Art, Hiking and Travel in Japan - Joan Miro: 1918-1945 - Setagaya Art Museum - Tokyo

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Joan Miro: 1918-1945

Museums like shows of big name artists because they always draw well-paying crowds. Miro is one such artist. In 1964 influential modern art critic Michael Fried called him "among the finest painters of the past 100 years." The public, too, likes Miro, especially his poetic surrealism—wobbly biomorphic shapes swimming around in giant color fields. The problem is, such postcard-popular artists often lead to postcard-quality exhibitions—little to write home about.

Joan Miro, Interior (Farmer's Wife),
1922-23, oil on canvas, 81 x 65.5cm,
Musée National d'Art Moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
(Photo: ©CNAC/MNAM/distributed
by Sekai Bunka)

Not this show. Compiled from the most important international collections, "Miro: 1918-1945" traces the artist's early development and experimentation through 80 of his best paintings, etchings and drawings. Serious fans have much to like and amoeba admirers won't be disappointed.

Born (1893) and raised in Barcelona, Miro studied the Fauves, van Gogh, Cezanne and other turn-of-the-century artists. Landscapes and portraits from 1915-1918 display his range of talent and ability to impersonate and extend these popular styles (the Rousseau- esque farm scenes are especially nice).

Miro's interest in the vibrant Paris art scene led him to the City of Lights in 1919. There, he met artists like Picasso, the Dadaists and the Surrealists (writer Andre Breton would call him "the greatest surrealist of us all"). Miro picked up ideas from this milieu but remained independent, experimenting extensively throughout the 1920s. Works here show his oscillation between representation and abstraction and his attacks on the surface of his paintings—punched holes, scraped lines and excisions.

Several paintings entitled Spanish Dancer offer an example. The first, in 1921, is a fairly straightforward, if wooden, representational portrait like you might see advertising Senora Cordoba's flamenco class. Only three years later, in 1924, the figure has been reduced to a diagram of movement on white paper: a sinuous line of red dots, and a black zigzag with a small blob radiating squiggly lines on top. By 1928, the dancer, still a diagram, has evolved into a collage of sandpaper, photo and pencil.

Joan Miro, Spanish Dancer (Olée),
1924, oil on canvas, 92 x 73cm,
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de
Belgique, Brussels. (©Succession
Miro/ADAGP, Paris & JVACS,
Tokyo, 2002)

There are many other unique or unexpected pieces—a 1924 play on Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase where the figure is a French postage stamp, a 1925 nearly monochromatic blue painting with the smallest black and white daub in the corner, a bold 1937 stencil on paper used as an ad to help aid the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.

There aren't many of Miro's well-known large canvases in this exhibition. Curator Etsuko Sugiyama says one reason is that during this period Miro lacked the fame and fortune necessary to afford a big studio. The large paintings that are on view, like Painting (Circus Horse) and La Fornarina (After Raphael) both from the late 1920s, are exemplary if idiosyncratic.

This show ends with a roomful of paintings in Miro's characteristic style. Unusual, dynamic, symbolic, yes. But Miro resisted the term "abstract." His painting was, in fact, often representation by another name. Art critic John Richardson recounts a conversation with a high-society collector in his Miro biography, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice": "'Don't you love our Miro?' she said. 'We've keyed the color of the room to it because our little girl loves it so much.' Did this woman realize, I wondered, that the pink balloon the male figure brandished was a penis and the black starfish was a vagina and the configuration in the corner represented a Catalan peasant taking a shit?"

The Joan Miro: 1918-1945 exhibition was held Aug-Sept 2002 at the Setagaya Art Museum in Kinuta Koen (Yoga), Tokyo, Japan.