms by whatever means he could imagine.  His impulse to change everything was exacerbated and informed by world events that overtook him: the rise of fascism (in Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933) and the Spanish Civil War in his native country (1936-39), the harbinger of another world war. 

It’s little wonder, it seems to me, that an artist might renounce conventional beauty in art—just as the Dadaists saw the destructiveness of machines and technology and abandoned soothing aesthetics for more provocative techniques.  Oddly perhaps, both the Dadaists and Miró could still create a kind of frightening and disquieting beauty—like the menacing splendor of a lava flow or the chilling grace of a shark.   In The Poetics, Aristotle said that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we would regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure; the same must be true of art in any form. 

After having discarded paint, the defining medium of the art of painting, Miró moved on to eliminating painterly craft.  In Spanish Dancer I (1928), the artist assembled colored paper, sandpaper, and a cut-out of a woman’s shoe on a wood panel.  There’s not one image or object which Miró created, nothing which required his artistic skill (or any paint or pigment he applied to the collage).  Later, Miró began to mangle art history as well, with his deconstructions of old masters, as Dutch Interior I (1928), the artist’s take on Hendrik Martensz Sorgh’s The Lutanist (1661), a painting of a reclining woman being serenaded by a suitor, or La Fornarina (1929), a seated nude portrait of Raphael’s lover, which both end up in Miró’s versions as his familiar amoeba-like blobs in garish colors such as yellow, red, and brown.  In the end, Miró returned to painting (and his works after 1937 seem less angry and volatile), but in this developmental decade, the artist engaged collage and assemblage and built art from unlikely found materials and ready-mades.

[Mom and I had always enjoyed van Gogh shows, but things didn’t always work out for us.  I went down to D.C. for the year-end holidays in 1998 and my mother and I had planned to see the van Gogh exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, Van Gogh's Van Goghs (4 October 1998-3 January 1999), but the show was so popular that Mother couldn’t get tickets—NGA, whose admission is free, did issue tickets for entry to this exhibit to control attendance—even after standing in line one afternoon in the hope of getting lucky.  In contrast, several years later, Mom and I saw Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape (6 May-12 August 2012) at the NGA’s West Building.  (I blogged on this show on 5 October 2012.)]

'Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape'

[I only occasionally publish a report on an art exhibit on ROT. For one (important) reason, I have no credentials to discuss art, though I have plenty of experience as a consumer. Unlike for plays, I don’t feel compelled to report on every exhibit I see, either for the record or for any other reason. When it comes to art shows, something in the experience has to have spoken to me, even if it’s only great pleasure in the work or the display. As a result, I haven’t written about an art exhibit for quite some time—the last ones were all last year, in fact, ending with the Paul Gauguin show at the National Gallery of Art in June 2011. None of the shows I’ve seen since then have caught my imagination strongly enough to overcome my general reluctance to spout off on a subject in which I have so little background. Until this August, finally, when my mother, a cousin, and I went to the National Gallery again for Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, a large show of the surrealist’s paintings spanning most of his career. (Admittedly, aside from having a long-standing affinity for Miró’s work, one reason for this enhanced interest is the fact that it took Mom and me three tries to get to the show, which we managed to do in its last week. That’s not including one attempt Mom made with a friend after I had left Washington when I was there in June. After all that effort, I guess I was primed to appreciate this show a little more than I might have otherwise. Not that it wasn’t a completely worthy exhibit of some really terrific art anyway.) So, then, here are my impressions of The Ladder of Escape, a retrospective of the paintings of Joan Miró (1893-1983). ~Rick]

