Over the past decade or so, admirers of Joan Miró, willing to make a little effort, have been encouraged to consider this fascinating artist’s work in many different ways. At intervals, during that time, volumes two through six of the ongoing catalogue raisonné of Miró’s paintings appeared, bracketing the years 1931 through 1981, and bringing us virtually to the end of his life as an artist. (Born in Barcelona in 1893, Miró died in Mallorca in 1983.) A catalogue raisonné of his sculpture was published. Exhibitions were organized internationally dealing with everything from his painted sculpture to his “linguistic nationalism”—whatever that may mean, in relation to the art of a Catalan speaker—and a good deal in between. The Phillips Collection examined the provocative relationship between Miró’s work and that of his friend Alexander Calder, who plainly learned a lot from his Catalan colleague. The Museum of Modern Art’s comprehensive overview, “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937,” studied the artist’s paradoxical efforts to “assassinate painting” by means of experiments with what were, at the time, unconventional materials and methods. Soon after that, the Metropolitan Museum’s narrowly focused “Miró: The Dutch Interiors,” organized in collaboration with the Rijksmusum, Amsterdam, explored the artist’s fascination with seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the effects, both immediate and long-lasting, of the 1928 trip to the Netherlands where he first saw Dutch Golden Age painting in depth. More recently, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, in England, a major survey of Miró’s sculpture
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Joan Miró in Washington
On “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 30 Number 10, on page 42
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