<Archive Obituaries> Joan Miro (December 25th 1983)
Bill Schenley
Photo: http://www.fuenterrebollo.com/Picasso/joan-miro.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (December 26th 1983) ~
By John Russell
Joan Miro, universally acknowledged as an artist of the first rank who
played an important role in the imaginative life of the 20th century
for more than 60 years, died yesterday at his home in Palma, Majorca.
He was 90 years old.
Miro, who suffered from heart disease, had been bedridden since he
left a clinic two weeks ago where he was examined for respiratory
problems.
Almost from the moment that Miro arrived in Paris in 1919, fresh from
his native Barcelona, he stood out among the painters and poets who
believed that the first duty of the artist was to the unfettered
imagination.
Left Ineffaceable Mark
As a painter, as a maker of constructions and assemblages, as a stage
designer, as a monumental muralist and as a sculptor on the grand
public scale, he left an ineffaceable mark upon his century.
In recent years, nowhere was this true more than in the United States,
where major sculptures by him had an impressive effect in Chicago and
Houston, and museums and collectors throughout the country vied for
his paintings. In particular, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had
assembled over the last 50 years an exceptionally representative
survey of his long career. The effect of these paintings,
constructions and sculptures upon American artists was undeniably
profound.
Channel of Surrealist Art
In the catalogue of an exhibition called ''Miro in America'' that she
organized in 1982 for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the critic
and curator Barbara Rose argued that ''Miro, the Surrealist not exiled
in New York during World War II, was actually the channel through
which the genuinely innovative forms, techniques and attitudes we
identify as Surrealist passed into American art.''
As the critic David Sylvester once said: ''Miro's art may well have
been the most far-reaching single influence the American Abstract
Expressionists had. It is reflected in Pollock and Gorky, Gottlieb and
Baziotes, Motherwell and Smith. And is there any influence other than
his that has been common to both de Kooning and Rothko?''
Initially and by nature the most private of men, Miro adapted in time
to a public role that took two specific and quite different forms. As
of 1958, when he made a large ceramic mural for the headquarters of
UNESCO in Paris, he was continually in demand for big- scale public
decorations. Adapting without apparent effort to a wide range of
commissions, he brought his inimitable vein of fantasy to airports,
hospitals, schools and museums the world over.
He also came out in his 70's and 80's as an archetypal upright citizen
to whom it came naturally to speak his mind on the great issues of the
day. When he was 76 years old, he did not hesitate to spend the night
in an unheated Spanish castle while keeping a vigil to protest the
mistreatment of political prisoners in Spain.
'Always Worked for Liberty'
In his 80's he collaborated with a Barcelona street-theater troupe
called the Claca, for which he designed a series of over-lifesize
monster figures; pre-eminent among them was an elephantine grotesque
in whom Spanish audiences were quick to spot a likeness to Franco
himself.
''I have always worked for liberty,'' he said to a friend recently.
''Liberty of expression in art is the same as liberty of expression in
ideas''.
Miro will be remembered, with Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, the young
Salvador Dali and one or two others, as the embodiment of the
spontaneous imagination as it was nurtured in the art of the 1920's
and 30's.
Miro never ran with any pack, never sided with any faction, never gave
up any part of himself. He knew that when the imaginative conditions
were right, two and two could make 75. And he acted on that principle
until almost the day of his death.
Joan Miro was born in Barcelona on April 20, 1893. He was the first
son of Dolores Ferra and Michel Miro Adzirias, a goldsmith and
watchmaker. In no way precocious, he nonetheless experienced a kind of
epiphany when he began to learn drawing at the age of 10 or 11.
''That class was like a religious ceremony to me,'' he said later. ''I
would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The
instruments of work were sacred objects to me.''
His progress was not, however, such as to convince his parents that he
had a vocation for art. In classic style, they found him a job as a
bookkeeper when he was 17, and in classic style he rebelled against it
to the point of a nervous breakdown, followed by typhoid fever. At
that point, his parents settled him in a farmhouse outside Montroig,
near Barcelona, and agreed that he could give up his business career.