I’ve been going down to Washington somewhat more often lately than I used to, principally for family reasons. On my recent trip down in the middle of June, my mother and I took in two plays (see my ROT reports on The Servant of Two Masters, 9 July, and Memphis, 14 July) but we also tried twice to get to the Mall to see Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape at the National Gallery of Art (6 May-12 August). Both times we abandoned the effort for irrelevant reasons. Essentially because of that, and because Mom had made a lunch date with a cousin who lives in Baltimore but whom we don’t see so often, I planned another visit to the Nation’s Capital in early August to try to catch the show before it finally closed. So I took my usual Kosher Bus down on Monday, 6 August, and we met my cousin Andy the next afternoon at the Garden Café in the West Building where a special menu had been created by Chef José Andrés, best known in the District as chef-owner of Jaleo, a trio of Washington-area Spanish eateries popular for their tapas selections. Renamed for the duration of the Miró exhibit, the Garden Café Catalonia featured Catalan-infused dishes such as empedrat de mongetes, a tasty white bean salad with vegetables, black olives, and tomato; sopa freda de cireres de Santa Coloma de Cervelló, delicious cold cherry and tomato soup—and really, really different; samfaina, a pleasant Catalan vegetable stew; and pollastre a la catalane, a savory Catalan chicken stew with dried fruits and nuts.

After lunch by the 19th-century French marble sculpture Bacchus and a Faun (after Jacopo Sansovino) and a fountain with Herbert Adams’s art nouveau bronze Girl with Water Lilies (model 1928), we trooped through the underground concourse—it was a very hot and humid outdoors, as it was all that week along the Potomac—to the East Building for the large show which covered several galleries on two floors. It was an absolutely magnificent exhibit of the life’s work of one of the world’s most fascinating artists, one whose art had intrigued me since I first encountered it decades ago. (One of my favorite works at NGA was Woman, the 1977 Miró tapestry that used to hang in the main atrium of the East Building. It had been commissioned for the I. M. Pei structure, but a number of years ago it was removed, ostensibly for cleaning, and has never been returned to its place of prominence in the big entrance space. I miss it every time I go there.)

The Ladder of Escape was organized by the Tate Modern in London in cooperation with Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, in association with NGA. Washington had been the exhibit’s last stop on a three-city tour following stays at the Tate Modern from 14 to 11 September 2011 and the Fundació Miró from 13 October 2011 to 25 March 2012. Unfortunately, no further visits are planned, so I’m doubly glad I finally managed to get to it just before it finished up in Washington. Curated by Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale of the Tate Modern in collaboration with Teresa Montaner, a curator at the Fundació Miró, the 160 paintings, drawings, prints, and a single sculpture span more than half a century, from Portrait of Vicens Nubiola (1917) to the Fireworks series (1974). Ladder is arranged basically in chronological order, which allows spectators to view the artist’s development from early Hieronymus Bosch-like landscapes to his more iconic floating blobs of color, stars, moons, suns, flowers, stick figures, and letters. The curators’ motive for the chronology, however, is different: history. Daniel and Gale propose that Miró, not generally considered a political painter, was an “artist of his times.” Because he lived through World War I (1914-18), the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), World War II (1939-45), and Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s dictatorship of Spain (1939-1975), Ladder’s curators posit that Miró was engaged in the issues of the time. In addition, they contend, he was a passionate Catalan, championing the culture and traditions of his homeland and displaying a Catalonian nationalism in his art. The surrealist’s political interests are coded in his paintings, however, without being expressed overtly. They have to be sussed out, which Daniel and Gale accomplish with the wall panels, just so we don’t overlook the political content.

But I tend to go with most of the art critics whose reviews I read: the attempt to make Miró into a political artists is quatsch. All of us wax political sometimes, and there’s no denying that two or three of the works on display in Ladder have strong political undertones, especially during the Civil War period and the authoritarian dictatorship of Franco when freedoms and artistic expression were suppressed and dissidents were persecuted and sometimes disappeared. (Look at Aidez l'Espagne, the 1937 design for a French postage stamp which was Miró's most public statement during the Spanish Civil War. A Franco-Spanish nonintervention pact prevented production of the stamp and the design was converted into a poster.) I also think you can find political meaning in just about anything if you try hard enough, especially if it’s art that’s as open to personal interpretation as the surrealism of Miró. The painter didn’t talk about his art so much; most of his work is left to the viewer to interpret so it’s a little like the patient who tells his shrink that all the Rorschach blots look like figures engaged in sex. “Why do you keep seeing sex in all the inkblots?” asks the doctor. “Me?” replies the patient. “You’re the one drawing the dirty pictures!” That seems to me what Daniel and Gale have done—substituting politics for sex, of course.

