Art: The Last of the Forefathers

Joan Miró: 1893-1983

The death last week of Joan Miró, at 90, was a vivid reminder of the antiquity of modernism. The old surrealist, whose work was once so startling to received taste (a half-century ago, you did not give paintings titles like Two Figures Standing Before a Pile of Excrement without offending someone), received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church; his death was attended by the priests whom surrealism, a profoundly Catholic movement, once despised. Miró was the last of the great modernist inventors, if you concede that neither Salvador Dali nor Marc Chagall, both still alive, is quite in that league. Now they are all dead, the artists born between 1880 and 1900 who reshaped both culture and consciousness. Although it would be pious to suppose that much of Miró's work in the last 25 years of his life compared with what he made in the first 50, his passing is emblematic.

He died on the island of Mallorca, but came from Catalonia, the Spanish province whose language, humor and sights had fueled his imagination all his life. Most great art is rooted in provinciality, and Miró's was no exception. He was a city boy, a goldsmith's son, but he spent part of his youth on the farm that his parents owned at Montroig. Its white, cracked walls, dusty earth and heatstruck furrows—commemorated in lunar detail in The Farm, 1921-22—were the frame of an immense repertory of images that constituted the motifs of his art: hairs and plants, chickens and cats and snails, the moon and the dog howling at it, galumphing limbs and waggling genitals.

When Miró took up art studies in Barcelona (where one of his fellow students was the ceramicist José Lloréns Artigas, who would later become Miró's chief collaborator in sculpture), he started with the very specific, dense and playful sense of nature that only a country childhood can give.

What Miró did with this fund of imagery after he moved to Paris in 1919 marked his emergence. Miró did not need groups. He became a surrealist because surrealism needed him; it had plenty of poets but no great formal artist (as distinct from vivid dream illustrators like Dali or Magritte). Even allowing for the recent rise in the critical fortunes of André Masson, the painter who introduced Miró to the surrealist group, it still seems clear that, as a draftsman and colorist, as an inventor of epigrammatic shapes set in exquisitely pure pictorial fields, Miró had no rival within that movement.

He rejected hard-and-fast distinctions between painting and poetry. He loved words. PHOTO, announces the writing on a 1925 canvas that, being mostly blank, is clearly not a photograph; and then, around a shapeless blob of blue pigment, the wiry script declares that "this is the color of my dreams." Yearning is fixed in a depicted absence. "In my pictures there are tiny forms in vast empty spaces," Miró once explained. "Empty space, empty horizons, empty planes, everything that is stripped has always impressed me."