Art: Boiling Internally

The exhibition at Paris’ Maeght Gallery last week was the kind that provokes many a parent to exclaim: “My kid could do better than that!”

Some of the pictures (with titles like The Red Sun Is Gnawing at the Spider) looked like the absent-minded doodles of a preoccupied businessman. They were crammed with little stars, half moons, circles, eyes, teeth and amorphic blobs loosely knit together with wandering black lines. There were also sculptures and such: highly polished pear-sized bronzes and “objects” made of bricks, rusty wire and old bones. All these things were produced by Joán Miró, a Spanish-born painter-sculptor who has long been a fashionable exponent of all that is doodliest in modern art (TIME, May 26, 1947).

Even for Miró, the “objects” were peculiar. One of them was a brick surmounted by a rusty brown sardine can and topped off with a pebble carved in the shape of a face. Miró called that one Woman. Some of the sculptures were almost as baffling. They were about evenly divided between people and birds; the catalogue told which was which.

But Paris sophisticates were delighted with the show. Orson Welles, Painter Georges Braque and Poet Paul Eluard were all on hand at the opening. Another poet, Jacques Prévert, had written a catalogue foreword which described Miró as “a smiling innocent gardener who strolls about in the garden of his dreams among the wild flowers of Multicolorado.” It was a strange country, but Miro’s multicolored Multicolorado did exert a cloudy charm on sympathetic visitors—just as children’s paintings often do.

Joán Miró himself, little, chubby and dapper, sports monogrammed shirts and a calm, businesslike air. “I lead a very regular, normal life,” he told a reporter, “I work every day from 6 a.m. to nightfall. At noon, before lunch, I take half an hour’s physical exercise.” After a reflective pause he added: “Outwardly I am perfectly calm, but internally I’m boiling!”

Miró shuttles between two studios, a small one in Paris’ Rue de Téhéran and a big one in Barcelona. At week’s end he dashed back to Spain to continue work on an 18-by-17-ft. mural for Harvard University’s new graduate center. The mural, he says hopefully, “will enable me to establish close contact with the students, the young men of tomorrow. It is better to influence the young generation than to try to convert stubborn old men . . .”

Will the Harvard mural turn out as abstract as his other works? “I have never,” Joán Miró indignantly replies, “painted an abstract thing in all my life!”