There is a clear difference between a real naive artist and a fake naive artist. True naivety is where you start: finding your way, exploring, experimenting, and discovering your voice. The false gullible is cunning, seeking approval under the guise of arrogance and superiority. Joan Miro is the real article and remained so throughout his life. He played like a child, and paintings and colors were his tools. Louise Bourgeois, who knew him, wrote of his character that “He was who he was and did not pretend or want to be anyone else. He believed in himself, which is a great compliment. He really accepted himself. In a true naïve there is no contradiction between person and action. Miro was his work.”
This is also an apt description of Miró’s paintings, which exude childlike wonder. When you see the 50 pieces in Phillips’ collection in “Miró and the United States,” you can’t help but be filled with the same wonder. I heard laughter in the galleries and enthusiastic discussions, a sure sign of liveliness. His works are not the silent works of Rothko or the shimmering spaces of Frankenthaler, which also appear in the exhibition. Miro’s paintings burst with joy and vitality, and the joy is contagious. They simply make you happy.
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“Miro and the United States“ |
But Miro doesn’t mess around. He follows the flow of his play with shapes, drips, spots, smears, thin lines and swirls, dancing with colour. He had been talking with Marx and was aware of what they could represent. This is movement in two dimensions, and you watch, often giddy, of Miro’s invention. Take him Horoscopes series. These 22 paintings (hand-coloured stencils) were created between 1940 and 1941 on paper from his oil and gouache paintings, and decorate one gallery in a straight line, uniform in size and frame. You travel along the line, seeing flying shapes of fish, women, birds, acrobats, stars, ladders, and snails. The paintings provided Miro with a respite from the horrors of war, which forced him to flee France after the German invasion in World War II. He valued it so much that he carried the top ten in his bag as he fled. They and those who would follow were finalized on his family’s farm in Monttroig, Spain. The series premiered in New York at the gallery of Pierre Matisse, his agent, and was sold out. “The opinion is unanimous,” Matisse wrote to Miró, “and the public finds your exhibition admirable.” The abundance of the work lies not only in the paintings themselves, but also in their titles: A woman with blonde armpits combs her hair in the starlight, Nightingale’s song at midnight and morning rain, Women at the edge of a lake become iridescent due to the passing of a swan, The pink dusk caresses the sex of woman and bird. Again and again, the work passes as an evocation of joy, and the artist’s joy generates your joy.
The Phillips Collection exhibition accompanies works by many of Miró’s contemporaries who were in New York during his visits to the United States, and his influence on their works is clear. According to curator Elsa Smithgall, she and her team searched for the best examples of artists who had a strong connection to Miró’s creative methods, vision and/or aspects of his formal language. Our desire was to have a vibrant mix and include not only well-known artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Louise Bourgeois who have established links with Miró, but also Lee Krasner, Peter Miller, Sonia Sekula, and Alice Trumbull. Mason, among others, for whom the relationship with Miro is not explored. An important aspect of the exhibition was to shed greater light on the many women artists who were deeply engaged with Miró’s work and ideas, but whose contributions were not always at the forefront in narratives of postwar modernism.
There is an expansive, meandering, exploratory feel to the show, much like Miro’s work. You enter via a sweeping staircase into a large first room painted New York State blue, and through several small galleries that invite wandering. “The exhibition brings together many voices that aim to embody the spirit of experimentation,” Smithgall added. “As visitors ascend the spiral staircase, they are surprised by some of Miró’s sculptural works before finding at the top of the stairs two mobiles, a wire photograph of Miró, and, through the corridor, a small mobile stable – all designed by Alexander Calder. The exhibition unfolds chronologically with Miró’s art as a leitmotif in each room.”
Experiencing an artist’s works chronologically is always an added pleasure, as you can follow their development. Miró’s beloved and gruesome self-portrait painted from 1937 to 1960 has been reworked. The end result captures the essence of the man. The oil and pencil drawing on canvas features a dense dark graffiti background with its distinctive shapes, delicately shaded in fine detail. Above the top is a thick, round black circle for the head with three sprouting fatty black hairs, two large black circles for the eyes and two lines connecting two curves for the body, with small circles of light pink, blue, yellow and red. It’s a child’s depiction of the body, and it’s a real naivete.
This is an expansive and important exhibition that provides an exciting demonstration of Miró’s importance and influence on American artists. As Barnett Newman said after seeing an exhibition of Miro’s gouache in 1945, “Miro is a pioneer in a new field that will change the face of art for many years to come.” His work continues to excite.
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