Joan Miró at MoMA
It’s pretty much peak art season at the galleries and museums in New York City right now and yesterday I managed to view a whole lotta art. In this post and the next, I’ll cover the first half of my day, spent at the Museum of Modern Art.
Wow — there’s a lot to see at MoMA right now! First up, on the sixth floor, is Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937. The show is organized by “series”, with each room displaying works from a specific period in Miro’s output over these 11 years.
Things get off to a slow start in a gallery of works whose goal was to “assassinate” painting. The important feature of these, apparently, is that they were painted on raw, unprimed canvas. The works themselves, while perhaps of import art historically, don’t offer much visual interest today: a few splotches of white or black paint, some schematic lines here and there.
Things begin to get more interesting in the next room, with Miró’s “Spanish Dancers” and “Portrait of a Dancer”. Here, the artist enters the third dimension with his “constructions”, collages of real-world objects onto painted supports.
The third room features what I consider to be the most iconically “Miró” pieces, his Dutch Interiors and Imaginary Portraits (this could just be due to my familiarity with the piece Dutch Interior (I), a part of MoMA’s permanent collection that I have painted into a still life several years ago). These paintings abstract, simplify, morph, and twist scenes that one would have found on Dutch interior paintings. The compositions become complex negotiations of positive and negative spaces, while the forms are painted with out-of-the-tube colors.
Bouncing back in the opposite direction, Miró then returns to mostly colorless collages (less collage-objects this time), now frequently cutting holes into the supports, adding some surface interest to otherwise not-so-exciting pieces. In the next series, Miró returns to painting in a series of “Large Paintings on White Grounds”, which MoMA’s texts describe as “willfully ugly”. Compositions are less formally balanced and brush strokes are loose and child-like. I did notice, however, that the work “Painting (Mediterranean Landscape)”, which is easy to pass by quickly, looks very different when you look back on it from the next room: the mountains are painted like a scrim and make the painting pop with depth.
The show proceeds to works of “non-sculpture” objects/constructions, then to “Paintings Based on Collages”, and then to “Drawing Collages” (which pair found materials with biomorphic black lines).
Once again color comes back into the picture in the room “Pastels on Flocked Paper” from 1934. (“Flocked paper” refers to paper that has been painted and then, while still wet, sprinkled or otherwise coated with a texture-providing material such as dust or fibers.) These works include dimensional modeling of surreal figures with exaggerated limbs and other protrusions.
Moving back to paint, Miró completes a series of works on cardboard that he considered a look back on his career with works full of the colors and shapes that signify Miró. From there, this show moves to a series of works on copper and masonite, occasionally working with tempera instead of oil. These works are worthy of closer study, with intense color, detailed brushstrokes, and a more narrative structure that includes ghastly figures and other beasts at play on barren landscapes.
Perhaps coming full circle, the last series on display use “minimal means” on mostly raw masonite supports, with images becoming more schematic, more abstract, less colorful and much less attractive. The final work in the show, however, is something of a rock star, “Still Life with Old Shoe”. Miró returns to representation and working from life in this psychadelic, surreal play of forms and colors.
If you can’t make it to see the show in person, be sure to check out MoMA’s excellent online exhibition which includes wall texts, audio explanations, and images for all of the works in the show as well as a few that aren’t.
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