As for his focus on Catalan life and imagery, I’m not sure that’s necessarily so political, either. Many artists draw on the culture of the regions where they were born without getting embroiled in the political issues of the region. Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner were passionate Southern writers, but neither one refought the Civil War (pardon me, the War for Southern Independence) in their art. Williams did take stands on civil rights and the Vietnam war now and then, but in essays and letters that were published separately from his plays, poems, and short stories. So, if Miró included allusions to his Catalan heritage in his paintings, I don’t find that he was campaigning for the independence of Catalonia or crying out against the suppression of Catalan culture. He was painting what he knew and loved—like most artists. Of some of his early paintings, Miró remarked later, “I am very much attached to the landscape of my country.” In The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) (1923-24), for instance, Miró inserted a tiny image of the crossed flags of France and Catalonia attached to a scythe and suspended over a ladder into his surrealistic landscape. (By the way, that’s the “ladder of escape,” a recurring image, as we’ll see, in Miró’s work to which the exhibition’s title refers.) But these were the main places where he’d lived and the image struck me as more sentimental than political. (In The Tilled Field, 1923-24, Miró painted three little flags, with the Catalan banner flying between those of Spain and France. Like the banners in The Hunter, they’re hardly prominent.) If there’s nationalism in this, then its innate, not necessarily purposeful.

Happily, as Ken Johnson of the New York Times declared, this “muddled” interpretation didn’t mar the show as a collection of wonderful paintings and drawings. The situation reminds me of a van Gogh exhibit I saw at MoMA in 2008, Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. (Coincidentally, I saw another Miró show on the same visit, Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937.) Of the van Gogh exhibit, I wrote:

The curators want to make the point that night was a special inspiration to van Gogh (though we know that what attracted him to Arles and Provence was the extreme brightness of the southern sun and the colors that virtually assaulted him in that yellow light). I suppose there’s a legitimate argument to be made for that point (if art needs an argument to justify an exhibit), but my suspicion is that someone wanted to mount a van Gogh show and, there having been so many just in recent years, that she or he decided there had to be a “unique” perspective to rationalize a new exhibit. Anyway, that’s what it looked like to me. Not that I care, of course. I’ll accept any excuse to mount a van Gogh show; all I want to do is see the paintings. And if The Starry Night’s there, or his sunflowers, or some of his portraits—I don’t even need a rationale.

The press generally agreed, despite reservations or even outright objections to the curatorial conception for Ladder. (The Washington City Paper called it “a hard sell.”) The Washington Times described The Ladder of Escape as “an artist’s astonishing chronological journey through the major movements of modern art” and the New York Times declared, “It is a beautiful and exciting show.”

Joan Miró i Ferrà (pronounced in Catalan: zho-AN mee-RO) was born on 20 April 1893 in Barcelona, the Mediterranean port city that’s the historical capital of Catalonia, the ancient Spanish state on the northeast coast. He was the oldest child and only son of Miquel Miró Adzerias, a goldsmith and watchmaker, and Dolores Ferrà, the daughter of a cabinetmaker in Palma de Mallorca. At the age of seven, he began drawing classes at a private school and at 14, enrolled in La Escuela de Artes y Oficios Artísticos (School of Fine Arts) in Barcelona. At the insistence of his family, Miró also studied business and started his working life in his teens as a clerk, but in 1911 he suffered a nervous breakdown followed by typhoid and after retreating to the farm in rural Mont-roig his parents had bought as a vacation home, devoted himself entirely to his art. The emerging painter’s early influences and inspirations were visionary artists Bosch and William Blake, then the Fauvists and Cubists, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. He had his first solo show at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona in 1918, but his work was roundly rejected. In 1920, the young surrealist moved to Paris to join the gathering of artists in Montparnasse, the bohemian quarter of what had become the art capital of the western world. There he met American writer Ernest Hemingway and fellow Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, twelve years Miró’s senior, who was immersed in his Cubist period at the time. He regularly returned home in the summer, spending time at Mont-roig (Catalan for ‘red mountain’).

