Joan Miró: A life in paintings

Miró's work is loved for its joyful celebration of life and colour. But it also contains ideas of freedom which, in Franco's Spain, were very dear to the Catalan painter. We look again at the man, and trace his personal journey through six great paintings.


Joan Miro in his studio at home in Palma de Mallorca, c 1977. Photograph: Christian Simonpietri/Sygma/Corbis
On the death of General Franco in 1975, Joan Miró was asked what he had done to promote opposition to the dictator, who had ruled Spain for nearly 40 years. The artist answered simply: "Free and violent things."
The first major Miró exhibition in this country for nearly 50 years, which opens at Tate Modern next month, will cast light on that answer. Miró is not always thought of as a political painter, in the broad or the narrow sense. He was not a creator of manifestos, or a signer of petitions; he was not given to provocative gesture like his contemporary Salvador Dali, nor did he pursue his passions at all costs, like his sometime mentor Picasso. For most of the second half of his long life (he died in 1983 at the age of 90), Miró painted in his studio in Palma, Mallorca, charting a unique course among the movements in postwar painting, and always looking very much his own man.
Politics was for Miró, however, unavoidable, an accident of birth. He was the son of a blacksmith and jeweller who lived on the harbourside in Barcelona. He came of age with the Catalan independence movement, and shared its deep-rooted sense of the possibilities of liberty. To begin with, he identified this freedom with internationalism; he longed to be in Paris. But once he had escaped, he held on to his identity as a Catalan, as a freedom fighter, all the more devoutly and from it developed an intimate visual language, which sustained him all of his working life.
The Tate show will concentrate on three periods of Miro's constantly reimagined career: his formative years in Catalonia; his exile in Paris in the years of the Spanish civil war and the outbreak of the second world war; and his enthusiasm for the radicalism of the 60s, when he was approaching the late period of his work. Marko Daniel, the co-curator of the exhibition, which will bring together more than 150 works in collaboration with the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, hopes that it will be "a perspective not just on Miró but on the turbulence of the 20th century, the way an artist's life might be shaped by proximity to these great political upheavals".
The title of the show, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, comes from a painting, one of a series, that Miró began in 1939 as the Nazi forces were advancing into France. He was living in Normandy at that time and had begun the works as a kind of personal defence against what he knew to be the horrors to come. The series of paintings dwelt on his profound internal sense of connections between things, an entirely singular private universe that he called the Constellations. When he eventually fled with his wife and daughter on the last train out of Paris for Spain, the paintings were rolled under his arm.
As the exhibition will make clear, Miró's instinct for political engagement, though heartfelt and full of risk, often lay in these gestures of withdrawal, of self-defence. André Breton, the surrealist, once referred to Miró, for good and bad, as a case of "arrested development", a childlike artist. The label stuck for a long time but this exhibition should go a long way to revealing how hard-won Miro's apparent playfulness was. The ladder in that borrowed exhibition title had long been for him an emergency exit to the safe house of his imagination. In a 1936 interview, with the Spanish civil war a looming reality, he spoke of the need to "resist all societies... if the aim is to impose their demands on us". The word "freedom has meaning for me," he said, "and I will defend it at any cost."
Though he was capable of making propaganda images for the Catalan and republican causes, this sense of absolute individual liberty was as much about a sense of wonder at the world; you could find it, he believed, "wherever you see the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists sometimes of staying close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters". In this spirit Miró created for himself the alter ego of a Catalan peasant, indefatigable and ribald, wild bearded under a barretina, the red cap of the rural radical. The surface of his life, despite the great fractures of the times in which he lived, was relatively orderly and measured, but you do not have to look for long at his work, including the pictures on these pages, to see that he reserved all of his formidable energies for his painting.
NORD-SUD, 1917