Passion for Catalonia
Miro loved Montroig. Not only did it become the subject of his first
important paintings, but when he moved to Paris he made a point of
taking grasses and stones from Montroig in his luggage, so that
contact should not be lost.
Montroig prompted the big painting called ''The Farm,'' now on loan to
the National Gallery in Washington and which for many years belonged
to Ernest Hemingway.
Montroig was the focus of Miro's intense, lifelong and steadfast
passion for Catalonia. (''Madrid is a foreign country for me,'' he
once said to a friend.) The architecture, the landscape, the very
color of the earth - all were an inspiration to him, and when he
brought a poet's imagination to bear upon the memory of Montroig in
the 1920's there was no end to the epigrammatic symbols that resulted.
Barcelona at the time of Miro's youth was one of the liveliest and
most enlightened cities in Europe. Everything about it was delightful
to him, from the medieval works of art in the Catalan Museum to the
new art, the new books and the new music that were being discussed in
the cafes.
He always remembered how in 1916 the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard
had sent an exhibition of French Impressionist painting to Barcelona.
''There was a Monet landscape in that show,'' he said later. ''It was
so beautiful that when the guard wasn't looking I went over and kissed
it.''
But after World War I, Paris beckoned, and in 1919 he got there. He
carried with him a Catalan cake that had been baked by Picasso's
mother as a present for Picasso; and Picasso, along with many others
in Paris, immediately saw the point of Miro.
Sense of Scale Abolished
The same, however, could not be said of the public at large, and Miro
was often hungry to the point at which he hallucinated. Happily, he
could put those hallucinations to good use in paintings in which
plants, animals and human beings exchanged characteristics with one
another. All sense of everyday scale and space was abolished in those
paintings, of which the most celebrated is perhaps the ''Harlequin's
Carnival,'' now in the Albright- Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.
By 1925, Miro was ready to bear upon his back the burden of
reinventing painting in pictures like ''The Birth of the World,''
which is now in the Museum of Modern Art.
William Rubin, director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of
Modern Art, once described this large and premonitory painting, as
''the first of a long series of visionary surrealist works that deal
with the act of artistic creation through an image of the universe.''
In more ways than one, Miro in the late 1920's began to anticipate
modes of expression that did not become generally current until quite
a few years later. It is, for instance, implausible that the elements
used by Miro's close friend Alexander Calder in his mobiles would have
been what they were if Calder had not been familiar with Miro's
paintings. The imagery used by Arshile Gorky likewise ran close to
Miro's in later years.
Miro's use of large open fields of pure color beyond question had an
effect upon American abstract painting. As for the enigmatic
three-dimensional constructions like the ''Object'' of 1936 that is in
the Museum of Modern Art, it stands as first father to a vast family
of three-dimensional images that was to grow up over the next 40
years.
Refused Abstract Painter Label
Miro's images did not always reveal themselves at a casual glance, but
he refused to regard himself in any way as an abstract painter.
''The smallest thing in nature is an entire world,'' he once said. ''I
find all my themes in the fields and on the beaches. Pieces of
anchors, rudders, starfish and tiller handles - they all turn up in my
compositions. So do the heads of mushrooms and the 77 shapes of the
calabash.''
The multiplicity of these amoebic images was never more vividly
manifested than in the ''Constellations,'' a series of quite small
paintings that he sent to the Pierre Matisse Gallery toward the end of
World War II. When shown in New York, they had a considerable
influence, as much for their omnidirectional composition and their
free-running sense of fun as for their formal derivations.
Under the watchful and affectionate guidance of Mr. Matisse, Miro in
the years after World War II consolidated his American reputation year
by year.
His first visit to this country in 1947 had the effect upon him, so he
said, of ''a blow in the chest.'' Quite possibly that visit and
ever-increasing fame were the more welcome to him because in Franco's
Spain he had to endure what he called ''a total indifference, a total
silence,'' except on those occasions when the Government wished to
involve him for reasons of its own in enterprises that did not tempt
him.
