Page 54 - Studio International - May 1970

Miró's sculptures In the history of this century's art Joan Miró is
a man almost on his own for the energy, the
sense of fun, the gift of metamorphosis, the
John Russell implicit violence and the darting, imperious,
unballasted imagination which he has been
putting to multifarious uses for well over fifty
years. `Unballasted' is the key-word here :
Miró has always travelled light, with no
ponderous 'definitive' appellations to weigh
him down. He is a one-man repository of so
many things which in others might seem con-
tradictory : high art and the vis comica, a
virile colour sense and a liking for the fine-
drawn exploratory line, pioneer work with the
colour-field and a sharp eye for biomorphic
form, subversion and the taste for a remote,
unchanging way of life. He came to know
Picabia in 1917, Picasso in 1919, and Max
Ernst, Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Paul
Eluard, and Alexander Calder in the 1920s:
he could have become one of the great ex-
patriates—Picasso, Joyce, Pound, Stravinsky—
who for one reason or another cut themselves
off from the place where they began. But he
didn't: until quite recently he could claim that
he often painted in the room in which he was
born, and in so far as his art feeds upon ob-
jects from the real world those objects have
changed hardly at all since his first teacher,
Francisco Gali, told him to go into the moun-
tains around Barcelona 'with a crown of eyes
around your head'.
Miró also has a virtue which both Matisse and
Braque exemplified throughout their long
careers: he knows just where to direct his
energies. He never gets stuck with a kind of
work which has outlived his usefulness. He
knows just when to drop a certain medium, a
certain kind of imagery, a certain predictable
format; he knows when to go slow, and when
to go fast; he knows when to let the inter-
national art-world into the work, and when to
keep it out. He is his own best administrator.
Nothing could have been more exactly timed
than the Dutch Interiors of 1928, the 'painting-
objects' of 1931-2, the paintings on sand-
paper of 1934, the Constellations of 1940-1, the
experimental ceramics of the 1940s, and the
Mural Paintings for a Temple of 1962. It is in
this context that we should look at the long
series of new sculptures which Miró has pro-
duced since 1968.
Miró the sculptor has not a long history, but
in any survey of his work an important place
should be assigned to the three-dimensional
1 pieces which he has made from time to time
Personnage 1969
Bronze when out of humour with 'pure painting'. I
about 36 in. am thinking here of pieces like the Man and
2 Woman of March 1931 which was one of the
Femme No. 28 1968
Bronze most haunting things in Andre Breton's
68x 28x 14 in. collection: pure painting is there offset by
3 apparatus dragged in from the real world—a
Forme Chapeau 1968
Bronze heavy chain, a nail, a ring, a heap of found
9* in. objects. In 1938 Miró wrote that he would like
4 to try his hand at being a sculptor; but, once
Forme Chapeau 1968
Bronze again, his own innate sense of pace combined
14 in. with the outbreak of war to delay the fulfil-