Peter Schjeldahl on Joan Miro at the MoMA (from today's New Yorker)
Angry Young Man
Joan Miró at MOMA.
“I want to assassinate painting,” Joan Miró is reported to have said, in 1927. Four years later, the Catalan modern master elaborated, in an interview: “I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.” (He is quoted, along similar lines, as having put the Cubists on notice: “I will break their guitar.”) Brave words, for a painter. I want to assassinate painting,” Joan Miró is reported to have said, in 1927. Four years later, the Catalan modern master elaborated, in an interview: “I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.” (He is quoted, along similar lines, as having put the Cubists on notice: “I will break their guitar.”) Brave words, for a painter. Miró, who first came to Paris in 1920, when he was twenty-six, plainly enjoyed indulging in the slash-and-burn attitudinizing of the avant-garde, despite being essentially a plain man, of equable temperament. He had reason to think that he meant it, and not just because he was of the generation that, in the wake of the high-minded slaughter of the First World War, was disgusted with European civilization. Fustian brought out the best in him. An eventful show now at the Museum of Modern Art, “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937,” explores dizzyingly rapid-fire, experimental developments in the artist’s work, influenced by Dadaism, Surrealism, and the savage materialism of the writer Georges Bataille. (In no other period was the ingenuously intuitive Miró so receptive to intellectual impetus.) With cultivated “automatist” spontaneity, he worked on raw canvas, copper, and the recently invented Masonite; employed gross materials, including sand and tar; made thoroughly abstract pictures; and hatched funky varieties of collage and assemblage, whose influence would extend to Robert Rauschenberg. It’s not his fault—or is it?—that the show leaves an impression of being distant and dated, and strangely tame.
Miró was born in Barcelona, in 1893. His father, a goldsmith and a watchmaker in the era of Barcelona’s prominence as a hub of Art Nouveau architecture and design, insisted that his son pursue a practical career. After two years as an accounts clerk, Miró had some sort of nervous breakdown, which won him permission to go his own way. A rebellious student in Barcelona’s art academies, he emulated Cézanne, Fauvism, and Cubism, and thrilled to the dash of the Futurist manifestos. In a letter he wrote while miserably serving in the Spanish Army (having been conscripted in 1915), Miró hymned modernity: “Let’s transplant the primitive soul to ultramodern New York, inject his soul with the noise of the subway, of the ‘el,’ and may his brain become a long street of buildings 224 stories high. . . . Down with Rome, down with Venice and all that has been.” A key phrase there is “the primitive soul.” Miró identified with Catalan folk traditions, which became the anchor of his first mature works, including “The Farm” (1921-22), a phantasmagoria of boldly outlined rustic details, which was bought and praised by Ernest Hemingway. (It’s now a treasure of the National Gallery in Washington.) In Paris, where Miró was embraced by André Breton’s Surrealist movement, he developed the image repertoire of brightly colored blobs and squiggles, overlaid with sharp linear glyphs, which became his trademark. Among his closest colleagues were Max Ernst, Jean Arp, and André Masson. With Ernst, in 1926, he collaborated on a production of “Romeo and Juliet” by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—an accommodation to
haut bourgeois taste that provoked Breton and the poet Louis Aragon to denounce both artists, in a handbill distributed at the première, for having “abandoned their class.” The attack wounded Miró, but he was unrepentant. The event seems to have fuelled his anarchic fury at the onset of the decade covered by the MoMA show.
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