''My hope has always been to work fraternally, as part of a team,'' he
once said. For this and other reasons he enjoyed making ceramics with
his friend J. L. Artigas. From there to making sculpture was a natural
step, one that he took with pleasure and full confidence in the last
two decades of his life.
Outgoing and Generous
For Chicago, he created a tall standing figure, half beauty queen,
half female Neptune, that looked as if she had stepped ashore at dawn
from the chill waters of Lake Michigan. For Houston, he made a
55-foot-high sculpture called ''Personage and Birds.'' Built
originally from many disparate elements - among them a pair of chair
legs and their crosspieces - it brought an element of mischief and
insubordination into the very headquarters of corporate activity.
As one critic wrote at the time: ''In a particularly sterilized
context it reminds us that birds sometimes leave their droppings even
on the chairman of the board.'' To those who found it (and others
among his late works) grotesque he would say: ''We live in a monstrous
era. How should art not reflect that?''
Miro in all his ways was simple, direct, outgoing and illimitably
generous. His instinct was to give everything to everyone and keep as
little as possible for himself.
In 1975, there was opened in Barcelona what is generally called the
Miro Foundation. Thereafter, he made this the repository for a great
part of his output, and it was natural that visitors should think of
it as an institution devised to honor him. He did not see it that way,
disliked the name and hoped that it would be ''a pretext for those who
come after,'' rather than a monument to himself.
He looked forward, not back, and when he was asked to make a mural for
the exterior of Wichita State University in Kansas, he readily agreed.
''It's the young people who interest me, and not the old dodos,'' he
said. ''If I go on working, it's for the year 2000, and for the people
of tomorrow.''
He is survived by his wife of many years, Pilar; a daughter, Dolores,
and two grandchildren.
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Photo:
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Joan Miro, A Master Of Modern Art, Dies At 90
FROM: The Washington Post (December 26th 1983) ~
By J. Y. Smith, Staff Writer
Joan Miro, 90, one of the great masters and creators of modern art,
died yesterday at his home near Palma de Mallorca, Spain. He had heart
and lung ailments.
Mr. Miro was a surrealist who looked at the world from the perspective
of his native Catalonia, and some of his greatest works depict the
vibrance and earthiness of Catalan life: peasants, farms, fishermen,
trees, animals, birds, everyday implements, toys and ancient and
primitive decorations. Although his paintings are abstract, they
depict specific things that the artist held to be recognizable.
Principal characteristics of his work are wit and an engaging
eroticism.
If his subjects often came from home, his art came largely from
France. He was influenced by the work of Cezanne, Matisse, van Gogh
and Picasso, who was his friend as well as his countryman, and the
primitive pictures of Henri Rousseau, to which he was particularly
attracted. He read the poetry of Rimbaud and Mallarme and other
symbolists. He studied the crowded and tortured canvases of
Hieronymous Bosch. He drew from all of these and more. He absorbed
cubism, Fauvism and postimpressionism and put his own mark on all of
them.
It was a mark that had a large influence on abstract expressionists of
a later generation, such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Mr. Miro
was one of the last major figures whose creations provide a direct
link between art at the turn of the century and art today.
His more important works include "Standing Nude" (1918); "The Farm"
(1921-1922); "Catalan Landscape (The Hunter)" (1923-1924); "Carnival
of Harlequin" (1924-1925); "The Birth of The World" (1925); "Spanish
Dancer" (1928); the series of gouaches called "Constellations" (1941);
the three "Blue" paintings of the 1960s; and his numerous sculptures
and ceramic murals, such as the one at Wichita (Kan.) State Univesity
or the ones adorning the Paris headquarters of the U.N. Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization and the Harkness Commons of the
Graduate Center at Harvard University. (The original work at Harvard,
painted in 1959, was a mural. It is now in the Museum of Modern Art in
New York and was replaced by the present ceramic wall, which Mr. Miro
did with the late Josep Lorens Artigas, who collaborated on many of
his ceramics.)
Another ceramic mural is at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Still another, executed in 1972, is on permanent loan to the Zurich
Kunsthaus. A large mosaic, done in 1977, is part of the Rambla de las
Flores in Barcelona.
