PROLOGUE
At certain hours in the late afternoon, when the flow of visitors begins to thin, it is a particular pleasure to wander through some of the galleries of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, those quiet rooms that house several of my favourite painters.
Only a few days ago, I paused before paintings by Joan Miró, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger, and it occurred to me that our next blog might well be devoted to these three masters of modern art, artists who managed to introduce rhythms and musical harmonies into the language of twentieth-century painting.
CHAPTER 1
Joan Miró at the Thyssen: From Cubist Edges to the Language of the Stars
Joan Miró i Ferrà (Barcelona, 1893 – Mallorca, 1983 ) was a precocious and extraordinarily gifted artist who, at the Galí Academy in Barcelona, learned to draw with a precision comparable to that of the Flemish masters of the seventeenth century. Another of his teachers, the painter Modest Urgell, instilled in the young Miró a fascination for contemplating star-filled skies and boundless horizons.
It was sixty-four works that the avant-garde Galeries Dalmau presented in Barcelona by this brilliant painter of twenty-five years of age, a lover of horizons, of stars, and of the murmur of waves gently touching the shore. Landscapes, still lifes and portraits marked by Cubist edges yet infused with Fauvist colour. Thus ended Miró’s first artistic period, just at the close of the First World War.
Two years later, he encountered Picasso in Paris, gradually moving within the Surrealist circle, yet — faithful to his absolute independence from group doctrines — he never signed the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. That same year Miró’s brushes, like the wands of conjurers, began tracing arabesques across the canvas, dissolving objects into symbols and simplifying forms into signs interlaced by subtle yet decisive playful lines.
Miró and the turbulent twentieth century
Miró was one of the protagonists of the rise of the avant-gardes — Surrealism brushed against him, but never fully absorbed him.
He endured the nightmares of wars and totalitarian regimes.
He fled to Normandy from the “green-grey troops,” commanded by enemies of his so-called “degenerate art.”
During those dark years, he imagined nocturnal cosmic iconographies crossed by birds that scatter archetypal figures of the earth-mother. His brushes once again became magic wands, drawing Constellations where stars and symbolic forms converse, crowded together in the silence of infinite spaces.
Soon Miró felt the breath of the invading army approaching. Once again, there was nothing to do but flee. Of two evils, the lesser: Francoist Spain.
And in Spain he remained until the end: forty-three years of retreat and intense creation. He prepared experimental surfaces of great intensity, produced backgrounds rich in textures and material qualities, adopted collage and mixed techniques; his sculptures resemble the dreams of a child; and the lines, colours and blacks of his paintings would weave mysterious narratives about a country oppressed — though never subdued.
Miró and the nature of art
For Miró, art had to return to the purity of its origins, an idea that guided his moral attitude toward creation. He rejected analytical Cubism for being excessively geometric and intellectual. Art, for Miró, was not a mathematical exercise.
Technical perfection — so thought the master draftsman — mattered less than the desire to create. He always placed free creative expression above artistic theory.
Any material could provoke his creative impulse: he discovered ceramics, tapestries, stained glass and mosaics. In his famous burnt canvases of 1973, he explored the transformation of matter while simultaneously criticising the monetisation of art — those who understand a painting only by the currency it commands.
For Miró, art — constant, honest work — became a refuge from the violent and difficult times of the twentieth century. Through it he managed to detach himself both from historical turmoil and from those people and criticisms that disturbed him.
Miró’s iconography and symbolic universe
Miró gradually built a highly personal and coherent symbolic repertoire that arose instinctively and stabilised around recurring forms: birds, stars, women, fields, ladders, holes, suns, snails, monsters and dismembered limbs.
His birds are messengers of freedom, introducing poetry into a world dominated by material concerns.
His stars, moons and suns are remnants of sleepless nights, crackling with energy across the space of the canvas.
The woman is mother, earth, fertility and sexuality — yet sometimes little more than a fragmented body in which eyes and mouths survive, remnants of devoured presences.
Trees, orchards, peasants, animals and moons over the countryside evoke the rural memory from which emerge those strange cosmologies that float motionless in intimate skies.
