Painting: Father for Today

The sun blazes on Majorca for ten months of the year. It lights the baked forms with a harsh kind of super-reality. The sallowleaves of a dead cactus writhe upward like a petrified fountain. A palm hangs against the sky like a bursting skyrocket. On the ground, a beetle crawls. Above it, crouches a man — no figment of a dream but a com pact figure with grey thinning hair, a potato nose, and dressed all in sober brown. “Once,” he “I was passionate about insects. I painted many of them.” In fact, he still does.

Bach & the Beatles. Though Joan Miró is now 75, the freshness and fascination with which his blue eyes see the world around him have not changed. For 60 years, he has been painting these forms—sun, moon, star, woman, man, birds, flowers, sparks. Of course he paints them in his own way—and they are instantly recognized the world over. Though he insists that he only draws what he sees, his images are usually a surreal shorthand. An asterisk denotes a star, a curlicue a snail, a cartoon figure with popeyes and a Minnie Mouse behind becomes a kind of Iberian Everyman. “I’m always in a state of dreaming,” says Miró, suggesting that his night vision discerns what others cannot see by day.

At the same time, Joan (pronounced Jo-ahn) Miró is wide awake. He rises early in the morning, puts in a quick ten minutes of exercise, by 8 a.m. is hard at work in the white stucco studio in Majorca designed for him by Architect Jose Luis Sert, in 1956. Both the studio and the 13-room, 200-year-old stone farmhouse behind it which serves Miró as an annex, are crammed with his new paintings and sculptures. Among them stand the found objects that furnish at once a touchstone to reality and the impetus to further dreams: a child’s toy ladybug, a rock with an owl’s face drawn on it, the skeleton of a bat, the mummified body of a cat, a twisted wagon tongue, a piece of the rudder of a fishing boat.

The past three years have been among the most fecund in his life. “I’m in a state of euphoria,” he reports, having completed more than 80 paintings and ten sculptures. Many of these go on view in a massive Miró exhibit that opens this week at the Maeght Foundation near Vence in Southern France. As always, he works, as he puts it, “in part by hazard; the main thing is the first breath, with great attack.”

Erotic Whimsy. What he fails to mention are the careful preparations that come before. He sketches incessantly, in the subway and even on the airplane —as he did last month when he popped across the Atlantic to pick up an honorary degree from Harvard. Much of his inspiration comes from music. “Right now I’m in a Bach mood,” he reports. “Tomorrow it could be Stockhausen. I’m very fond of the Beatles, too.” Then, after the first spontaneous burst of creation, come the months—and sometimes years—of revision. “A line,” says Miró, “has to breathe. If it doesn’t, it’s dead, and if you see a corpse, you smell it.”

Shy and never flamboyant, Miró has always been in danger of being dismissed as merely playful. Happily married, reluctant to engage in polemics, disliking grand gestures, he has never been one to charm and bedevil the public as have his fellow Spaniards Dali and Picasso. As one of the earliest and most abstract of all the surrealists, Miró was already a near-legendary figure among his fellow painters by the 1930s. But even in the 1960s, there are still critics who argue that his art is too shallow, too cheerful, too clever and, above all, too personal and too eclectic to rank as truly great.

There is increasing awareness that Miró in fact has had a far more enduring impact on the landscape of 20th century art than many critics had once suspected. The recognition comes, in part, as a result of a series of recent retrospectives in Zurich, Tokyo, London, New York, and now Los Angeles, which have brought out into the open many of his little-known works. They reveal Miró to be a remarkably diversified artist (see color pages). In the light of his full range, he stands forth today as astonishingly youthful, relevant and contemporary.

He is now seen as the spiritual forefather of postcubist movements, ranging from the gesture paintings of the abstract expressionists to the gaily erotic whimsies of such pop artists as Warhol, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg. Miró is not only the most influential painter of the generation that came to maturity between two world wars; he is also the finest living painter after Picasso.

