Page 55 - Studio International - May 1970

ment of this idea. And when, during a long
period of residence in Spain, his old friend
Joseph Llorens Artigas suggested to him in
1944 that he should work in ceramics, there
began a collaboration which has lasted on and
off ever since and must to a large extent have
satisfied the ambitions which Miró had ex-
pressed in 1938—the wish, in other words, to
find an alternative to easel-painting, and for
preference one which would allow him direct
and easy access to a very large public. With
the ceramic wall for UNESCO in Paris, the
ceramic mural for Harvard University, the
big decoration for the University of St Gallen
in Switzerland and the partnership with Jose
Luis Sert at the Fondation Maeght in St Paul
de Vence, Miró began a new career as big-
scale decorator. [Later this month another
huge decoration will be inaugurated at Bar-
celona Airport]. Miró the administrator of his
own gifts was very much to the fore when these
commissions came along.
But Miró is also an artist for whom art is
something that can be held in the hand.
Touch matters to him. Earth, stones, grass—
all have a distinct personality, in his view, and
one which varies from place to place: almost,
one could say, from field to field. (When he
first went to Paris he took with him some grass
from his native Montroig so that he could
continue work on The Farm with no loss of
authenticity). Ernest Hemingway said of
The Farm that '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'. This remark is obviously more directly
relevant to The Farm, with its careful alpha-
betizing of the Montroig scene, than to the
recent sculptures; but at the same time there
is something curiously and irreducibly native
to that particular scene in Miró's use of found
objects, over and over again, in the new work.
There are a great many of these sculptures,
and they are evidently of the same family. But
Miró distinguishes three quite different forms
of patina as between the three firms who cast
the sculptures. In a letter to Pierre Matisse he
says, for example, that the pieces from Susse,
in Paris, have a range of noble patinas that
runs from black to dark red, with large areas
of a greenish hue. The pieces cast by Clementi
have 'a rich and very personal patina, with
plenty of magic in it'; and as for those cast by
Parellada their patina has a purity which
preserves, so Miró says, 'all the strength and
the expressivity of the sculptures, and preserves
them in all their pristine wildness and power.
These pieces in any other form would be a
dead loss'. Miró is not the kind of senior artist
who sends a batch of ideas to the founder and
lets him get on with it.
As for the sculptures themselves, much could
be said. One at least of them, the Moon, Sun
and One Star of 1968, looks back to the series of
seven Projects for a Monument which Miró made
in 1954. Jacques Dupin in his book on Miró
says of these that 'Most of them consist of an