Salvador Dalí described Miró’s figures as “paranoiac images.” Perhaps that definition revealed more about Dalí himself than about Miró, who seemed able to purify the invisible and translate it into painting.
Two Miró works at the Thyssen
Catalan Peasant with Guitar, and Painting
At the time of publishing this blog, the Thyssen Museum displayed only these two works. Catalan Peasant with Guitar hangs on the first floor of the main building, while Painting appears in one of the galleries belonging to the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The distance between them is hardly oppressive; the walk is made pleasant by the multitude of beautiful paintings that capture your attention along the way.
Joan Miró — Catalan Peasant with Guitar (1924)
Miró’s Blue Cry
The date of this painting explains both the work and the artistic and social environment surrounding it.
In 1924 Miró ate little, yet he had visions. Though not wealthy, he lived in Paris and spent summers in Mont-Roig, his creative refuge and the origin of his art. In the sandy soil among carob and olive trees his footprints remained; the heat, the salt flats and the nocturnal song of cicadas would inspire paintings later executed in Paris with fingernails still metaphorically filled with the clay of Tarragona.
In that same year Miró befriended André Masson, though his innate independence prevented him from adhering to the Surrealist Manifesto. He felt particularly close to Michel Leiris, Antonin Artaud, Paul Éluard and other members of the circle of poets around Rue Blomet. Miró began abandoning figurative art in favour of the simplicity of ideographic signs that would lead him toward painting-poetry.
Meanwhile, Spain was under the whims of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, among them the repression of Catalan identity symbols. Miró denounced this situation before the international avant-garde, reaffirming his roots through the Head of a Catalan Peasant.
Thus, in 1924, Miró painted Catalan Peasant with Guitar, a figure from which almost everything is missing except the red cap — the barretina — and a single eye floating in a blue cosmic space. Music seems to envelop the painting with sardanas and contrapases, yet the guitar that sings them has dissolved into fragments of nothingness. Mironian dream-colours splash the background while black lines dominate the centre.
I do not trouble my mind searching for symbolic meanings. I prefer instead to sink my gaze into the wonderful layers, nuances, gradations, textures and pictorial qualities emerging from the intense blue of the second plane.
A group of Asian visitors — unmistakable admirers of Miró — suddenly place themselves before the painting to photograph themselves with it, barely looking at the work itself.
It is time for me to move on toward Painting.
Joan Miró — The Cry of Celotex and the Wild Painting of 1936
Miró’s Wild Paintings was a term coined by the artist himself during a period of unbearable emotional tension and fear for his personal safety.
In the months immediately preceding the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Miró sensed that his homeland no longer offered security.
The previously apolitical artist abandoned neutrality. He sided with the Republicans, who respected Catalan identity. He remembered the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and feared that what was coming would be worse. He worried about becoming a scapegoat for nationalist forces.
In 1936, Miró moved to Paris. There, he painted the mythical mural Els Segadors, the cry of a Catalan peasant before the violence and horror of the Spanish Civil War.
Painting (1936) is executed on celotex, a rough industrial fiberboard far more suitable than canvas — and less expensive — for expressing his visceral anguish in a raw, almost prehistoric manner, evoking the Magdalenian painters of Altamira, who had fascinated him in his youth.
Pessimism permeates the painting. Dark colours, black drawings and white stains confront one another in a nightmarish atmosphere. On the left appears a sketch of a monstrous human form capable of provoking dreadful hallucinations. On the right an hourglass seems to prophesy a long period of total darkness.
It would not feel inappropriate to contemplate this painting while listening to the furious atonal music of Edgard Varèse.
I take leave of Joan Miró, thinking that he found consolation in his refuge at Mont-roig, working tirelessly and in silence. During his moments of rest, he surely enjoyed the austere harmonies of his friend Erik Satie, and perhaps — why not — cheerful sardanas performed by local coblas that filled him with optimism and peace.
A few meters away from Painting, I catch sight of a self-portrait by Lyonel Feininger.
I sense that he is waiting for me.
Without hesitation, I walk toward it.
TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER 2:
Lyonel Feininger — The Professor of Prismatic Cubism