Symbol in a Snail. Curator William S. Rubin, in his “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, went all out to pry little-known but major Mirós from private collectors. Rubin now feels that Miró’s 1925 The Birth of the World-is in many ways as significant a painting as Picasso’s first major cubist painting, the 1907 Demoiselles d’Avignon. A subtly seething, 8-ft.-high panorama, The Birth of the World, says Rubin, is “in retrospect the point of departure in modern painting,” making Miró “the major European progenitor of abstract expressionism.” As is often true with Miró paintings, the title offers a clue. It is named for the way in which it was painted, for he re-enacted, so to speak, the first chapters of Genesis. At first, he covered his canvas with spots, drips and washes. Then from this primordial chaos, he created an ordered series of lines, and sketched in sun-and moonlike heads to represent the first two primal people. Poet André Breton, spiritual spokesman for surrealism, once called Miró “the most surrealist of us all.” It is a title that he himself feels he has outgrown. “I am a free man, I hate labels,” he protests. “I am not a cyclist with a number on my back.”

Native Son. To understand Miró it is perhaps more important to remember that he is a native of Spain than to try placing him in a particular artistic movement. The Farm, finished in 1922 and bought soon afterward by Novelist Ernest Hemingway for $200 in Paris, is one of Miró’s earliest efforts to distill the essence of Spain and the way in which its savage, whimsical, passionate people still cling close to the earth. The scene depicts the farm bought by his father, a Barcelona goldsmith, at Montroig, a coastal village in Catalonia. For all its literalness, the painting is anything but realistic. By its microscopic stylization, it turns each detail, including the lizard and snail in the foreground, into a symbol. “I wanted,” recalls Miró, “to penetrate into the spirit of objects. I realized the cubists had made a great revolution, but it was strictly a plastic revolution. I wanted to go beyond the plastic aspect, to get to the spirit of the thing.”

Between 1925 and 1930, Miró tried dozens of different ways to express “the spirit of the thing.” Some ornate fantasies, like The Harlequin’s Carnival, became popular immediately, but others had to wait decades for their audiences. His 1930 Painting is as elemental and totemic as a mobile by Calder —or any painting that would be turned out by New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s.

Eventually, “getting beyond the plastic aspects” came to mean abjuring the use of paint on canvas altogether. Proclaiming that it was time “to wring the neck of painting,” Miró in the early ’30s embarked on the production of oddly haunting “poetic objects,” which were meant to suggest the improbable juxtaposition of objects that occurs in dreams. Many of his sculptures remind observers of the combines produced by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the 1950s.

Memories of Astarte. Miró has always loathed politics and avoided them. But as a Spaniard who throughout his life has spent most of each year in his native land, he was deeply embittered over the Spanish Civil War. For five months in 1936-37, he labored over one canvas, the Still Life with Old Shoe, which would, he hoped, be simple enough for the humblest Spanish peasant to appreciate. His anguish is mirrored in the lines that crisscross the face of his 1938 Self-Portrait. “I’d like,” he wrote, “to try my hand at sculpture, pottery, engraving and, by means of painting of another kind, to get in closer contact with the masses, whom I have always kept in mind.”

In the years since World War II, Miró’s partner in realizing these ambitions became Llorens Artigas, a lifelong friend and master potter. At his kilns north of Barcelona, Miró fired many ceramics, including the 1958 murals that decorate UNESCO’s Paris head quarters. He is currently working on ceramic murals for the Barcelona air port and for a West Berlin broadcasting center. He is also preparing a poster for the 1972 Olympics, and will meet this week with Japanese representatives to discuss a “laugh room” for the 1970 World’s Fair at Osaka, which he envisions as a place where visitors can amuse themselves with Miró ceramic grotesques, a fountain and Miró images on Japanese screens.

In the 1960s, Miró has also turned to huge bronze totems, cast in molds made from found objects, that brood like so many legendary rocs amid the gardens of the Maeght Foundation. One of his most recent sculptures is the massive marble Moonbird, who, in Miró’s language, is meant to suggest not only moon and bird but also woman. Moonbird summons up half-forgotten racial memories of fertility-cult objects, altars, Astarte and menhirs. In so doing it suggests the deeper roots of Joan Miró’s art. Through dream symbols and childish cartoons, through the very innocence of his spontaneous line, he poetically evokes the rhythms and the harmony of a simpler world. It is a ritual celebration of the mysterious will to create that drove man when he slept under the stars, and drives him still.

*Shown publicly only once before in the 43 years since it was painted, it will not be seen in the “Dada, Surrealism” show, which moved from New York to Los Angeles last week. The painting’s owner, Belgian Collector René Gaffe, loaned it only for the exhibit’s Manhattan appearance.