Even casual visitors to art museums easily recognize works by Joan Miro (1893-1983). An early Surrealist who also experimented with Cubist techniques, Miro’s abstractions almost always have recognizable figurative elements–birds, insects, animals, humans–and they are characterized by whimsical charm, a sense of playfulness, and brilliant use of color.
Weinstein Gallery has assembled a first-rate selection of works by this modern master, including paintings, works on paper, and original prints. Included are both lesser known and landmark pieces such as Femme au Miroir whose bright primary colors and use of black are markers that are frequently present in the artist’s work. These are joyous, cheerful works, rarely displaying contemporary angst, with the occasional exception such as the watercolor and crayon Femme dans la Nuit, whose head is turned skyward with mouth open, seemingly railing at the universe. The connection to similar images by Picasso is strong.
While the flattened perspective used by some of Miro’s contemporaries (e.g., Matisse) is most often attributed to the influence of Japanese prints, Miro found his inspiration closer to home. The Catalan chapels that he saw in the Museum of Catalonia, in his native Barcelona, are characterized by flat, frontal, cartoon-like images rendered in primary colors with black outlines. The sense of scale amongst images in his works is also seen in the Catalan works, where size is more a question of relative hierarchic importance than physical reality. While the connection to children’s drawings is unmistakable, the childlike quality of much of Miro’s work has the sophistication and charm of an artist knowingly drawing on such imagery–it may be childlike, but it is anything but childish.
Miro worked in many print media, including etchings, pochoirs (stencils), and lithography. He was often innovative and frequently combined different techniques in one work. In the wonderful Parchment Serie III, a central gray field was printed from an etched plate onto an irregularly shaped piece of parchment; the artist then added his wonderful squiggles and blotches in gouache, including not only the primary colors, but also parenthetical sweeps of purple.
Miro used yet another technique, carborundum (silicon carbide engraving) combined with aquatint, in his droll La Femme aux Bijoux. Another carborundum of note is Le Jardin de Mousse. Here Miro used two different plates to get the effect of the elongated black blotch which breaks the rectangular frame of the composition. The blotch is a delightfully audacious aberration which seems totally appropriate both for what seems like the representation of the sweeping tail of a peacock and for anchoring the composition.
Towards the end of his career Miro created prints on a monumentally large scale such as Le Somnambule, a monumental aquatint etching measuring over 45 by 29 inches which is dominated by a large, central pair of unmatched eyes against a dark and unusually textured background.
Miro especially took from Surrealism the idea of automatism, which suggested that the artist let forms flow from the subconscious without inhibition. It is, perhaps, the resulting ambiguities of his imagery, the merest suggestions of reality, that allow the viewer in turn to respond so viscerally to his work–subconscious meeting subconscious, if you will, leavened by wit and prodigious skill. That may just be the secret of Miro’s universal appeal.
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