Nord-Sud, 1917, by Joan Miró. Photograph: Collection Maeght, Paris
Aged 24, Miró longs to leave Barcelona for Paris
Miró made this painting in 1917, when he was living in his native Barcelona and dreaming of moving to Paris. He was in the final year of his national service as a soldier; Spain was not involved in the first world war, and he was frustrated that the fighting in France had put his ambitions to enlist in the Parisian avant garde on hold. After a period of depression, he had given up on the career in business that his father had planned for him, and had spent the previous four years, when not in uniform, painting full-time; he had that premature, 24-year-old's sense that life was already passing him by.
The presence in his painting of the journal Nord-Sud – founded in Paris that year by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire among others – hints both at this anxiety, and at a solidarity with the ideals of freedom the magazine represented. The caged bird behind it is faced with an open door, but has not yet flown: "I must tell you," Miró wrote to his friend and fellow painter EC Ricart in 1917, "that if I have to live much longer in Barcelona I will be asphyxiated by the atmosphere – so stingy and such a backwater (artistically speaking)."
Miró was, above all, desperate, in the spirit of the moment, to be part of an -ism, or, better, to create one. Impressionism was dead, he suggested: "Down with weeping sunsets in canary yellow... Down with all that, made by crybabies!" He was already anticipating the demise of cubism, futurism and fauvism (though the latter in particular has a strong influence on his painting here). The scissors are open ready for him to cut ties with the past and present, with Catalonia (represented in the characteristic vase), and with Goethe-esque rites of passage. But his hopes of finding that new style, that new way of painting seemed to be beyond him, and to the north.
Two years later Miró still found himself maddeningly caught in this limbo, and finding new torments in his friends' departures: "Ricart must have told you," he wrote to JF Rafols in August 1919, "that he is determined to go to Paris for a few months. I am afraid that he will get a fright unless he realises that life in Paris is expensive if he does not manage to go there with a good monthly allowance... I am definitely going at the end of November. You have to go there as a fighter and not as a spectator of the fight if you want to do anything..."
When Miró eventually did make it to Paris, in 1920, he called on Picasso, whom he had never met, but whose mother was a family friend in Barcelona. Picasso looked out for him, bought a painting that Miró showed him, and helped him into the radical society he had dreamt of. Within a year, Miró's tiny studio at rue Blomet received regular visits from his new friends: the poet Paul Éluard, the playwright Antonin Artaud and the artist Tristan Tzara. Sud had found his way Nord.
THE FARM, 1921


The Farm, 1921-2, by Joan Miró. Photograph: © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011/ Tate Modern © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011/ Tate Modern Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011/Tate Modern
Broke in Paris, he reflects on his roots
"When I first knew Miró," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1934, "he had very little money and very little to eat, and he worked all day every day for nine months painting a very large and wonderful picture called The Farm..."
Miro found that his life in Paris allowed him to understand his Catalan roots, that formative light that had seemed so oppressive, with a new and startling clarity. His parents had bought a country house in the Catalan mountains at Mont-roig in 1910, in part to help him recover from depression. It was where he learned to look at the natural world. In The Farm, he later recalled, "I wanted to put everything I loved about the country in the canvas, from a huge tree to a tiny little snail." He brought dry grasses up from Mont-roig to Paris so he could "finish the painting after nature".
Because he was working so hard on the painting during the day he took to boxing in the evening at a local gym as a way of relaxing. Among his sparring partners was Hemingway. Miró, so the story goes, impressed the writer first with his punching and then with his painting.
Hemingway was determined to buy The Farm. He agreed with Miró's dealer to pay 5,000 francs for it, which, he recalled, "was four thousand two hundred and fifty francs more than I had ever paid for a picture..." When it was time to make the last payment he risked losing the painting because he didn't have the money. On the final day he trawled around every bar he knew in Paris, with his friend John Dos Passos, borrowing cash, and eventually raised the funds.
"I would not trade it for any picture in the world," he wrote. "It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint those two opposing things."
Miró's obsessive attention to a kind of personal storehouse of imagery, the carob tree, the animals and insects of Catalonia, his footprints in the place he fell to earth, begins to find its full expression in this painting. "For me an object is always alive," he later observed. "A cigarette, a matchbook contain a secret life much more intense than certain humans… I see a tree, I get a shock as if it were something breathing..."
"After Miró had painted The Farm," Hemingway wrote, "and after James Joyce had written Ulysses, they had a right to expect people to trust the further things they did, even when people did not understand them."
THE CATALAN LANDSCAPE (THE HUNTER), 1923-4


The Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), 1923-4 by Joan Miró. Photograph: Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011/Tate Modern
Thanks to André Breton, Miró finds surrealism
Only two years after he painted The Farm, Miró was spending more time back in Catalonia, trying out ways to distil the essence of his Catalan identity still further. He had become friends in Paris with André Breton, finding his once longed-for -ism. Surrealism, an artistic response to the power of dreams and the subconscious, was only a brief obsession for Miró but its ideas informed his painting of the mid-1920s, and his methods thereafter. "Every idea has to develop in my unconscious, and sometimes it takes years... The starting point is absolutely irrational, sudden and unconscious: I start off blindly..."
The compulsive detailing of his earlier painting had by the time of The Hunter become a kind of playful shorthand. He had a powerful sense of the emptiness of his remembered landscape, animated only momentarily by human action; life becomes explicable as a diagrammatic series of gestures and relationships, "the underlying magic", as Miró described it, and he developed a way of painting that seemed to respond to those energies. He was in search of the essence of things. In The Hunter, his Catalan peasant alter ego is captured simultaneously in the act of shooting a rabbit for his cooking pot and fishing for a sardine for his barbecue.
Miró explained the detail of the painting in the following terms to one viewer: "The Catalan peasant has become a triangle with an ear, eye, pipe, the hairs of a beard and a hand. This is a barretina, the Spanish peasant headdress… And the man's heart, entrails and sexual organs. I've shown the Toulouse-Rabat airplane on the left; it used to fly past our house once a week. In the painting I showed it by a propellor, a ladder and the French and Catalan flags. You can see the Paris-Barcelona axis again, and the ladder, which fascinated me. A sea and one boat in the distance, and in the very foreground, a sardine with tail and whiskers gobbling up a fly. A broiler waiting for the rabbit, flames and a pimento on the right..."
André Breton acquired The Hunter in 1925, the year after he wrote his Surrealist Manifesto. He believed that Miró had found a way to depict the "poetic reality" of life, in ways that his manifesto had described, but which he had not fully imagined. Miró was not much interested in manifestos, thoughprinciples he pursued were not going to be written by anyone but himself.
STILL LIFE WITH OLD SHOE, 1937


Still Life with Old Shoe, 1937, by Joan Miró. Photograph: Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011/Tate Modern
A family man, in exile from the civil war
For a while in his 20s and 30s, Miró had felt his freedom almost unconstrained in Paris. When he returned to the city in 1934, though, now married and a father, he carried a sense of foreboding about the state of Spain and Europe: "I had this unconscious feeling of impending disaster," he later wrote. "Like before it rains; a heavy feeling in the head, aching bones, an asphyxiating dampness..."
From the beginning of that year, Miró found himself unable to draw anything but monsters; the human figure became a grotesque of teeth and genitals. The margins of his sketchbooks are populated with visions of nightmarish couplings and weirdly erotic subhuman bodies. He had a sense of himself as prophetic in some way, and was troubled by these portents. "If we do not attempt to discover the magic sense of things, we will do no more than add new sources of degradations to those already offered to people today, which are beyond number... if the powers of backwardness continue to spread, if they push us any further into the dead end of cruelty and incomprehension, that will be the end of all human dignity," he wrote. The outbreak of civil war in Spain and the rise of fascism across Europe confirmed his worst fears. He contributed images for propaganda posters, the raised fist of the Catalan peasant, for the republican cause. But in Paris, in 1937, where he had gone with his wife and daughter to escape the bombing, Miró now found himself a prisoner from the terror at home, and at a loss to know how to respond.
He felt he had to begin again from first principles. He came across a gin bottle in the street, brought it home to his apartment, and began to paint a still life, which quickly took on the atmosphere of his apocalyptic anxieties. The painting took him five months to complete from January 1937. His friend and biographer Jacques Dupin calls this painting "Miró's Guernica", his simple riposte to Picasso's epic. Its objects could not be more mundane – a fork, a bottle, an apple, a loaf of bread – yet these homely realities seem threatened by a kind of hallucinogenic doom. "The civil war was all bombings, death, firing squads..." Miró wrote to his dealer Pierre Matisse, (son of Henri). "The composition is realistic because I was paralysed by the general feeling of terror and almost unable to paint at all... We are living through a terrible drama, everything happening in Spain is terrifying in a way you could never imagine. I feel very uprooted here and nostalgic for my country..."
In an interview at this time, Miró was asked about his state of mind. "I am pessimistic, I am tragically pessimistic," he said. "No illusions are permitted. More violently than ever before there will be a struggle against everything that represents the pure value of the spirit."
He incorporated the old shoe in the picture as a gesture toward Van Gogh; he had the sense that his eye was bringing all the world's psychosis to everything on which it fell; the objects in the painting seem lit by a savage incandescence, the light comes from the direction of the artist.
THE ESCAPE LADDER, 1940