In Paris, Miró completed several canvases he’d started in Mont-roig, including The Farm (1921-22), The Hunter, and The Tilled Field, all of which were in the first gallery of Ladder. Aside from the fact that these works from this early period were unknown to me, they were revealing as an initial stage in Miró’s development of an individual style, the surrealism for which he became universally known and recognized. With some influences from cubist and abstract painting, Miró filled his canvases with details from his memories of Mont-roig, but images filtered through a dream or the subconscious and scattered about the scene as if dumped from a strange child’s toy box. “The Farm was a résumé of my entire life in the country,” the painter acknowledged. “I wanted to put everything that I loved about the country into that canvas—from a huge tree to a tiny little snail,” he explained in a way that sounds more nostalgic than politically motivated. His later work is wholly unreal, fantastical, but The Farm, for instance, is part real and part unreal. All the elements are recognizable, but the overall effect is magical and otherworldly. NGA’s website sums this period of his work up very nicely for me:

Events of daily life in the farmyard are meticulously rendered, each element carefully observed and precisely described, yet the overall effect is strangely dreamlike. Miró’s style—fanciful and playful, while wonderfully detailed and thoughtfully arranged—creates a kind of magical realism.

The general resemblance to Bosch is palpable both in the way Miró filled his frame with images—NGA materials called it his “detailist” style; his later work left a lot of unfilled space, a sort of void in which his amoebic shapes floated gravity-free—and in the symbolism with which he imbued those images, meaning that may or not be immediately clear. The symbols Miró employed just grew less and less representational and more and more abstract. (Surrealism draws substantially on dreams, so many of the images Miró and other surrealists present are often private, open to each viewer’s own interpretation. If I respond one way and you another—we’re both right. Perhaps that’s how Ladder’s curators got their notion of pervasive political statements.) Being introduced to these works of the ’teens and ’20s of which I hadn’t been aware was one huge benefit of the organization of Ladder—getting to see the Miró before the Miró I knew.

In 1923, Spanish general Miguel Primo de Rivera launched a military coup, establishing a dictatorship (1923-30) which suppressed Catalonian autonomy. In Paris, the painter joined the Surrealists which had organized in 1924 under the leadership of writer and poet André Breton (who wrote the group’s manifestos). He began to move away from the cluttered busy-ness of The Farm and Tilled Field, turning toward the spareness and abstraction of his later work—though he didn’t altogether abandon pictorial images. In many of this period’s canvases, called “animated landscapes,” a small number of animals, especially dogs and birds, and even people appeared in cartoon-like representations, often juxtaposed with unrelated abstract objects on fields of lush color. Landscape (The Hare) (1927), for example, shows a rabbit with a spiraling sphere, and Dog Barking at the Moon (1926) and Landscape (Landscape with Rooster) (1927) depict, respectively, a dog and a rooster with a ladder. One recurring image is the stick figure of the Catalan farmer with the ubiquitous red cap (called a barretina in Catalan, the museum materials tell me), as in Head of a Catalan Peasant (series, 1924-25). Again, here’s evidence of a sort of casual nationalism that seems more devotion to his native culture, romanticized to be sure, than insistently activist. The abstraction, reduced to a few lines and dots, rather than an evocation of Catalan nationalism, can be read as a prideful self-representation of the artist.

The ladder (of escape) in these works represents the connection between the natural world and the preternatural, or the real world and the world of imagination and dreams. Miró, the visionary, the dreamer, climbed from the realm of reality, the mundane and solid, to the realm of the metaphysical and symbolic where things like gravity and logic (and politics?) don’t exist. Daniel and Gale want the ladder to be grounded in the quotidian world of politics and issues, reaching up to the escapist word of imagination and magic. In 1940, however, when the artist was fleeing France to evade the German occupation, he painted The Escape Ladder, a representation of a fairly prosaic and literal point: the escape from the Nazis. The red-and-black striped ladder leads from the bottom edge of the painting, where all kinds of strange and even threatening hybrid creatures are depicted, up into Miró’s mystical heavens, studded with his blobs, stars, and moons, where his imagination lives, and where, I think, art provides him a refuge from reality. Generally, Miró’s ladder was his route into the haven of his imagination from distressing and unpleasant surroundings, including political reality. Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post asserted that “Miro's ladders are also ladders to nowhere,” but I find that too dismissive; however, Ken Johnson’s final assessment of the symbol in the New York Times rings nicely:

