Joan Miro

Like organic spongy life of the sea or the weird shapes that bubble and float before our half-closed eyes in bright sunlight, the forms of Joan Miro drift across his canvasses. For their simplicity, the crescents, spots and silhouettes have been called no form at all but only elements--embryos of form like "graffati that children scratch on walls" or that "prehistoric man engraved in caves."

Miro traces his imagery back to the Romanesque frescoes of his native Catalonia and the influence of his teacher Urged who left him with an obsession for the red circle, the moon, and the star. To these can be added other sources of inspiration. From Cubism, Art Nouveau, Surrcalism, he borrowed eclectically. But when the literary and formal sources were exhausted he returned to the materials themselves for suggestions. This is one of the late developments noticeable in the loan collection from the Pierre Matisse Gallery at the M.I.T. library.

The work of Miro is gay and childlike. In a few broad strokes he paints a head that looks like it comes from a 5th grade drawing board. His naivite and simplicity extend even to his use of color, which rarely deviates from the grade school palette of primary tones. Yet both his lyric feeling for color and innocent flow of form take on masterful surety through discipline and technique.

His simple visions take on philosophical dimension because of his typically Spanish ability to combine gaiety and humor with the grotesque. Though this does not mean for him specific social concerns as it does with Goya or Picasso. Miro's world even as it exhibits the primal images of Jungian psychology does not cause pain. It does not probe or disturb the way Klee's calligraphic revelations of the subconscious seem to. Using one of his recurrent forms--the ladder Miro prefers to drift into a sea or sky world. As he said when the war broke out "I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely." Walking by the sea he read Rimbaud and Mallarme and explained that "the night music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings."

The series of black and white lithographs from 1944 show that Miro was still strongly in the grips of Surrealism. He had accepted the cubists flat picture plans and sacrifice of reality to demands of equilibrium and now worked exploring the possibilities of combining forms, in "jesting grotesque." Never completely satisfied with tightness of silhouettes he sporadically tried his hand at the rough shaky line and nervous application of color. This departure similar to the ramblings of Jackson Pollock show up in some of his etchings done in 1953, which surrender more than usually to spontaneity in design. His oils continue to reflect the relaxation of right geometric form. There is a decreasing interest in orchestrating multiples of small details in favor of larger more comprehensive rhythms.

Miro finds a new basis for life and means of continuation in the appreciation of spontaneity and the resources of his own emotion. Perhaps his work is fresh and unarming to the 20th century man because it is aimed at those who take themselves too seriously and who forget to feel the stars, the sun and the land the way Miro does. The fact that his form is organic and never completely abstract--that it is always a sign of something "a man, a bird or something else"--should give his art lasting value both because contemporary art is moving away from the more analytic and technical phases of modernism and because such form, combined with virtuosity of color, seems to be most humanly satisfying.