[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: November 10, 2008]
The capacious Miró show, "Painting and Anti-Painting: 1927-1937" which currently monopolizes MOMA's entire 5th Floor (which regulary has space for two blockbusters) is not only exciting but profoundly illuminating.
Large in scale, but wisely limited in scope, the exhibition confines itself to twelve series of works produced by the Catalan artist during the decade he devoted to the "assassination of painting": 1927-1937.
The violence in the expression of the theme doubtless reflects the influence of the Surrealists with whom he associated in Paris during this period. The movement's leader, Breton, had remarked that the "simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd". Cutting the throat of the old masters seems mild in comparison.
Certainly, there's an undercurrent of anger and aggression in these works, which might startle those who know Miró primarily as a painter of pleasurable not-quite-abstract fantasies of birds and stars floating through sandy red and warm blue pictorial space. There are works which are bound to strike the viewer as atypical, and there are also connections to be drawn with later artists.
In fact, the first thing I mumbled under my breath as I entered the show was - unexpectedly - "Cy Twombly?" Miró's brute, sardonic assault on painterly conventions at the end of the 1920s sees him scribbling and writing on tan, unprimed canvases. "Head" (1927) is a blunt takedown of portrait painting; another work from the same series simply shows painterly perspective as a series of diagonal lines ending at a crudely drawn square with splodges standing in for the ultimate painting. "Bullfighter" (1927) was literally relevatory - the toreador is reduced to a simple cross with a dot of a head, a cape hanging from the vertical line. I own a Miró print featuring this figure, and I'd previously taken it to be no more than an abstract structuring device.
There are twelve distinct series of works in this show. The next chronologically - "Spanish Dancers" uses collage to break down traditions of figuration. In one light, witty combination, the dancer is nothing more than a pin, a cork and a feather. In the Dutch masters series, the curator might have assisted us by showing reproductions of the paintings Miró worked from; nevertheless, the trajectory of the work is clear, again demolishing the ornamental literalism of formal portraits and interiors and developing his own distinctive, alternative visual short-hand. I started to think of it as a kind of reverse engineering ("deconstruction" is an abused term), taking apart his models to discover the working pieces; putting them together again in a manner which seems to make a satirical, perhaps political statement (Queen Louise reduced to a collar and a shape based on a diesel engine, for example).
This technique continues in a series of playful, flowing arrangements of apparently organic, apparently abstract shapes, actually based on examples of technical drawing displayed, as Miró intended, alongside the paintings. The strength of this show is the way in which it begins to provide a visual key for Miró's later, seemingly free and decorative abstracts.
The landscapes from the '30s reminded me of Twombly again - an artist engaged in assassinating Abstract Expressionism as surely as Miró was attacking figurative conventions. Impatiently, almost angrily, Miró fills the background with pencil scrawls: mountains become brisk, jagged zigzags, trees puffs of green paint. Another wonderful series of works in a side gallery consists of smaller paintings on masonite and copper created under the shadow of impending civil war. Distorted, strained figures; aggressive coloring.
By 1936, Miró is staining his canvases with tar, sand and gravel - textural gestures later recalled by fellow Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies. But if there's a touchstone for the show's final painting, an ominously glowing still life featuring, among other things, an unlaced shoe, it's Van Gogh. This painting, "Still Life with Old Shoe" is little short of a psychedelic freak-out. It's not the comfortable, decorative Miró we know. Perhaps the echo of Van Gogh's shoes is only to be found in my imagination. But it's a fitting end for a series of works in which an artist brings fathomless passion and great resources of invention, color and symbolic imagination, to the destruction and restoration of his tradition.
A show to see at least once, and probably several times, and you have until January 12. MOMA lets you do it online here.
