Joan Miro
French father of Surrealism Andre Breton called Spanish artist Joan Miro (1893-1983) "the most Surrealist of us all," while Miro himself infamously called for "the assassination of painting." Particularly between 1927 and 1937, transformative years during his very long career, Miro worked to both attack and reinvigorate painting. Though he maintained his freedom, experimenting with other movements such as Expressionism and Color Field painting and never truly becoming a member of the...
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Text by Carolyn Lanchner. Library JournalThe genius of the Catalan painter/sculptor Joan Mir was best demonstrated by the sustained intensity of his remarkably imaginative vision, which endured for much of this century. This book, the catalog of a recent retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, offers a good venue for discovering-or rediscovering-Mir's unique and often lyrical Surrealist style. Some 230 pages of luminous colorplates are unquestionably the highlight of the volume, testifying to both the immensity of the exhibition and the lavish production values of its catalog. This section is found, however, only after wading through a lengthy, arcane, and largely unreadable biocritical essay by Lanchner, MoMA's curator of painting and sculpture. Because of the variety and sheer volume of work, there is a great deal to like and dislike in Mir's oeuvre. Nevertheless, even those who are disdainful of his unremittingly rounded, wavy shapes will grant that his is a cohesive body of work, parts of which form the early breezes of the hurricane that was to hit the ``New York School'' of abstract art in the late Forties and early Fifties. Recommended for larger art collections. [For another view of Mir, see Jacques Dupin's Mir, reviewed above.]-Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal.
