Joan Miro: THE LADDER OF ESCAPE: Tate Modern: April 2011
Joan Miro: THE LADDER OF ESCAPE: Tate Modern: April 2011
Joan Miro (1893-1983) is the least known of Spain’s twentieth-century triumvirate of great artists: Picasso, Dali, Miro. This is the first retrospective of Miro in London since 1964, quite a long time then since any notable interest in Miro’s work, but now he is clearly a part of history rather than making it. Miro’s career straddled two centuries, born in the late 19th century but living into the latter part of the twentieth, he witnessed the great conflagration of the Spanish Civil War but also the Great War and WW2.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Miro’s response to it shaped his career as it did Picasso’s and Dali’s to a lesser extent. Furthermore his career went on after the fall of the Republic and his subsequent exile. Miro’s approach to art was to dissolve his own formal constraints once he had attained them, therefore his work passed through a kind of negative evolution from complexity to utter simplicity to bold late anti-art statements which he, being Miro could formulate and complete. A younger artist would have been laughed out of any art gallery for presenting such works. There are recurrent symbols, such as the ladder symbolizing philosophical propositions perhaps to be discarded once they are surmounted, a dog barking at the moon symbolizing futility, or a Catalan peasant’s cap summoning up Miro’s connection to the forces of Catalan language and nationalism, a nationalism ultimately suppressed by General Franco. Franco insisted on authoritarian rule by Madrid’s Cortes, suppression of regionalism, alternate language or nationalist movements and, of course, repression of the Left. These forces were mostly represented by the cities of Barcelona and Madrid, the regions of Catalunya and El Pais Basco. Miro’s influences were the German-French painter, poet, sculptor Jean Arp (1886-1966), the surrealist Andre Masson (1896-1987), Paul Eluard (1895-1952) co-founder of the surrealist movement and Andre Breton (1896-1966) principal initiator of the surrealist movement.
Miro’s art evolved from plastic post-realism to more politically conscious work in the Franco era plus Catalan Modernism, an art closely connected to Miro’s Catalan roots but also representing a cosmopolitan consciousness and intellectual awareness extending far beyond Catalunya. Miro’s work is quite liquid yet also conceptual. Artists usually create depth of field through their use of the rules of perspective but in Miro’s early work colour contrasts create depth but also intimate a cold, abstractness devoid of strong feeling. In his later stark canvases, a single colour, usually a cold blue but sometimes a red or yellow, dominate the canvas alongside one or two black dots. It is as if Miro had discovered colour again in the post-Renaissance era. In later life Miro exhibited rarely in Spain, his preferred art locations being Paris and New York. He seems to have disowned Spain as a recalcitrant, backwards dump shunned by most politically aware people. Spain’s isolation and Miro’s painful political progress meant that Spanish people were unable to share in or even truly appreciate their own artistic heritage.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London
Joan Miro (1893-1983) is the least known of Spain’s twentieth-century triumvirate of great artists: Picasso, Dali, Miro. This is the first retrospective of Miro in London since 1964, quite a long time then since any notable interest in Miro’s work, but now he is clearly a part of history rather than making it. Miro’s career straddled two centuries, born in the late 19th century but living into the latter part of the twentieth, he witnessed the great conflagration of the Spanish Civil War but also the Great War and WW2.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Miro’s response to it shaped his career as it did Picasso’s and Dali’s to a lesser extent. Furthermore his career went on after the fall of the Republic and his subsequent exile. Miro’s approach to art was to dissolve his own formal constraints once he had attained them, therefore his work passed through a kind of negative evolution from complexity to utter simplicity to bold late anti-art statements which he, being Miro could formulate and complete. A younger artist would have been laughed out of any art gallery for presenting such works. There are recurrent symbols, such as the ladder symbolizing philosophical propositions perhaps to be discarded once they are surmounted, a dog barking at the moon symbolizing futility, or a Catalan peasant’s cap summoning up Miro’s connection to the forces of Catalan language and nationalism, a nationalism ultimately suppressed by General Franco. Franco insisted on authoritarian rule by Madrid’s Cortes, suppression of regionalism, alternate language or nationalist movements and, of course, repression of the Left. These forces were mostly represented by the cities of Barcelona and Madrid, the regions of Catalunya and El Pais Basco. Miro’s influences were the German-French painter, poet, sculptor Jean Arp (1886-1966), the surrealist Andre Masson (1896-1987), Paul Eluard (1895-1952) co-founder of the surrealist movement and Andre Breton (1896-1966) principal initiator of the surrealist movement.
Miro’s art evolved from plastic post-realism to more politically conscious work in the Franco era plus Catalan Modernism, an art closely connected to Miro’s Catalan roots but also representing a cosmopolitan consciousness and intellectual awareness extending far beyond Catalunya. Miro’s work is quite liquid yet also conceptual. Artists usually create depth of field through their use of the rules of perspective but in Miro’s early work colour contrasts create depth but also intimate a cold, abstractness devoid of strong feeling. In his later stark canvases, a single colour, usually a cold blue but sometimes a red or yellow, dominate the canvas alongside one or two black dots. It is as if Miro had discovered colour again in the post-Renaissance era. In later life Miro exhibited rarely in Spain, his preferred art locations being Paris and New York. He seems to have disowned Spain as a recalcitrant, backwards dump shunned by most politically aware people. Spain’s isolation and Miro’s painful political progress meant that Spanish people were unable to share in or even truly appreciate their own artistic heritage.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London
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