Joan Miro Exhibit
In 1927 Joan Miró declared, “I want to assassinate painting.” This exhibition illuminates the individual and intensely innovative character of Miró’s challenge to painting by focusing on twelve series of works the artist made over the course of a single, transformative decade. The compressed time period reveals the extensive range of Miró’s experimentation during these years, as he struggled not simply to negate painting but to reinvigorate and redefine his own art.
The exhibition opens with a series of paintings on unprimed canvas made in Paris in early 1927. This group of works marks the onset of Miró’s heightened engagement with collage strategies and with the physical, concrete qualities of his materials, including paint. It concludes with 1937’s singular, hallucinatory painting “Still Life with Old Shoe,” the result of Miró’s abrupt return to working from life. The pronounced diversity of this body of work underscores his resistance to a unified style.
Why Miró’s attacks on painting took on such particular urgency in the late 1920s is a complex question. It is clear, however, that the work he produced between 1927 and 1937 is symptomatic of the malaise and creeping sense of doom that emerged in Europe as the Roaring Twenties came to an end and the political tensions that would lead to World War II became increasingly apparent. The persistent tension Miró maintained during these years between abstraction and figuration, radicality and tradition, and formal mastery and aesthetic “murder” is one of the profound achievements of his art.
Exhibit runs at the MOMA through January 12, 2009. [link]
Errant Aesthete
Q: What natural gift would you most like to possess?
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