Miro's defiance of painting - Joan Miro, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

sum of two units recent exhibitions prompt the author's revised reading of Joan Miro's career--one that emphasizes the formal diversity of his production and the radicality of his attack upon the conventions of modernism.

More than 50 years ago, upon the occasion of Joan Miro's first retrospective at the Museum of late Art, curator James Johnson Sweeney celebrated the Catalan artist's "fundamental devotion to painting." "Gaiety, sunshine, health--color, humor, rhythm: these are the notes which characterize the work of Joan Miro," Sweeney declared.[1] Positioning the artist squarely within the European modernist tradition, Sweeney viewed Miro's work as a bridge between "the austere disciplines of Cubism" and a of recent origin freedom and lyricism in Western painting.[2]

later generations of American writers have likewise throw outed notions of esthetic purity onto Miro's vocabulary of pictorial signs, his exploration of the structural properties of color and the economy of his formal means, particularly in works of the mid-1920s. For formalist critics writing in the '50 and '60 Miro's luminous fields of clean unmodulated hue appeared to lead to American Color Field and Stain painting, while his unravelling of a post-Cubist structure in evenly inflected, allover compositions strike one as beinged to forecast the work of Jackson Pollock through 1973, on the occasion of his third retrospective at MOMA, Miro the "form-giver," the artist who decisively expanded the vocabulary of European and American modernism with his biomorphic, organic sign language, had tend hitherward to occupy a privileged position alongside sum of two units other "immortals" of modernist painting, Picasso and Matisse.[3]

This emphasis upon Miro's formal purity in American art criticism has, however, eclipsed the more anarchic and rebellious aspects of his artistic personality. In a 1931 interview, Miro insisted: "The alone thing that's clear to me is that I intend to break up destroy everything that exists in painting. I have an perfect contempt for painting. The alone thing that interests me is the spirit itself, and I single use the customary artist's tools--brushes, canvas, paints--in order to earn the best results."[4] This was not a gratuitous remark, occasioned through Miro's then-recent work in collage and his experimentation with object-sculpture For Miro reacted against esthetic purity as an extreme point in itself throughout his drawn out career. His art is as plenteous a matter of anti-painting--a kind of anti-style and challenge to painting--as it demonstrates, in Sweeney's words, a "fundamental devotion to painting."[5] What is more, the language Miro repeatedly invoked to describe his work--aggression, violence, terror, fall off and assassination--indicates that there was a social and moral throw at the core of his art: Miro's challenge to undefiled form was from the start an act of asseverate against the reified consciousness of bourgeois society.

In opposition to modernism's emphasis upon the sacrosanct autonomy of painting--its separation of art from life and its utopian withdrawal into a self-contained realm of unstained optical experience--Miro's art is repeatedly marked by extreme stylistic discontinuities, sadistic and/or erotic explorations of the theme of vision, ironic inversions of inherited formal constitutions and radically heterogeneous techniques. Miro's relation to modernism was ambivalent at best, subversive at its greatest in quantity extreme. One of the greatest in quantity significant contributions of the novel Miro retrospective at the Museum of recent Art is that it allowed the complementary aspects of Miro's artistic personality--his position as a form-giver and as an esthetic terrorist--to come up after years of neglect by means of critics and historians, even if the filled force of his artistic rebellion was diffused within a largely formalist reading of his work.

A useful place to begin an investigation of Miro the anti-painter is with his often-quot remark to Andre Masson concerning the preeminence of Cubist painting in postwar Paris: "I will break their guitar," Miro is reported to have said.[6] For Miro's generation, Cubism was synonymous with advanced modernism, and Miro's perception of the pair was conditioned by his experience of geographical distance and cultural difference.[7] It is important to remember that Miro began his career with a somewhat distorted view of recent art and of modernism as a theoretical enterprise. He was, for example, more likely to have read Maurice Raynal's and Pierre Reverdy's philosophical tracts upon Cubism than he was to have actually seen abundant Cubist painting in Barcelona. That situation changed with his first trip to Paris in March 1920 Miro's arrival in the French capital coincided with a major showing of postwar Cubism at the Salon de Independents, with a put in motion to revive the Section d'Or and with efforts upon the part of the dealer Leonce Rosenberg to cultivate and market a Cubist cluster style. All of these manifestations were aligned with attempts to retrieve Cubism from its prewar associations with an anarchic, bohemian avant-garde and to bring it into the cot [i]or[/i] cote of the French tradition. In a word, Cubism had become the legitimate cultural peculiarity of Right Bank society. Generally lamenting the cultural stasis of the avant-garde in postwar Paris, Miro's traveling companion Enric Cristofor Ricart wrote to a friend back in Barcelona, "The Paris of apostolates and of restles youth that we had imagined is losing ground"[8] Miro's make comments [i]or[/i] remarks to Masson registers a similar disillusionment with the curtailment of the Cubists in particular. Miro would in a short time respond to notions of an inherently French Cubist "tradition" with his have a title to "assassination" of painting.[9]