Page 56 - Studio International - May 1970

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Femme No. 21 1968 Bronze 17}x 44x 4 in.
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Femme et Oiseau No. 25 1968 Bronze 121 x 10 x 6 in.
7
Moon, Sun and One Star 1968 Bronze 51¼ in.

iron shaft stuck in a large round stone, which
is itself ornamented with incised and painted
signs, and supports other objects (shinbone,
old saddle, hook, sheet of tin, even a telephone
bell) which form the head and body of the
figure. Though of reduced dimensions, they
convey an impression of grandeur...' This
new piece, just 51¼ inches high, is recognizably
a later variant of this monumental theme.
Another piece which has an unmistakable
ancestor in Miró's earlier work is the Woman
No. 28 of 1968. Miró has once more treated
the female figure frontally, with arms hanging
loosely from the shoulder and a tent-like form
below which could stand either for a wide
skirt or, as here, for a mingling of legs-and-
skirt spread out in a movement at once jaunty
and ungainly. (The Caresses of Moonlight
Met by a Beautiful Bird at Dawn (Dupin 866)
is very near to this new sculpture.) As for the
two pieces called Forme Chapeau, again of 1968,
they have the closed, epigrammatic form
which Miró tried out twenty two years earlier
in two bronzes called Bird. Other pieces recall the painting of that name (1922-3), and the
the heyday of the surrealist object-sculpture snail in The Tilled Field (1923-4) with its sky-
or sculpture-object—notably the standing blue shell. And if, in the sculptures of 1968-9,
figure, Personnage of 1968, which carries on its each such object was given a new identity,
head what looks like a very large onion with coaxing and not coercion was responsible.
six two-pronged forks stuck into it. Among the characters evoked in these sculp-
As is often the case with Miró, certain pieces tures, some are characteristic Miró-people : by
have a kind of friendly kinship with the work turns whimsical and choleric, airborne and
of other artists: the sculptures of Max Ernst, rooted in the earth. Sometimes the anatomical
for instance, on more than one occasion, and references would befit a children's book made
of course the light-fingered inventions of in Heaven; sometimes they are strictly for
another great Spaniard whom it is hardly adults—the two pieces called Forme Chapeau
necessary to name. The head of the Personnage can, for example, be read as broad vaginal
and Bird No. 29 of 1969 is for instance made openings in a Wagnerian helmet. Most of the
of a straw shopping-basket squashed flat, with sculptures are chamber-musical in scale;
the handles for ears and improvised metal many can be held in the hand, and we remem-
inserts for eyes and a mouth. But there is a ber at such times how Miró's first teacher
radical difference of feeling between this piece would make him hold an object in his hand
and a Picasso sculpture. Picasso in his ap- with his eyes shut until he could draw it by
proach to objects is voracious and tyrannical: feel alone. But some were made with enlarge-
the metamorphosis is made on the instant ment in mind : it would be a great pity, for
and stamped 'irreversible'. Miró is altogether instance, if Chicago were not to have the
more relaxed : what has been done in play, he monument originally destined for it, or if room
seems to say, could easily be undone if the were not found on the high seas for the piece
basket were to prefer it that way. There is, in called Monument to be Raised in the Ocean to the
fact, an unhurrying warmth about the new Glory of the Wind. Perhaps it is too much to
sculptures. Miró clearly enjoyed doing them, hope that every municipality would be as
and he did them not with any polemical in- sensible in this context as Barcelona; mean-
tent, and certainly not to prove his own con- while the sculptures in their present form add
tinuing vitality, but simply to get into close a new page, and a lively one, to the annals of
contact, once again, with the countryside that Miró's career. q
has been his subject, in one guise or another,
ever since he painted the winding path at
Ciurana in 1917. The battered and punctured
football which forms the head of another piece
is of the same order of objects, for Miró, as the RECENT SCULPTURES BY MIRÓ ARE ON
watering-can in The Farm, the stove in The EXHIBITION AT THE PIERRE MATISSE GALLERY,
Farmer's Wife (1922-3), the sun-dial in House NEW YORK, IN MAY. ILLUSTRATIONS TO THIS
with Palm Tree (1918), the carbide lamp in ARTICLE ARE COURTESY PIERRE MATISSE.