When, in the second decade of the 20th century, Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1893 – Palma de Mallorca, 1983) began his career, Paris was the capital of the world and the dream of European youth with artistic ambitions. The Catalan artist, suffocated in the cultural context of the country, was convinced that his work could only be developed in France. His letters from these years are dramatic when describes the difficulties in Barcelona and the urgent need to escape to the French capital.
Finally, in 1925 and in that city, Miró held the exhibition that marked his emergence as a great artist with the help of Pierre Loeb. When the press asks Loeb why he had that exhibition, the dealer responds with a rare transparency: “I have a lot of respect for Bretón and his friends and I thought that if they were interested in Miró it was because there were qualities in his works that I, perhaps, did not know how to discover, that is why I did this exhibition.” Miró’s success responds to a movement of absorption of the surrealists.
The artist makes his first trip to the United States in 1947 (he will make a total of seven), when he is 64 years old, that is, a truly mature age and with a prestige already built in Paris. And yet, this fame is not enough, the world has been transformed: the cultural capital – and the artistic market – has moved from Paris to New York, which attracts for a reason of survival. Not only Miró, but also, for example, Salvador Dalí, who, from Paris, settled in the United States between 1940 and 1948, a fundamental period for the Empordà artist.
There is an expression that summarizes Miró’s American experience and appears recurrently in his correspondence from the late 1940s and 1950s: “Plan of attack.” as if it were a war. For Miró, the US is a question of market and visibility, aware that New York is the center of power and the most powerful sounding board.
There is no single explanation for its success, but, among other aspects, a bold and, incidentally, unscrupulous dealer, Pierre Matisse, developed an effective promotional campaign. He is the creator of the American Miró: he placed pieces in influential collections, commissioned public works from the artist and collaborated with institutions.
Joan Miró: ‘Le soleil rouge’ [El sol rojo]1948. Photo: Sucessió Miró
He is behind the two retrospectives that MoMA dedicated to Miró (1941/42 and 1959). Its universal consecration would have been impossible without the American experience and without Pierre Matisse. New York defines the canon of modern art.
However, there is something else. This is not exclusively a reason for marketing: Miró tuned in to a new generation of young artists who, such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Arshile Gorky, among others, expressed their admiration for the Catalan artist, as did such influential critics as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.
What did you observe in him? Miró, “the murderer of painting”, takes European tradition to its limits. That generation that sought its own art and to break with the cultural colonialism of Europe, sensed in the artist the promise of a new art. The arcana of primitive, automatism, references to psychic impulses and the unconscious were latent in the Catalan artist.
This is a round trip: Joan Miró was open to this new way of doing and he himself recognized that all of them had considerably influenced his way of understanding painting. In some way, they signified his statement. Starting with the trip to the United States, he will work with large format and large fields of color. Perhaps, like the vampire, the artist needed fresh blood to survive.
Lee Krasner: ‘The seasons’, 1957. Foto: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
The exhibition is articulated around artists, episodes or themes linked to Miró’s American experience, roughly: the Calder-Miró-Sert friendship; the European exiles; primitivism, a fundamental aspect in his career, which was especially in tune with emerging American art; the cenacle that represented Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 engraving workshop frequented by Miró; the edition of stencils (1959) promoted by Pierre Matisse.
The selected works “illustrate” this itinerary. The exhibition closes with a documentary: Around and About Miró (1953) by Thomas Bouchard. I literally quote the text of the panel that introduces the film: “This universal creator has its roots in the cultural traditions of Catalonia. We may or may not agree, but perhaps it would have to be explained in another way to avoid caricature.”