But ladders go both ways. They can be a means of escape from worldly woes, but they also may lead the visionary prophet back down to earth, where he may try to get people to become better oriented to transcendental realities—by making art, for example.

Eventually, the painter distanced himself from the organized Surrealists because he rejected Breton’s alliance of the art group with the communist party. Miró never signed the Surrealist Manifesto, signaling, I believe, his resistance to political activism even though he was bitterly opposed to Franco’s rightist Falangists and surely backed the Republicans in the Civil War, whose cause was supported by the communists and socialists. (The Falange was openly championed by Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s National Socialists.) Miró, according to his personal history, wasn’t a joiner or an activist, and unlike his countryman Picasso, who exiled himself to France all through the Franco dictatorship, Miró left his native land for artistic, not political reasons in 1920 and returned to work in Falangist-controlled Spain in 1940. As Jeffry Cudlin put it in the Washington City Paper, “Miró was an aesthetic revolutionary, not a political one.”

Miró married Pilar Juncosa in 1929 and remained with her until his death. In 1931, the year Miró’s daughter Dolores was born, Pierre Matisse, the youngest child of painter Henri Matisse, opened a gallery in New York City and represented the Spanish surrealist, thus introducing him to the Unites States with frequent exhibits of the Spaniard’s work. Because of the deprivations of the Depression, the Mirós returned to live in Barcelona in 1932 and the painter continued to work in the brief second Spanish republic established after the ouster of Primo de Rivera; the return of democracy briefly reinstated some of Catalonia’s autonomy. When the Spanish army suppressed the nascent republic in 1934, foreshadowing the coming civil war, Miró engaged in a creative period during which he vowed to “assassinate painting,” the subject of the MoMA exhibit I viewed in 2008, Painting and Anti-Painting. Works during this time weren’t painted on canvas, but on Masonite, copper, and thick paper, using odd media like casein, tar, and sand instead of paint, with shards of newspaper, tarpaper, or sandpaper affixed to them. Ironically, these 1936 works usually bear the title Painting—perhaps in the same turn of mind as surrealist René Magritte when Miró’s Belgian contemporary wrote across The Treason of Images (1928-29), a depiction of a pipe, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe).

At the end of 1936, after the civil war began, the family went into self-imposed exile in Paris, following the events in their homeland from a distance. Miró’s work took on a bitterer and angrier tone, with figures in attitudes of fear, supplication, anguish, or protest. In Still Life with Old Shoe (1937), a withered, brown apple is speared by a misshapen fork and splotches of garish colors pop out of a black background as if glinting in a blackout. (This painting has been called Miró’s Guernica, though I wonder if the artist would have felt that way.) According to the Washington Times, Miró called the objects in the work “tragic symbols of the period—the tragedy of a miserable crust of bread and an old shoe, an apple pierced by a cruel fork and a bottle that like a burning house, spread its flames across the entire surface of the canvas.” But rather than relish this anguished painting for its apparent political—or, at least, topical—expression, New York Times art critic Johnson observed: “What is immediately captivating about it, though, is how the rustic objects seem to glow numinously from within. It is an image of supernatural immanence in the humblest of circumstances.”

In 1937, the beleaguered Republican government of Spain commissioned Miró to paint a mural for its pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition (World’s Fair) and the artist created Catalan Peasant in Revolt, his first major foray into politically significant art. (Note that his subject wasn’t Spanish, though, but Catalan—his lifelong national pride still holding sway. Catalonia remained a stronghold of Republican support.) Better known as The Reaper, the two-story mural, destroyed or lost when the building was taken down, depicted a Catalan peasant raising a sickle (a common symbol of communism, perhaps not coincidentally), ready to combat fascism; it hung in the pavilion near Pablo Picasso’s famous anti-war work, Guernica.

