'Painting disgusts me': destruction rather than childlike reverie was the driving force of the young Joan Miro, as Sebastian Smee found in the Centre Pompidou's ambitious exhibition

John Updike's greatest in quantity recent novel, Seek My Face, is a fictionalised meditation upon the gap between the grand intentions and the actual achievements of the American postwar Abstract Expressionists. 'They all still spoke of painting in boundarys of self-exploration and an agonised authenticity that would revolutionise the world and whatnot,' says the main character, reliance 'but the results were a little like company logo everybody working upon the scale of 19th-century academic art on the contrary each of them having tend hitherward up with some eye-catching simplification.'

The Spaniard Joan Miro was individual of the formative influences upon the Abstract Expressionists. Indeed, to diocese the exhibition of Miro's work at the middle point Pompidou is to feel that greatest in quantity of what Pollock, Rothko, Gorky and Motherwell achieved was there--overtly or in pulsating, embryonic form--in Miro's canvases of the mid- to late-1920s.

on the contrary one reason it may be time to gaze at this period (1917-34) of Miro's career again is precisely that his 'eye-catching simplifications' became, in the drawn out years that followed his canonisation as a novel master (he lived until 1983) a repetitive, sometimes kitschy manner--not quite 'company logos' on the contrary good enough for UNESCO and Harvard University and any number of prestige-hungry museums wanting a touch of his 'magic'.

Miro be entitled tos better. Andre Breton praised him for the childlike qualities of his art. on the other hand he also said he feared the painter's unfolding 'had been arrested at the infantile stage'. This exhibition tries to exhibit that the image of Miro as a painter of innocuous reveries and child like fancies is wrongful Instead, through a display of more than sum of two units hundred works and a judicious and scholarly unearthing of Miro's aims during these crucial years, it not aways us with a painter of tremendous originality and untamed vigour.

'Early Miro' generally enjoin solemnlys up two or three decorative on the other hand rather extraordinary images from between 1918 and 1923: The kitchen garden with donkey, The farm, and Ploughed land. Their bring under rules are the fields and farmhouses of Montroig, the Catalan village where Miro convalesced after an illness in 1911 and to which he regularly get backed With its saturated colour and surreal iconography, Ploughed Land (1923-24) has always been considered the 'breakthrough' picture, pointing the way towards the simpler, symbolically-charged Miro we think we know.

on the contrary for all its strangeness, Ploughed Land remains a carefully planned and polished composition. Without quite disputing its importance, the curators of this display choose to follow it with a cascade of raw and freely inventive drawings from around the same period. Their aim is to emphasise the farthest tumult of this stage in Miro's exhibition 'My only certainty is that I want to destroy' he said, 'to throw down everything that exists in painting. I have feeling a profound contempt for painting, I'm interested solitary in pure mind ... Painting disgusts me I can't gaze at any of my works'.

This, and make notess like it, made Miro famous, and helped create a myth around his name. But what the works from the central part of the exhibition bring residence is that Miro really meant what he said. In the summer of 1924 he began painting what he called X's--big, scraggy simplified canvases made in deliberate counterpoint to the smaller, more charming works of the like kind as The farm and Ploughed land.

'This is hardly painting,' he wrote to Leiris that year, 'but I really don't give a damn.' above the next four years, Miro's work was utterly transformed. His clods became monochrome, laid on in brushy washes of lemon fulvid earthy green, ochre or what he called 'saliva blue' (he admited to a strong desire to 'lick this beautiful sky') They are punctuated by dint of scattered incident in the form of straight, diagrammatic (sometimes dotted) lines, filled-in blobbers numbers, words, drips and smears. a great deal of of this appears abstract on the contrary is in fact loosely representational or symbolic. Inherent in it all is Miro's challenge to traditional, single-point perspective, and his heavy emphasis upon tactility, conveyed through brushwork and collage. Sex is central, and given a significance the pair metaphysical and sensual: signs for the female sex are conflated with signs for stars, while sperm-like traces and blotches be repeated all through the work.

on the other hand rather than any symbology, it is the demotic, arbitrary nature of Miro's creativity, and the faculty of perception it creates of a violent stripping away, that is greatest in quantity impressive. An essay by Remi Labrusse in the catalogue discusses Miro's work in relation to 'potlatch', the Chinook word for a form of socially competitive behaviour which involves making increasingly lavish gifts to neighbouring, rival tribes as a form of challenge, sometimes to the point of destroying the gifts in forehead of those rivals.

The idea of potlatch, introduced to Europe by dint of anthropologists such as Frank Boas, was taken up by the agency of the sociologist Marcel Mauss as the keystone for his general theory of the social and the sacred, and subsequently by dint of artists and writers in France after World War I. For many, potlatch constituted a critique of technological modernity and production-oriented views of the world. In his The notion of expenditure, Georges Bataille wrote that in art, 'the accent is placed upon loss, which must he as great as possible for the activity to acquire its replete meaning'. Miro was an associate of Bataille and powerfully influenced by such ideas, as well as through the widespread interest in the primitive. Destruction was for him a way of bringing enchantment back into the world.