The Fantasy World of Miro, by Karen Wright

18 September 2009

In the south of France last week and it was hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement. To get some relief from the heat, we went up into the hills above Nice to visit the Maeght Foundation. I hadn’t been there for years and remembered it was good, but not how good it was.

Walking through the entrance garden surrounded by sculptures by the best of 20th Century sculptors including an imposing stabile by Alexander Calder and a lyrical water fountain by Pol Bury.

Designed in 1962-3 by Catalan architect Josef Louis Sert, who worked in the sculptural expressive style, best seen in the US in the work of the Saarinen TWA terminal at John F Kennedy Airport, the Maeght Foundation building is set around a series of terraces and courts. Sert was a close friend of Joan Miro’s and went on to build both Miro’s studio in Palma de Majorca and also the Miro Foundation in Barcelona. Sert worked closely with Miro in designing the building and especially Miro’s labyrinth, a series of terraces.

Natural daylight is brought into the building by raised light traps on the roof, and the galleries often have spacious views out onto the various terraces. Climb to the top of the building and you get a vista both of the various terraces but also a bird’s eye view of the bell tower with its inset mosaics by and the sculpture, both by Miro atop it.

The current temporary exhibition, a one-man show of Joan Miro, one of the artists most closely associated to the Maeght Workshop in Paris. Miro is often eclipsed by his contemporary Pablo Picasso, but having explored this show it brought back memories of “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937,” the artist’s recent show at MoMA.

In 1972, Miró famously said, “I want to assassinate painting,” he wasn’t saying anything new. The 20th Century in some ways spent much of its artistic energy trying to do away with this process that many considered old fashioned. In an unforgettable painting at the beginning of the exhibition, the Portrait of a Dancer, (1928) the list of materials -Feather, cork, and hatpin on wood panel with household paint (original feather has been replaced- tell you almost everything need to know. The artist has reduced everything down to its barest minimum. It is truly what he has consciously left out that is important. The grace and elegance of the dancer are in shorthand – reproduced simply by a feather.

Miro said he loved the ‘phantasmagorical world of living monsters’. So it comes as no surprise that Miro’s creatures, look sort of like animals. ”Sort of” - as they are like no animal really - but are instead a summation of goofy body parts. They are ancestors to that game “Potato head” that one played as a child. They come out of the surrealism that infused his work from the mid 1920s, forms which he chose to simplify as he grew into his work.

A row of three works, all of them fountains on a side terrace equally display angst and simplification. A face, identifiable by two large black eyes, the nose recessed in the folded metal, the round mouth spewing water resembling some kind of unidentifiable primeval frog, while next to it hangs a cobalt blue rectangular head and nearby a maroon monstrous geometric head. The three works illustrate both Miro’s simplification of form and his love of the folk and primitive art, which he collected and of which he said “it never failed to move me because it goes straight to the heart of things.”

Inside a pair of works, Man and Woman, two juxtaposed portraits made of found objects, the male, a red rectangular stool surmounted by a rectangular blocky object, the female a black curvaceous stool surmounted by a simple yellow egg, so simple and so telling and so prescient of works like that of Sarah Lucas.

There are paintings here including two abstract works that could equally be early Cy Twombly’s. This is abstraction taken to its limits, with its graffiti-like marks and dark vortexes that are indicative of sexual organs.

Pottery is here also, with a beautifully installed group of child-like loops and swirls, all looking deceptively simple to reproduce. The dominant line here is confidant, both thick and black, something that influenced the work of fellow painters like American abstractionist, Jackson Pollock.

Working drawings, often on crumpled bits of paper include the cartoon for the large wall outside. Miro used what was on hand to capture his inspiration -backs of letters, butchers bills and bus tickets, -often nurturing the shadowy figure of the idea for years before bringing it to fruition. He said simply “I have been doodling all of my life.” Miro was clear though that there had to be some point of reference in these selected objects, “Use things found by divine chance bits of metal, stone, etc….that is the only thing – this magic spark – that counts in art. I must have it as a point of departure, even if it is only a grain of dust or a flash of light”.

The wall outside, contains many of Miro’s most familiar artistic notations, the arrows that appear and reappear in everything from pots to drawings. The colours, saturated primary colours imposed on the surrealistic ant-like heads taken away from any possible naturalist interpretation by their dense coloration of Mediterranean blue.

The extent of the Miro collection would be enough to satisfy the visitor, but the range expands behind this seminal artist. On a terrace overlooking the countryside is a strong group of Giacometti bronzes including the now almost too familiar single striding man, but also the shadow like dog slinking dog. This group is worth a visit in its own right.

Leaving the Maeght behind we travel to the Matisse Chapel in the nearby town of Vence. Descending down the flight of stairs from the street one enters into the small chapel that Matisse decorated towards the end of his life. The stained glass windows permit a lavender tinged light which falls onto the alter hewn in a porous brown stone, chosen we are told, by Matisse himself, for it’s resemblance to communion bread. Here are the familiar (from photographs), 14 Stations of the Cross, drawings, done with simple thick black lines made with the aid brush on the end of a long pole. They are abstracted to the extreme - reminiscent of the Miro’s we have just seen.

The chapel itself is surmounted by a roof of Mediterranean blue tiles, on top of which a thin wrought iron spire soars into the sky shimmering in the heat. The perfect ending to a perfect day.

Miro et son Jardin continues at the Foundation Maeght until November 8, 2009

The Matisse Chapel in Vence is opened for limited hours, check ahead to avoid disappointment.