Amputate tradition, torture the past, terrorize the present. The impulse to destroy was part of what made early Modern art the guerrilla movement it was.
Cubism sentenced illusionistic art to the Death by a Thousand Cuts. Dada unleashed an anti-aesthetic Reign of Terror: Beauty? Off with its head. Decay? Let’s have more. Surrealism, a slippery business, let the killer instinct run amok. Tossing manifestos, dreams and libidos like bombs, it aimed to bring Western civilization to its knees and keep André Breton in the news.
So in 1927, when Joan Miró said, “I want to assassinate painting,” he wasn’t saying anything new. What was new was the way he carried out his cutthroat task. That process is the subject of “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937,” an absorbing, invigorating and — Miró would be mortified — beautiful show at the Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition illustrates, step by step, exactly how Miró stalked and attacked painting — zapped its conventions, messed up its history, spoiled its market value — through 12 distinct groups of experimental works produced over a decade. If, in the end, painting survived, that’s neither here nor there. The story’s the thing. Crisp, clear and chronological, the show reads like a combination of espionage yarn and psychological thriller set out in a dozen page-turning chapters.
In 1927 Miró was 34. He was a successful artist and an early devotee of Surrealism, working in a polished, fantastical-realist mode. But he had a restless temperament and lived in provoking times. The high-flying 1920s were winding down, the political climate was growing tense. Surrealism, he discovered, had limitations. He was ready for a radical change in art, but he realized that he would have to create it himself. He decided it would take the form of a crime. Painting would have to go. He would deliver the blow.
How to start? With dissection, which entailed taking painting apart, piece by piece, and throwing out essential things. This is what we see happening in the seven stark abstract paintings that open the show, all done in Paris in January to mid-February of 1927. The pictures look intact enough, with their handwritten phrases and clouds filled with dots, until you notice that something is missing: paint, or all but a minimal amount of it. Most of each picture is raw, untouched canvas on which the words and clouds drift like flotsam from a ship gone down.
A year later Miró gets rid of something else: skill. The wood panel used as a support in a piece called “Spanish Dancer I” is covered with a sheet of colored paper. A small rectangle of plain sandpaper is tacked on top of it. Glued to the sandpaper is a tiny cutout image of a woman’s shoe. That’s about it: no paint, almost no image, almost no artist.
Then in a third series the hands-on painter comes back with a vengeance to demolish art history. In a work called “Dutch Interior,” Miró takes an image of a lover serenading his lady, from a 17th-century painting, and turns it into a hostile clash of bloated, sluglike forms. So much for the golden age of Dutch realism. And you can kiss Renaissance idealism goodbye. In Miró’s version of the famous picture “La Fornarina,” Raphael’s beauteous sitter becomes a big brown blob with a leering red mouth and one yellow cat’s eye.
At least these paintings, with their bright colors and sharp outlines, are recognizably Miró-ish, which is not true of the collages that come next. If you happened to wander into this section cold, you’d think, “What drab, funky artist is this?” Not that the collages aren’t wonderful; they are, with their holes and glued-on circles, and stretches of industrial tar paper, which looks as if it might smell bad, yet suggests a starry sky.
By this point a certain pattern to Miró’s aggression becomes clear. In a rhythm of thrust and feint, he alternates direct attack on painting with turning his back on it, as if wishing it would go away. After the collages, he’s in attack mode again, wielding ridicule as a weapon in five oil paintings of preposterous size, seven feet high, the scale of altarpieces or imperial portraits but covered with scribbles, as if they were made by some cretinous child.
Who, in 1930, would have bought such daft things? Nobody, and the pictures went into storage. We can appreciate them now because they look so new and because we can see what Miró was up to. In these giant doodles, Kandinsky’s music-of-the-spheres abstraction takes a hit and falls to Earth.
There it is met — why not? we’ve seen everything else — by sculptures: squat, homely, nailed-wood things from 1931 and 1932. Although touched with grace notes of delicate painting — Miró was a fabulous brush technician — they are mostly about their baser accouterments: screws, chains, machine parts, sequins, a piece of bone, a single chickpea painted cobalt blue and encased in a tiny shrine.
By 1934, collage, assemblage, drawing and painting had blurred together into freakish hybrids that seem products less of objective experiment than of pathological obsession. Two drawing-collages on reflective paper from this time have an unhinged, fun-house look. A third, of uncertain date, combines ripped paper-doll figures with tied-on cardboard paint tubes resembling cartridge shells.
The whole piece looks derelict and must have even when new. That it survives is a miracle, though I wonder if Miró intended it to. Durability — timelessness, art is eternal and all that — was yet another aesthetic myth that he took pains to trash.
As Miró doggedly continued his assault on art in the 1930s, the world was assailing him. Fascism was on the rise across Europe. Events that would lead to the Spanish Civil War were brewing. At this time, he was living in the Catalan town of Montroig, a favorite retreat, but his anxiety was building. And as it grew, he returned to painting as if seeking solid ground.
In the fall of 1934 he finished a series of 15 extraordinary pastels on paper, most of them of single scowling, extravagantly sexualized figures so luridly colored and amorphously shaped that they look like walking cancers and oozing sores.
They were succeeded by small narrative paintings. Done in tempera on Masonite, and in oil on copper plates, like “The Two Philosophers,” their diminutive scale and assertive color gives them the toothsome innocence of fairy-tale illustrations. But they are not sweet or innocent: they are battle scenes from a psychic hell. They are also formally exquisite. For them Miró summoned all the virtuosity that in the cause of revolution he had labored so hard to suppress.
He makes just one more murderous lunge at tradition, in a series of paintings on Masonite panels from 1936. The attack is very physical and feels a bit desperate. In many ways this series brings him back to 1927. The pictures are abstract; he leaves the Masonite surface mostly bare. But what he adds has changed: oil stains, vomitlike substances and fecal-looking hunks of tar and dirt. In addition he hacks away at the surface, stabbing and gouging and leaving deep ruts and splintery scars.
At that point, with Spain in chaos, he leaves for Paris. The final picture in the show was done there. Titled “Still Life With Old Shoe, ” it is in a conventional oil-on-canvas medium, in semi-realist style, on a traditional theme. The search-and-destroy is over. Painting has survived and won. Miró as master painter, the new, oddly adorable artist of popular fame, more or less starts here.
He must have been exhausted. I was when I reached the last gallery, but exhilarated too because I felt I’d been through something: not the blockbuster slog but the experience of one artist’s creative process and the experience of an exhibition as a form of thinking. Like reading a book, the process makes you part of the trip, not just a witness to it.
In this case the trip is fairly demanding but one I suspect that audiences with even a casual interest in how art is conceived and made will enjoy. From beginning to end, the particular audience I had in mind was a special one, art students.
For them the show could serve as a manual of anti-authoritarian moves. Unpopular Mechanics of Painting, you might call it. But it could also be a guide to living a creative life. This is particularly true for students who are under pressure to choose a single medium (painting, say) and stay with it; to firm up a signature style and stay with it; to get to the market early and stay there.
To these requirements, the Miró show says: no, no, no. Change mediums, like habits, as often as possible. Make your signature look a no-look or every-look, and keep changing that. Get to the market early if you want, but then go home and stay there awhile and work. Then stay longer. Destroy the artist you think the world thinks you’re supposed to be, and you’ll start to find the artist you are.
