Art: Voyager into Indeterminate Space

A Joan Miró retrospective in Washington

Art historians have never been comfortable with Joan Miró. A surrealist? The admirers of Dali or Magritte would not agree. An abstractionist? Miró says he never painted an abstraction in his life. Everything "is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else," he insists. The Miró admirers who have now mounted a selection of 45 of his paintings at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum have another proposition: Miró is simply a great painter. Says Hirshhorn Director Abram Lerner: "Miró's place is alongside the most fertile of those giants —Picasso and Matisse."

The show, which moves to Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery in June, supports this notion, embracing as it does nearly every period in Miró's long career (he was 87 last week). The angular planes of Standing Nude, 1918, for example, show that the young goldsmith's son, painting in Barcelona, had already studied reproductions of the works of the cubists in Paris. Because of World War I, Miró could not get to Paris himself until 1919. By then he was 26 and a determined individualist: he remained very much the hedgehog (who knew one big thing) amidst the gabbling foxes (who knew many things) of Paris' cafés. He returned to Spain to paint The Farm, 1921-22, which proved he was not too intimidated by his Paris experience: though it had the cubists' flat composition, it was detailed with the intimate knowledge only a farm boyhood could achieve. Ernest Hemingway, who bought the painting, wrote appreciatively: "It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there."

A lesser man could have made a career out of repeating a style of such individuality (Raoul Dufy? Vlaminck?). But once Miró had perfected it, he abandoned it. In a transformation as abrupt as Picasso's switch from the soft-edged, attenuated figures of his blue period to the African ferocities of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Miró launched into his "dream paintings." These were derived partly from his fascination with his new surrealist friends in Paris, Breton and Eluard, and their talk of dream imagery, free association, irrational juxtaposition. And partly from plain hunger. As Miró explains, "Sometimes I hadn't had any supper. I saw things ... I saw shapes in the chinks in the walls and shapes on the ceiling." Typical of this period is Carnival of Harlequin, 1924-25, which squirms with a profusion of shapes—a black, writhing snake with a huge white-gloved hand where its head should be; a startled cat's face in search of a proper body; a jack-in-the-box with bee's wings.

From Miró's poet friends ("I make no distinction between poetry and painting") came other images that he painted and then made unforgettable, such as Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926, a magical vision of a comic canine that never was reaching hopelessly toward a moon that could never be (and has a face).