National Gallery of Art, Washington, Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
“The Farm” (1921-1922), part of the National Gallery’s “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” which explores politics in Miró’s art.
August 2, 2012
By KEN JOHNSON
WASHINGTON — Was Joan Miró a political artist? A much-beloved Surrealist, he is not commonly thought of as such. On its face, his oeuvre appears remarkably apolitical, especially considering that he lived through two world wars and a murderous civil war in his homeland, Spain. From the hallucinogenic vision of “The Farm” in the 1920s to his mural-scale fields of color punctuated by wispy signs in the 1960s, evidence of worldly political engagement is hard to find. A reluctant joiner and manifesto signer, Miró (1893-1983) disliked Social Realism. The artists of the past who inspired him were mystic visionaries like Hieronymus Bosch and William Blake.
This poses a problem for the many scholars and critics of today who tend to judge art on ethical grounds. The solution for ideological interrogators, then, would be either to dismiss Miró as a bourgeois escapist or to discover political convictions underlying the seemingly innocuous surfaces of his works. This second option is what the organizers of “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape” at the National Gallery of Art have determined to pursue. On that score the show is a muddled effort. Fortunately, this does not detract from the approximately 160 works dating from 1917 to 1974 on view. It is a beautiful and exciting show.
But for those who pay attention to wall texts and catalog essays, it is a different story. Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale, curators at the Tate Modern in London who organized the exhibition in collaboration with Teresa Montaner, a curator at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, contend that at certain crucial times in his life Miró did express passionately held political concerns, albeit in coded and not obviously illustrative ways.
They see Catalonian nationalism in his early proto-Magic Realist landscapes and in his more abstract images of the Catalan peasant-hunter. Later they find him to be an enemy of Fascism during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In the postwar years under the Franco dictatorship, he was a mostly passive resister, unknown in Spain outside of a small circle of friends and supporters, even as he was being celebrated in exhibitions elsewhere around the world.
How well do Miró’s actual works support claims of a politicized Miró? Not very. Consider his breakout series of landscapes of the late teens and early 1920s, culminating in “The Farm” (1921-22). In his essay about these stunning paintings, the art historian Robert S. Lubar declares that Miró’s mission was “to link his vision of an essential Catalonia with the promise of an emergent nation that hoped to participate on the world stage as an equal partner.”
This just does not sound right. Miró was a Barcelona city boy. His parents bought the house in Montroig in 1911, when he was in his late teens, for summer vacations. Moreover, romancing rural life is standard fare in art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne and countless others contributed to that tradition. What distinguishes “The Farm” is its nearly hallucinatory crystallization of the old buildings, the spindly central tree and the animals, plants and objects neatly distributed around the grounds. It is as if we were seeing through the eyes of a saint in a state of spiritual transport. That this Edenlike scene happens to be in Catalonia rather than, say, Normandy, is incidental. Viewed through a political lens, the Catalan peasant and hunter — the comical pipe-smoking, gun-toting, bearded stick figure who appears in zanily Surrealistic landscapes of the 1920s — may be a personification of Catalan pride. But he is easier to read as Miró’s own avatar, a tracker of signs of cosmic life in the landscapes of his own imagination. Near the end of the 1930s, Miró revisited the realism of “The Farm,” and he produced a masterpiece: “Still Life With Old Shoe” (1937). Struck by the image of the fork stabbing a dried apple and the ominously flowing areas of blackness, critics have read the painting as an allegory about the Spanish Civil War, calling it his “Guernica.” What is immediately captivating about it, though, is how the rustic objects seem to glow numinously from within. It is an image of supernatural immanence in the humblest of circumstances. Making a political case for Miró’s later work is a harder sell yet, as he turned increasingly to abstraction during and after the war. There is more comedy than tragedy in the cavorting hieroglyphic characters and hectic narratives of the wonderful “Constellations” series of 1939-41. A renowned public figure in his last decades, Miró was given to occasional political gestures, like creating posters for liberal causes and a splattered and dripped painting called “Mai 68,” commemorating the youthful revolutions in Paris of the late ’60s. In paintings that he cut holes in and burned with a torch in the early ’70s, he implicitly equated the violation of aesthetic norms with sociopolitical protest, but by then such Dada-like provocations were old hat. In a 1936 letter to his dealer, Pierre Matisse, Miró wrote that he would “plunge in again and set out on the discovery of a profound and objective reality of things, a reality that is neither superficial nor Surrealistic, but a deep poetic reality, an extrapictorial reality, if you will, in spite of pictorial and realistic appearances.” Miró believed in a reality transcending that of the material world: a place between infinite spirit and finite Creation. It is to this realm of imagination that the ladder recurring in many of his paintings leads: to a place inhabited by metaphysical life-forms and mind-stretching symbols, whose hallucinatory presences may convey truths that elude everyday consciousness. But ladders go both ways. They can be a means of escape from worldly woes, but they also may lead the visionary prophet back down to earth, where he may try to get people to become better oriented to transcendental realities — by making art, for example. That we would all be better off if more people kept in touch with cosmic mysteries was an article of faith with Miró, from first to last.