In 1939, the Spanish Republic fell to Francisco Franco’s Falangist forces and Germany, which had used the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for its war machine, prepared to invade France. Miró moved out of Paris south to Normandy, but when the Wehrmacht marched into Paris in 1940, he returned to Spain, now firmly under Franco’s rule. The painter and his family settled in Palma, the main town of Majorca in the Balearic Islands; Miró’s wife was from Palma. (Franco’s government declared Spain neutral during World War II so, despite the Caudillo’s ties to Hitler and Mussolini, those living in Spain, unlike in Unoccupied France, were safe from Nazi persecution and arrest. Intimidation by the Spanish government was another matter, of course.) Between 1940 and 1941, as he was retreating, he completed the gouache (a kind of thick, tempera-like watercolor) series Constellations, small paintings on paper, many of which are in the exhibit. As if to help make my point, Miró said of these exquisite little paintings covered with human figures, animals (especially birds), moons, and stars, “I dipped my brushes in solvent and wiped them on the white sheets of paper with no preconceived ideas.” (I loved these little pieces and if I were to come back for one of our Midnight Shopping Trips, I’d head straight for them. And swing by The Farm, a painting once owned by Miró’s friend Hemingway, on the way out.) During this period also, the first monograph on the artist was published (Shuzu Takiguchi, Miró [Tokyo: Atelier, 1940]).

After the war, Miró returned to Paris periodically to explore new painting techniques while he continued to live in Barcelona. In 1959, André Breton asked Miró to represent Spain in The Homage to Surrealism exhibition alongside several other artists, including fellow Spaniard Salvador Dalí, and Miró created a series of sculptures and ceramics, a medium in which he’d begun to experiment, for the garden of the Maeght Foundation, a museum of modern art in Saint-Paul de Vence in the south of France near Nice, which was completed in 1964. In Ladder is another overtly political work: May 68 (May 1968-December 1973), which uses splattered paint of blue, black, yellow, and red; palm prints; and graffiti-like squiggles and curved lines on a white background to pay homage to the student-and-worker protests that swept the world, especially Paris, that month.

In 1974, Miró created a tapestry for New York City’s World Trade Center. (He avoided doing tapestries until he learned the technique; then he produced several, including Woman for NGA in 1977.) His World Trade Center Tapestry was one of the works of art lost during the 11 September 2001 terror attack. Franco died in 1975 and Spain became a constitutional monarchy under King Juan Carlos de Borbón, but the last years of the dictatorship had been fraught with unrest, protests, and crackdowns. The political situation affected Miró’s work once again and he created his Burnt Canvases series, two examples of which from 1973 are in the show. The painter splashed paint from the can onto canvas he scorched with a torch, adding thick brushstrokes and treading across the surface. They are ugly but powerful and emotive works. Miró said he was trying to harness fire’s “inventive force,” but the distressed works, one of which reveals the wooden stretchers usually hidden by the canvas, looked to me like the remains of an art show that had been attacked by a mob, perhaps one geed up by forces opposed to non-traditional art.

The Ladder of Escape ends with the waning of Franco’s dictatorship, though Miró’s creative life continued for eight years after the Caudillo’s death and Spain’s return to democracy. Barcelona’s Fundació Joan Miró was established in 1975 and in 1981, the city of Palma opened the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca in four studios the artist donated. In 1979, Miró received an honorary doctorate from the University of Barcelona and in 1980, he received the Gold Medal of Fine Arts, Spain's highest cultural honor, from King Juan Carlos. He was still creating new work in the last years of his life, including 1981’s The Sun, the Moon and One Star, for Chicago’s Loop. The large, mixed media, outdoor sculpture, later renamed Miró's Chicago, is located across the street from a large, untitled steel sculpture by Miró’s countryman Picasso (informally called the Chicago Picasso, 1967). He also created the monumental (and deliberately phallic), ceramic-clad, concrete sculpture Dona i Ocell (Woman and Bird, 1982) for the Parc Joan Miró in Barcelona, his native city. (In Catalan, the word ocell is also slang for ‘penis.’ Even at 90, the man had a mischievous sense of humor.) The artist, who suffered from heart disease, was unable to attend the installation because he was too ill; he died less than a year later at age 90 at his home in Palma, Majorca, on 25 December 1983.