Other works are the bronze sculptures "Moon Bird" and "Sun Bird,"
which were exhibited in New York City in 1970, and a tapestry,
"Woman," which hangs in the East Building of the National Gallery of
Art here.
John Canaday of The New York Times wrote of the "Bird" pieces: "The
new sculptures are so alive, so vigorous and so inventive that
everything he has done until now begins to look like a series of
preparatory exercises."
In 1980, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden hung a major
retrospective show of Mr. Miro's work. In an essay in the accompanying
catalogue, Charles W. Millard said, " . . . it is clear that, with
Matisse and Picasso, Miro is one of the three giants of European
modernism in this century, and, indeed, his achievement may be even
more sustained and more varied than that of his compatriot. That
achievement, forged entirely in its own terms, shares both Matisse's
French fluency and Picasso's Spanish expressionism and stands easily
alongside the best of both."
A special significance attaches to the walls and other works on
display in heavily traveled places. This is because they represent Mr.
Miro's conviction that the world of art must be the world of people
and particularly the world of young people.
"A picture that an artist keeps is like a corpse," he told an
interviewer. "A picture has no life unless it circulates."
And as a picture is seen, it must have meaning. Thus, Mr. Miro
insisted that his abstractions were recognizable objects that conveyed
a sense of life.
"It seems to me a prime necessity that there should be a strong and
fruitful subject matter that hits the spectator in the face before he
can begin to collect his thoughts," he said in 1936. "This is poetry
expressed in plastic terms and it speaks its own language. Under these
conditions I can't understand--and I take it as an insult--when people
include me with the abstract painters."
In 1941, he said painters must "create new human beings, breathe life
into them and create a world for them."
And in 1959 he declared, "A picture must be fertile. It must give
birth to a world. Whether you see in it flowers, people, horses, it
matters little so long as it reveals a world, something alive."
Joan Miro was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona. He spent his
childhood there and in Montroig, a nearby village in the hills along
the Mediterranean coast. His parents were Michel Miro Adzerias, a
jeweler and watchmaker, and Dolores Ferra Miro. Throughout his life,
he cherished his Catalan heritage, with its tradition of independence.
"It's in the blood," he said in an interview in 1980.
As a boy, he first came under the spell of medieval frescoes in
Catalan churches. As a man he painted Montroig. As a world figure he
often returned to it.
Mr. Miro began his studies as a child in evening drawing classes. In
1907, he enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where his
teachers were Modesto Urgell and Jose Pasco. He became an accomplished
draftsman. In 1910, he worked briefly as a clerk and returned to
Montroig to recover from a bout of typhoid fever. In 1912, he joined
the school of Francesco Gali in Barcelona. Gali has been credited with
introducing him to music and poetry.
Through shows at the gallery of Jose Dalman, Mr. Miro was able to
study the work of Van Gogh and others. He had his first one-man show
at the Dalman gallery in 1918, and in 1919, he took part in a
municipal exhibition in Barcelona.
In 1919, he made his first trip to Paris, where he almost starved.
Sometimes, he said, hunger brought on hallucinations and he would jot
them down in a notebook for use in his work. Sometimes he would study
the cracks in the plaster walls of his garret. These images he also
incorporated into his work. His first show in Paris, in 1921, drew bad
reviews and few buyers.
But the following year he completed "The Farm," which is generally
acknowledged as his first masterpiece. The painting was part of
another Miro show in 1925 that was a success, and it was bought by
Ernest Hemingway, a friend of the artist. In 1926, he collaborated
with Max Ernst on sets for Diaghilev's production of the ballet,
"Romeo and Juliet."
The growing interest in his work assured Mr. Miro's future. In 1932,
Pierre Matisse became his dealer in New York and thereafter put on an
average of one Miro show a year. In 1948, Aimee Maeght, founder of the
Galerie Maeght in Paris, became his European representative. These
associations eventually made him rich.
For many years, Mr. Miro spent his winters in Paris and his summers at
Montroig. During the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936 and
lasted until 1939, he expressed his horror at the conflict by painting
"Still Life with Old Shoe," which took him five months to complete and
showed objects with which he believed all Spaniards could identify.
