One cannot but think of the artist contemplating his own passing, though he was to live on until Christmas Day 1983, dying at 90, having seen the first socialist government come into power since the civil war. The three-part painting is dominated by a line that sighs and falls with faltering resignation, percussive scribbles of colour like memories about to pass, and a thin rain of flicked paint. Later, in the 1973 triptych The Hope of a Condemned Man, Miró alluded to the execution of the young Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich, garrotted in prison that same year. They're based on playwright Alfred Jarry's cowardly dictator Pére Ubu as much as Franco and his generals.Ī series of copper panels from 1936 sees exquisitely nasty, lurid figures squirm and gesticulate, show off their sex organs and pontificate in arid landscapes (in one case, in front of a pile of excrement), filled with disgust and a loathsome sexuality. In his long Barcelona series of lithographs, conceived around 1940 but only printed in 1944, Miró depicts buffoonish, highly sexualised but impotent ogres menacing innocents across a suite of 50 prints. He could never escape his wit and energy and ribaldry, though at times this was mixed with a profound anger. Whatever formal and sometimes theatrical murders Miró perpetrated on his art – at one point dousing paintings in kerosene and setting fire to them, just like Yves Klein - you feel Miró's heart wasn't entirely in it. With the best of his work, I too feel genuinely lifted, transported, energised, though I just feel deadened looking at his murals and public sculptures, the endless prints, that overly jolly logo he devised for the La Caixa savings bank. In Spain's newly emerging democracy, Miró's art felt symbolic, both of resistance to Franco's state and of the new freedoms that were coming into being. We have almost lost our faith in the redemptive powers of art. ![]() Nowadays this sort of talk sounds a bit quaint. In 1979, four years after Franco's death, he said in a speech at Barcelona University that "being able to say something, when the majority of people do not have the option of expressing themselves, obliges this voice to be in some way prophetic … When an artist speaks in an environment in which freedom is difficult, he must turn each of his works into a negation of the negations, in an untying of all oppressions, all prejudices, and all the false established values." Miró never did succeed in killing painting, that walking corpse that still refuses to lie down and take it quietly. Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape brings us his art not just in its most characteristic guises – playful, childlike, direct – but attempts to bring out Miró the "international Catalan" and internal exile in Franco's Spain Miró the political artist and the avant-garde surrealist and modernist who wanted – so he once said – to assassinate painting. This work, along with three other late, large triptychs, is now being shown in two beautifully installed octagonal rooms towards the end of a new retrospective at Tate Modern. I imagine Miró holding his breath as he draws, and I hold mine too as I look. You can feel the vitality of Miró's line from your head to your toes, your hand clenching and unclenching in your pocket, somehow feeling in your own body the artist's concentration – the tensing of his wrist, the movement of his hand – as you follow the line on its way to nowhere. There is a palpable difference between a line that's alive and tense and somehow natural, and one that dies like a bum note. It is a daft idea, to paint just a skinny wandering line across such a big canvas. ![]() The recluse of the title might be the artist himself, painting one afternoon with the shutters closed against the brightness of the day in his studio on the island of Mallorca, during the month that the students rioted in Paris and General Franco still ruled Spain. Or like a long hair lost in the bedsheets, a memory of something or someone. You can tell where the slender brush has run out of paint, is recharged, then continues on its way with the same unknowable purpose, like the passage of an ant or a bird in flight, or the journey the eye makes along a horizon. Each enormous canvas is painted with a single black line over an unevenly primed white ground. There's nothing much to the three white canvases. ![]() W henever I have been to the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona – and I have visited Josep Lluís Sert's lovely building on Montjuïc many times over the last quarter-century – I try to see Miró's great 1968 triptych Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |