By Adam Lindemann
August 7, 2012

In early 2010, when the news broke that a respected art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, had been named director of the financially struggling Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the museum’s decision was widely considered a controversial one. This had, of course, happened before: back in the early 1960s, Walter Hopps left his partnership in Los Angeles’s fabled Ferus Gallery to head up the Pasadena Art Museum, where he went on to a successful museum career that included a now-famous Marcel Duchamp exhibition. But who ever said the art world has a long memory? In fact, there have been many role changes in the past few years, including Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison’s departure from the museum to work for Sotheby’s, and Picasso guru John Richardson and, more recently, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator emeritus John Elderfield joining the ranks at Gagosian Gallery. As well-financed galleries regularly put on blockbuster shows that are ballsier and more spontaneous than slow-moving museums could ever manage, the role of today’s art institution—and its staff—is at risk and thus up for grabs. Veteran curators are not immune to the smell of money, so it’s no surprise that some of them deservedly want to cash in a few chips. What made the MOCA appointment unusual in this context was that Mr. Deitch went in the opposite direction, giving up his eponymous commercial gallery in order to run a nonprofit institution that needed reinventing. Ironically, instead of receiving praise for his decision to focus on art instead of art commerce, he has been dogged by suspicion, accusations and mistrust from the beginning of his tenure.

The art press has always assiduously followed Mr. Deitch’s moves; his entertainer’s knack for drawing a crowd is one of the main reasons he was chosen to lead the troubled and financially weak MOCA. True to form, he debuted with a newsworthy Dennis Hopper photography show, perhaps a nod to LA’s real art and entertainment history, and to the fact that Mr. Hopper, a real LA cult figure, was dying of cancer. Sadly, he died just before the show went up. Then there was the “Art in the Streets” exhibition, a story Mr. Deitch tells better than anyone, all the way from Basquiat to Banksy. The show was a windfall for the museum, attendance-wise, but the purists continued to gripe and turn up their noses. More recently he did the seriously great “Abstraction After Warhol” show currently on view at the museum, and no one can fault that one, though I’d bet it hasn’t been a crowd-pleaser.

There may have been disagreement in the art community over some of those programming decisions, but it wasn’t until two recent events that all hell broke loose. The dismissal of MOCA’s chief curator, Paul Schimmel, who had been at the museum for 22 years (and the decision not to replace him), was closely followed by Mr. Deitch’s confirmation of an upcoming exhibition dedicated to the era of disco, prompting all four artists on the museum’s board—the luminaries Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie—to resign in protest. In response, a lynch mob of art pundits have now joined the witch-hunt. During the initial uproar over Mr. Schimmel’s departure, Mr. Broad, a life trustee who rescued the museum with a $30 million matching grant in 2008, came out in defense of Mr. Deitch in an op-ed in the LA Times, but two weeks ago the paper was mysteriously in possession of a letter that former MOCA chief executive Charles Young wrote to his “friend” Mr. Broad, urging him to fire Mr. Deitch, and now rumors are flying around the art world that Mr. Deitch’s directorship cannot survive such a loss of face and faith.

“I hope that the four-alarm fire now enveloping MOCA has at least given you pause for thought about his appointment and your continued attempts to try to save him for a job for which many (including myself) believe he is unqualified,” Mr. Young wrote in his letter. But before hasty judgments, let’s consider the amnesia relating to why Mr. Deitch was brought in: the institution was under financial duress and had poor attendance for years, and so it tried a new direction with a new kind of director.

As for Paul Schimmel, his departure appears to have been long overdue. I’ve heard rumors from trustworthy sources that he had been shopping around for another position for many years, long before Mr. Deitch entered the picture. I’ve always respected Mr. Schimmel because he is one of the few curators out there who speaks his mind and sticks to his deep commitment to art and artists, but it’s quite possible that his strong opinions and charmingly gruff manner didn’t help him in today’s job market. I know for a fact that Mr. Schimmel was very unhappy with the selection of Mr. Deitch as his boss, and if I knew it he must also have let everyone in town know it.

The art snob in me agrees with much in Mr. Schimmel’s style of curating, but in LA, where a competitor museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and its photogenic director Michael Govan have been absorbing most of the donor dollars, that strategy wasn’t working, and so the board and its main benefactor made a change. Will it ultimately turn out to have been a bad move? It is far too soon to judge Mr. Deitch, but museum goers did increase from 149,000 the year before Mr. Deitch arrived to 402,000 in 2011. Mr. Deitch’s populist blockbuster shows brought people in the door—and that is what he was hired to do.

Then there are the criticisms leveled at Mr. Broad. Instead of the praise he deserves for saving MOCA with a $30 million matching grant, he has been the victim of absurd rumors and allegations related to the private museum he is planning for a site across the street from MOCA. The spiciest blog post, on Coagula Art Journal, went like this: “If MOCA is downsized into a celebrity-curated kunsthalle style circus, it will give the blue chip Broad museum across the street more Gravitas. And then of course when MOCA is broke yet again—who will save MOCA by purchasing the best paintings in the collection because the museum is more concerned with event programming? The Broad Museum across the street of course.” But not all the attacks and rumors have been so easy to laugh off. The respected and influential curator Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, weighed in on the affair by heaping bitter criticism on Mr. Broad and his choice: “Dismissing Paul Schimmel in favor of Deitch is like cashing in all your value stocks and doubling down on junk bonds for the sake of a long-shot windfall.”

It always surprises me when patronage of the arts is met with this level of criticism and rebuke, and it certainly won’t encourage others to be generous with their gifts. As far as Mr. Deitch is concerned, his transition from gallerist to museum director was a natural progression; he always put the artists first and the commerce second. Those of us who’ve followed his gallery’s program always knew Jeffrey was never in it solely for the money: the zeitgeist was what his gallery, Deitch Projects, was about, and that’s what MOCA’s board wanted to bring to their museum. Messrs. Schimmel and Deitch were, understandably, oil and water from day one. The day Mr. Deitch was hired, Mr. Schimmel should have been retired with a respectable severance package, one befitting a 20-year veteran (I’m sure he’ll now turn up as an power-adviser at a major gallery just like Messrs. Richardson and Elderfield). I must assume the board was torn, and so for the past two years they decided not to decide, leaving the two men to quarrel in public. This was a clearly a mistake for all concerned, one that ended up further harming the institution’s reputation.

Now those who claim to love the institution are the ones who are putting it at risk. Charles Young was wrong to put down Mr. Deitch in writing; his rebuke, even if in a “private” correspondence with Mr. Broad, was not in the best interest of the institution he claims to care for. The same is true for those revered artists who left the board: to jump ship en masse at this critical juncture is not simply a rebuke of Mr. Deitch and the board’s direction for the museum; their actions have endangered the credibility and the future of the institution.

There is a popular misconception that museums are on rock-solid footing and that patron dollars grow on trees, but the truth is that, in the U.S., our public art institutions are fragile and subject to all sorts of riptides, especially because they receive virtually all of their funding from private donations. Those who purport to love art should not jeopardize the very institutions that preserve it. It’s a sad and irresponsible reaction to an unfortunate case of mismanagement. Right now it’s easy to sling mud and heap blame, and when famous artists join the ranks of those slinging, the situation quickly goes from bad to painfully ugly. I hope MOCA’s trustees will stick to their convictions, steady the ship and stay the course for better and worse. The worst way to weather a storm is to let it push you around. You end up buried in every swell, and that’s a sure recipe for getting dismasted.

August 3, 2012
By RANDY KENNEDY

The New York Times' Tony Smith with his sculpture “The Snake Is Out” in Bryant Park in 1967.

Art conservation can be a rarefied field, but a new project being announced by the North American branch of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art is taking a decidedly populist approach.

The group, which promotes collaboration among professional conservators, artists and collectors, has started a program in which members of the public are being asked to help locate, document and photograph outdoor sculptures made by the Minimalist artist Tony Smith, who created more than 100 such pieces. While many of the sculptures are in public spaces and are well-known, there is no complete inventory of the sites or condition of outdoor works by Mr. Smith, who died in 1980. (Sept. 23 will be the 100th anniversary of his birth.)

And so the conservation group is asking Smith fans to take their cameras and notebooks to “work together and complete the project by using two of the most-visited Web sites, Wikipedia and Flickr,” to “dramatically increase awareness about these works and therefore allow for the continued advocacy for their proper care and maintenance.” Information collected on the works will be organized and listed at the Wikipedia site WikiProject Public Art.

“We live in a world where every single one of the more than 500 television episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ has a well-researched Wikipedia article devoted to it, but by comparison there is practically no information about many of the greatest artworks of the 20^thcentury,” said Richard McCoy, a member of the conservation group and a founder of WikiProject Public Art. “This project can serve as a model and demonstrate the importance of documenting contemporary art while highlighting the significance of one of America’s most renowned artists.”

By RANDY KENNEDY
August 3, 2012, 1:07 pm

 
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Fisk University
Georgia O’Keeffes’s “Radiator Building — Night, New York” (1927).

This painting attributed to Jackson Pollock is the focus of a lawsuit against the Knoedler gallery.

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: August 5, 2012

Federal District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe’s résumé includes many impressive accomplishments but not an art history degree. Nonetheless he has been asked to answer a question on which even pre-eminent art experts cannot agree: Are three reputed masterworks of Modernism genuine or fake.

Judge Gardephe’s situation is not unique. Although there are no statistics on whether such cases are increasing, lawyers agree that as art prices rise, so does the temptation to turn to the courts to settle disputes over authenticity. One result is that judges and juries with no background in art can frequently be asked to arbitrate among experts who have devoted their lives to parsing a brush stroke.

The three art cases on Judge Gardephe’s docket in Manhattan were brought by patrons of the now-defunct Knoedler & Company who charge that the Upper East Side gallery and its former president Ann Freedman duped them into spending millions of dollars on forgeries.

The judge’s rulings may ultimately rely more on the intricacies of contract law than on determinations of authenticity. But the defendants and plaintiffs are busily assembling impressive rosters of artistic and forensic experts who hope to convince the judge that the works — purportedly by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko — are clearly originals or obvious fakes.

Of course judges and juries routinely decide between competing experts. As Ronald D. Spencer, an art law specialist, put it, “A judge will rule on medical malpractice even if he doesn’t know how to take out a gallstone.” When it comes to questions of authenticity, however, lawyers note that the courts and the art world weigh evidence differently.

Judges and juries have been thrust into the role of courtroom connoisseur. Legal experts say that, in general, litigants seek a ruling from the bench when the arguments primarily concern matters of law; juries are more apt to be requested when facts are in dispute.

In a seminal 1929 case involving the authenticity of a painting purportedly by Leonardo da Vinci, both a judge and jury got the chance to weigh in. The art dealer Joseph Duveen was sued by the owners of the painting, “La Belle Ferronnière,” for publicly calling it a copy. The jury included a real estate agent, a shirt manufacturer and a furniture upholsterer. Two artists were also on the panel and ended up on opposite sides of a hung jury.

With a deadlock on his hands, the New York State Supreme Court judge took the case back. He rejected Duveen’s argument that artistic attribution was not a question of fact that could be decided in a court of law but purely a matter of opinion, and ordered a second trial. Duveen ultimately settled with the owner.

Legal thinking on questions of authenticity has evolved since. Judges now recognize that while their word is law in the courtroom, in the art world their verdicts can be overturned by a higher authority: the market. “A decision by a court in the United States that a work is authentic may or may not have any value,” said the lawyer Peter R. Stern. “It’s totally up to the market.”

The court settlement in the Duveen case did little to alter the market’s opinion of “La Belle Ferronnière,” which remained unsold until 2010, when Sotheby’s attributed the painting to a follower of Leonardo’s and auctioned it for $1.5 million. (The New York Evening Post understood the court’s limitations back in 1929, when it asked in an editorial on the Duveen case: “How can anyone outside of a comic opera expect the authenticity of an old painting to be settled by a lawsuit?”)

Ruby Washington/The New York Times
“La Belle Ferronnière” was at the center of a legal case over its attribution to Leonardo da Vinci.

Mr. Spencer, who edited the book “The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts,” explained the disconnect between the culture of commerce and the courts. “In civil litigation the standard of proof is ‘more likely than not.’ Now picture yourself walking into a gallery and seeing a Picasso. You ask, ‘Did Picasso paint that?,’ and the dealer says, ‘Yes, more likely than not.’ You wouldn’t buy that.”

Just as a woman can’t be a little bit pregnant, a work of art can’t be a little bit real.

The classic example is a 1993 ruling by a federal judge that “Rio Nero,” a mobile ostensibly by Alexander Calder, was the real thing. Despite the decision the owners of this “genuine” Calder could not sell it because the recognized expert, Klaus Perls, had declared it a copy. Nineteen years later it remains unsold.

The judge recognized the problem at the time, noting that Mr. Perls’s pronouncement would make “Rio Nero” unsellable, but concluded: “This is not the market, however, but a court of law, in which the trier of fact must make a decision based upon a preponderance of the evidence,” or what is known as the 51 percent standard.

A 2009 opinion also involving a Calder stated the divide between the court and the market more bluntly. At issue were a couple of stage sets that Calder had designed but did not live to see completed. When the owner, Joel Thome, tried to get the Calder Foundation to authenticate the works so he could sell them, it refused. Mr. Thome sued and lost. The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court explained its rejection of Mr. Thome’s appeal by referring to “Rio Nero.” The fate of that artwork, Justice David B. Saxe wrote in his opinion, illustrates “the inability of our legal system to provide a definitive determination of authenticity such as is sought by plaintiff.” Having the court declare the sets to be authentic is meaningless, he told Mr. Thome, “because his inability to sell the sets is a function of the marketplace.”

Neither Justice Saxe nor Judge Gardephe would discuss their cases or the issue. What previous rulings show, however, is that while judges and experts consider the same evidence — provenance, connoisseurship and forensic analyses — they tend to value it differently. For example judges tend to give added weight to the signature of an artist on the work, Mr. Spencer said, whereas experts rely more heavily on the connoisseur’s eye.

Juries have also gone their own way. In deciding the Duveen case in 1929, The New York Times reported, jurors reacted to the expert testimony by concluding that “the connoisseurs had given them little but an exotic vocabulary and a distrust for connoisseurs.”

Even an artist’s own word can be overruled by the court. In a case involving a painting by the French painter Balthus, he denied that he created a work sold by a former wife. The case made its way up to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court and in 1995 the judges ruled that despite Balthus’s fervent disavowals, the painting, “Colette in Profile,” was authentic. In its opinion the court cited testimony that he had previously repudiated some of his works “to punish former lovers or dealers with which he has had disagreements.” It concluded that he seemed to be “acting from personal animus against his former wife.”

In the court’s view both the painting and the desire for revenge were authentic.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ruling on Artistic Authenticity: The Market vs. the Law.

Menil Collection, Houston
Giorgio de Chirico's 'Melancholia' (1916) is at Houston's Menil Collection

The avant-garde artist and composer John Cage famously said, "There's no such thing as silence." But that hasn't stopped contemporary visual masters (and, of course, Simon & Garfunkel) from using silence as a subject and a symbol.

"Silence," a new exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston on view through Oct. 21, looks at how many things the lack of sound has come to stand for, from a path to serenity to oppression to mortality.

A starting point for "Silence" lies in the Menil itself. It's home to the Rothko Chapel, a sanctuary lined with 14 of Rothko's monochromes and inaugurated in 1971. It's long been a site for acts of quiet contemplation.

The earliest work in the show is Giorgio de Chirico's "Melancholia" from 1916, a rendering of a Neoclassical sculpture in a seemingly quiet courtyard with two tiny figures whispering to one another behind its back. De Chirico and other Surrealists dealt with "the silence of the world and the isolation of the individual," says curator Toby Kamps.

From the mid-20th century on, artists took a more conceptual approach. In 1961, Robert Morris pieced together a deceptively simple wooden box. Riffing on the silence visitors might expect in a white-walled gallery space, the piece has an internal speaker that plays a recording of all the bangs and clanks that accompanied its making.

While John Cage may have denied silence's existence, his 1952 composition "4'33"" required musicians to sit in silence with their instruments for three short movements, directing the audience's attention toward any ambient noise in or around the room. The composition was a direct influence on several of the more recent works on view in "Silence," including Kurt Mueller's "Cenotaph" from 2011.

The piece is a functional jukebox filled with notable "moments of silence" sourced from YouTube and C-Span and burned onto CDs. The recordings include a remembrance of the Space Shuttle Columbia and President Barack Obama's tribute to victims of the Aurora, Colo., shooting just a few weeks back. Visitors are invited to pop in a quarter and play a commemoration of their choosing.

True to Cage's statement, many of these moments aren't silent at all. "One of my favorites is a moment of silence for Dale Earnhardt Sr., who crashed at the Daytona 500," Mr. Mueller says. "He wore the number three, and on the third lap of the race 10 years later the crowd goes silent, but you still hear the sounds of the cars and the engines, driving around the track."

—Rachel Wolff

A version of this article appeared August 4, 2012, on page C14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Silence, From de Chirico to Dale Earnhardt Sr..

See a time-lapse video of a room-wrapping installation by Barbara Kruger that opens Aug. 20, 2012, at the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C.

August 2, 2012, 6:43 p.m. ET
By KELLY CROW

When artist Barbara Kruger has something to say, she tends to use 12-foot-tall letters.

The 67-year-old Ms. Kruger, who is based in New York, has earned a reputation over the past three decades for pasting aphorisms about power and consumerism atop black-and-white photographs in combinations that are equally wry and wince-inducing. An early example from 1987 shows a hand holding up a card that reads, "I Shop Therefore I Am." More recently, she's created videos and wrapped entire rooms in pithy texts that splay across floors and squeeze above doorways.

Now, Ms. Kruger is headed to Washington, where her latest installation, "Belief+Doubt," has taken over just about every surface in the lower lobby of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The work, which covers 6,700 square feet of surface area, has been printed onto wallpaper-like sheets in her signature colors of red, black and white. The vinyl portions on the floor will be mopped daily to get rid of shoe scuffs. The exhibition goes on public view Aug. 20 and will stay up for about three years.

The artist has made playful use of the architecture: On the strip of wall above the descending escalator, riders will see "Don't Look Down on Anyone." Across the threshold of the museum's new store will be the phrase, "Plenty Should Be Enough."

The museum store's checkerboard floor also reads like a shopper's lament, with squares that read, "Hoard It," "Crave It," "Break It" and "Return It." Assistant curator Melissa Ho said this last suggestion initially raised some eyebrows with officials at Smithsonian Enterprises, which oversees the Hirshhorn's gift shop, but Ms. Ho said she reassured them. "I said, 'Don't you think she's funny?' "

Collectors seem to think so: Last fall, one paid Christie's a record $902,500 for her 1985 photo of a ventriloquist's dummy, "Untitled (When I Hear the Word Culture I Take Out My Checkbook)."

Humor has long played a role in Ms. Kruger's work—she has placed smiley faces above the lobby's restroom doors—but her style favors satire. That's partly why Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek said he thought of her two years ago when he was angling to transform the lower lobby. "With Congress steps away from us on the Mall, we have to find ways to engage with the powers of this city," Mr. Koshalek said. "We shouldn't hide from it."

Ms. Kruger said she didn't set out to lobby for any particular political party; indeed, both sides will likely find phrases that sum up their Capitol Hill sentiments. One patch of floor beside an elevator reads, "Admit Nothing. Blame Everyone." Another stretch of wall reads, "Whose Power? Whose Values?" The point, she said, is to provoke people to question themselves, and others. "At election time, questions come in handy, right?" she said.

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared August 3, 2012, on page D7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Artist Has Her Say—All Over A Museum's Lobby and Store.

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.