Although he was not a political person, he created an anti-Franco
mural, "The Reaper," for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition
of 1937, and also produced a poster, "Help Spain."
During World War II, he fled Paris for Normandy and then went to
Spain. He did not visit the United States, a country he liked, until
1947, when he had a commission to do a mural for the Terrace Plaza
Hotel in Cincinnati. On another trip here, in 1959, he called on
President Eisenhower to receive the $10,000 Guggenheim International
Award.
Since 1956, he had lived in a house he had built on a property at
Palma de Mallorca. The grounds, "Son Abrines," include a 200-year-old
farmhouse and a spacious studio. The studio was designed by his friend
Jose Lluis Sert, the great architect.
Mr. Miro, a dapper, blue-eyed figure who was five feet tall, was
described by friends as a lively companion. In his early days in
Paris, he used to go the gym with Hemingway and time him while he
boxed. Once he got into the ring with the writer and went a few rounds
to find out what it was like. In the United States, he developed a
passion for baseball, particulary night games, and ice hockey. But he
did not like openings--"They are commercial, 'political' and everyone
talks so much"--and he was taciturn about his art, asserting it was no
business of his to talk about painting. The views he did express were
notable for their clarity and steadfastness.
His work, he once said, "is always born in a state of hallucination
induced by some kind of shock, objective or subjective, for which I am
not personally responsible in the least." But having been conceived in
"a frenzy," a picture was finished "with a clinical coolness."
"I work in a state of passion and compulsion," he said in 1959. "When
I begin a canvas, I obey a physical impulse, a need to act. It's like
a physical discharge . . . . It's a struggle between me and what I am
doing, between me and the canvas, between me and my distress. This
struggle is passionately exciting to me. I work until the distress
leaves me."
To purge his distress, he worked in many mediums and used numberless
images. The figures in "The Farm" are simply and primitively drawn. In
"Catalan Landscape (The Hunter)," the half-word "sard" appears to help
identify a sardine eating a fly. A peasant is represented by a
triangle with an ear and there are entrails and genitalia. The flags
of France and Catalonia represent the cultural symbiosis of Paris and
Barcelona.
"Spanish Dancer," which Hilton Kramer described in The New York Times
as "a haunting and hilarious image of the passion and movement that is
also a very touching and delicate glimpse of human frailty," is an
abstraction made of sandpaper, string, nails, fur and a draftsman's
triangle, all stuck on linoleum. The powerful and anguished
"Self-Portrait I" of 1937-1938, which is done in pencil, crayon and
oil on canvas, shows Mr. Miro's extraordinary skill in drawing.
"Self-Portrait II" of 1938 is entirely abstract.
To do large works, Mr. Miro sometimes put the canvas on the floor so
he could pour color or turpentine on it and walk on it. Sometimes he
pushed the paint on with his fingers. When he thought he was done, he
would prop the picture against a wall so he could see it as a whole
and decide on changes.
"On the floor, I work flat on my stomach," he said in 1974. "Oh yes, I
get color on me, on my face, in my hair. My face and hair are all
smeared, all spattered. And as for my work outfit, it is a real
painting."
In 1972, Mr. Miro established the Joan Miro Foundation for the Study
of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. Its building, designed by Sert and
on a site donated by the city, opened in 1976 with a show of 475
drawings dating from 1901 to 1975.
Increasing infirmities, including operations for cataracts on both
eyes, forced Mr. Miro to cease his regular work about two years ago. A
year ago, a heart pacemaker was implanted. Two weeks ago, he was
released from a clinic at Palma where he had been treated for
respiratory problems. Last Monday, he received the last rites of the
Roman Catholic Church.
Yet until his final illness he continued to sketch, for there remained
in him what he once described as a compulsion to "refine the magical
sense of things."
Survivors include his wife, the former Pilar Juncosa, a cousin whom he
married in 1929, and a daughter, Maria Dolores, both of Palma de
Mallorca; four grandsons; and one great-grandchild.
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