The Escape Ladder, 1940, by Joan Miró. Photograph: Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011/Tate Modern
The artist retreats to an inner universe
In 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war, Miró and his family moved to Varengeville on the Normandy coast, a few miles from Dieppe. Georges Braque was a neighbour. The village was subject to a blackout, and that fact prompted Miro's most luminous and affecting series of paintings, the Constellations (six of which will be included in the Tate show). He explained their genesis in a letter to a friend: "I had always enjoyed looking out of the windows at night and seeing the sky and the stars and the moon, but now we weren't allowed to do this any more, so I painted the windows blue and I took my brushes and paint, and that was the beginning of the Constellations."
Painted on paper, the pictures create the most vibrant expression of Miró's inner universe, with its by now recognisable system of codes and symbols. The ladder of this painting had always been a fascination for him; it had acted as a metaphor for his attempts to put his painting on a different plane of understanding the world, as a path away from mundane realism. Now it becomes an even more urgent gesture toward flight: "I felt a deep desire to escape," he wrote of that period. "I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings."
On 20 May, with the advance of the German forces, he managed to get his wife and daughter on the last train for Paris, from where they miraculously found room on a train leaving for Spain. Miró had time to take nothing with him, except a roll of the starry paintings. The family got passage to Palma, Mallorca, where Miro had spent his childhood summers with his grandparents, and where, on 1 August, he resumed work after more than two months of escape. The Constellations, which Miro completed in Barcelona, were among the first artistic documents to reach America after the war, and were exhibited in New York in 1945. Andre Breton, who saw them, talked of how at a "time of extreme perturbation" Miro had escaped into a realm of "the purest, the least changeable..."
MAY, 1968


May 1968, 1968, by Joan Miró. Photograph: Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011/Tate Modern
Now 75, he backs the Paris uprisings
After the war, Miró based himself in Mallorca; if this looked like retreat, though, he still allowed the world to invade his work. In contrast to contemporaries such as Dalí or mentors like Picasso, Miró seemed able to chart a stable course through the latter half of his long life, reserving his energy for his painting. In his biography of his friend, Jacques Dupin marvelled at Miró's ability to live a life that was "utterly free of disorder or excess". In his studio, order ruled. Canvases were neatly filed according to a complicated and rigid system, brushes were cleaned as soon as they were used and arranged in order of size; tubes of paint were laid out in strict sequence. "I have often seen him bent over a sheet of paper, and flick off a grain of dust that has just alighted on it: each time the practised gesture is just the same," Dupin noted. "Nothing is left to chance, not even in his daily habits: there is a time to take a walk, a time to read, there is a time to be with his family and there is a time to work."
The work itself, though, was anything but ordered, and deliberately so. Miró reserved all of his anarchy for creation. "We Catalans," he was fond of saying, "believe that you must plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump high in the air. The fact I come down to earth from time to time makes it possible to jump higher."
Miró became aware that the energy in painting, like everything else, was moving to America. He saw a Jackson Pollock show in Paris in 1952 and recalled saying to himself: "You can do it too, go to it, you see, it is OK!" He had no interest in pure abstraction, though. "You get freedom by sweating for it," he believed, "by an inner struggle..."
Miró liberated his work in different ways, painting with his fingers and on the floor, burning and slashing his canvases in later life. By the 60s he had created a much bolder, more ferocious style. Spain was still under Franco, and even in Mallorca, Miró felt the dead hand of dictatorship, the anti-freedom he had always hated. With the student uprising in Paris in 1968, he hoped to bring more of the spirit of rebellion home. At the age of 75 he hurled his paint at the canvas as a shared act of defiance: "[This painting] is all explained by the title: May 1968," he later said. "Drama and expectation in equal parts: what was and what remained of that unforgettable young people's revolt..."
At the opening of an exhibition that included this painting, in 1978, after Franco's demise, Miró paced up and down in front of it, uncharacteristically. His wife, Pilar, told him to sit down, and he refused. "Damn it, let them see me standing up," he said. "I painted these paintings in a frenzy, with real violence so that people will know I'm alive, that I'm breathing, that I have a few more places to go." He was 85. "I'm heading in new directions!" he exclaimed.
Gardian

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