Painting: Father for Today

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The sun blazes on Majorca for ten months of the year. It lights the baked forms with a harsh kind of super-reality. The sallow leaves 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."