Like Ken Johnson in the New York Times, who wrote in his review that “evidence of worldly political engagement is hard to find,” most of the criticism of The Ladder of Escape agreed that the curatorial conceit was a stretch. Roland Flamini characterized the notion in the Washington Times as “circumstantial at best” and Jeffry Cudlin of the Washington City Paper admonished that Miró’s art “is not . . . best viewed as the product of repressed regional identity and allegiance to the political left.” When the curators of Ladder ask if Miró was a politically active artist or a visionary one, if his art came from the times he lived through or despite them, Cudlin responded, “These are not difficult questions to answer, and pretending that they are is disingenuous.” In the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott decreed that “it is more uninteresting than enlightening to argue that Miro was a political animal.” He determined, “One senses, rather, that from time to time, he directed a portion of his astonishing creative energy to political subjects, but that he was not by temperament deeply political.” Only in the Washingtonian did Sophie Gilbert seem to support Daniel and Gale’s contention, stating that “the extent of Miró's political involvement is revealed in . . . the hidden symbols” of his art. Gilbert views the painter “as a barometer of his era.”

Aside from ending the exhibit nine years short of the end of Miró’s life, the curators had carefully selected fewer than 170 works from a creative output many times that number. (None of Miró’s ceramics and only one of his sculptures, 1936’s Object of Sunset, is included.) The curators had grouped the works into periods of the most volatile political tension of Miró’s lifetime: 1918-1925, when Catalonia was an independent state, only to have its autonomy suppressed by a military dictatorship; 1934-1941, during the tumult of Spain’s civil war and the beginning of World War II; and 1968-1975, a time of extreme-leftist European activism. As I said earlier, any of us might wax political—and many of us have cultures, often from our birthplaces, to which we have a strong affinity. Van Gogh was drawn to workers at their labor, a subject that occupied him both artistically and philosophically because he believed that artists were also laborers, only in the fields of culture. He saw artists, farmers, and dockworkers as kin, and labor was an ennobling endeavor—but did that make van Gogh some kind of socialist painter? If our work were presented conscientiously pruned with the proper explications, might we all not seem devoted to politics—or any subject which we might actually have addressed only occasionally? Even with that predetermined focus, Daniel and Gale included many paintings in Ladder that contained no salient political or even nationalistic theme, such as the breathtaking Constellation series, painted during a particularly tense time in Miró’s life as he and his family were trapped in Normandy by the advancing German army, and many of their wall texts don’t mention political issues at all.

On the other hand, it would have been difficult, not to say impossible, for an artist (indeed, any sentient person) not to feel moved, even angered, by some of the events to which Miró was witness. The Spanish Civil War was bloody and devastating and diverted Spain from a brief period of democracy following the Primo de Rivera dictatorship to 36 years of authoritarian rule; World War II, particularly the German occupation of France, where Miró had settled, was shattering; and Franco’s regime was oppressive and repressive, especially for artists and intellectuals, many of whom were killed (playwright Federico Garcia Lorca) or fled (Pablo Picasso). Miró was certainly an emotional and passionate artist, which isn’t the same as being politically engaged; even if he made occasional, and sometimes very blunt, statements about politics and Catalonian national culture, that doesn’t make him a “political artist.” Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (who was a political artist) declared, “To be an artist, one must first be a man, vitally concerned with all problems of social struggle . . .,” and I believe that that’s what was operating for Miró: he was just being an artist moved by the life around him. In the end, however, no matter what the exhibit’s organizers may have had in mind, there are always the paintings. No matter what excuse someone may have used to bring them together and let me look at them, it didn’t interfere with that immense pleasure.