Books |
Joan Miro: I Work Like a Gardener
By
Published: Apr 26, 2018
Category:
Art and Photography
If you’re not a foodie, tapas gets old fast — by our third day in Barcelona, my daughter was Googling Italian restaurants. Yes, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia is the eighth wonder of the world, but the other Gaudi buildings… not so amazing. It was worth the hour train to experience the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres and have lunch in a café in the human-sized town square. And if you’re traveling with a female teen, Barcelona offers good shopping at reasonable prices.
The revelation in Barcelona, for me, was the Fundació Joan Miró. Start with the building, set high above the city. The architect was Josep Lluís Sert, who was born in Catalonia. In 1937, he designed the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris and asked his artist friends to fill it. Picasso sent “Guernica.” The Fundacio, built in 1975, is a masterpiece in concrete and glass — like a Richard Meier building, but just a bit better. Inside, the art is beautifully hung, with only a few paintings in each room.
And what paintings! The Picasso Museum in Barcelona has few top-shelf paintings; the best are in Paris. Miro (1893-1983) was not only from Spain, but of Spain; this is a great collection. I had seen a few Miro paintings in New York, but here, time after time, I’d turn a corner and see a painting of immense simplicity and beauty — a combination I cherish and, in my writing, struggle to achieve — and then, in the next room, see work that’s completely different.
You can’t see art of this quality and audacity without wanting to know more about Miro. The best introduction — “I Work Like a Gardener” — is just 86 pages, with 10 color illustrations. The words come from an 1958 interview. Miro was 65. It was an ideal time to seek him out. He had been looking at old work that had been put in storage, was creating a large retrospective for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was making two large murals for UNESCO — he could look back and, because he would be vital to the end of his life, look forward. It’s a quick, bracing read in a small (5” x 7”) yellow hardcover. Among its other virtues, it’s a great gift. [To buy “I Work Like a Gardener” from Amazon, click here.]
What comes across in this interview is great compression: ideas that have been lived and tested, then stated in language that is both lofty and direct. It starts like this:
By nature, I am tragic and taciturn. In my youth, I endured periods of great sadness. Now, I’m fairly well-balanced, but everything is appalling: life, to me, seems absurd. It’s not natural, I just feel this way. I’m a pessimist – I just think that everything is always going to turn out very badly.
If there’s anything humorous about my painting, it’s not been consciously sought. The humor comes, perhaps, from the need I feel to escape the tragic side of my temperament. It’s a reaction, but an involuntary one.
Here are some samples of his insights into his process — and much more:
The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I am overwhelmed when I see a crescent moon or the sun in an immense sky. In my paintings there are often tiny forms in vast empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything that has been stripped bare has always made a strong impression on me.
I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.
For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.
His biography suggests some reasons for his fascination with the objects of our daily lives. Born in Barcelona, he was the son of a blacksmith and jeweler. He burned to be an artist, which required him to move to Paris. Early on, Picasso bought one of his painting. “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.'” Hemingway bought it for the then astounding price of 5,000 francs.
Miro’s life was streamlined. “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,” noted the critic Jacques Dupin. “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.”
He was rooted. And, at the same time, sky-bound. “We Catalans believe that you must plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump high in the air,” he said. “The fact I come down to earth from time to time makes it possible to jump higher.”
And then I read this — “You get freedom by sweating for it, by an inner struggle…” — and as the author of a play about Henri Matisse, I suddenly realized another reason why I was taken by Miro: He was so like Matisse.
For a deeper dive and interesting biographical tidbits, you might want to go on to “Joan Miro: Selected Writings and Interviews.” [To buy it from Amazon, click here.]
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