16 May 2019

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 Coloron 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.]

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