NEW YORK -- If any painter could be said to have provided American art lovers with their favorite dream landscape, it was Spanish artist Joan Miro, the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.
Miro was even more successful than his compatriot, Salvador Dali, in creating surreal shorthand symbols like doodlebugs that live in the memory of anyone who has ever seen his paintings and his lesser known sculptures.
Nothing as esoteric as limp watches for Miro. He dealt with such familiar subjects as humanoid figures (which he called personages), dogs, birds, fish, insects, mountains, stars, comets, suns and moons, which float onto his canvases from the subconscious of everyman, rich in erotic overtones.
American museums, private collectors and art dealers own more Miros than can be found in the rest of the world. The exhibit of more than 150 paintings, drawings and sculptures at the Guggenheim, to run through Aug. 23, draws on these American sources, the Miro Foundation in the artist's native Barcelona and collections in a dozen European countries.
It is the first major Miro exhibition in America since a 1959 show at the Museum of Modern Art and was made possible by a grant from the Ford Motor Co. It was organized by an intimate friend of Miro, art writer-dealer Jacques Dupin, and shown in Zurich, Switzerland, and Dusseldorf, West Germany, before coming to New York.
Dupin said Miro, who died in Mallorca in 1983 at the age of 90, never was anything but 'a Catalan peasant.'
'No matter how successful he was and how much money he made, he did not change his way of life. In that, he was like his good friend Picasso,' Dupin said at a preview of the show. 'Only in his later years did he consciously reach out for a larger following. His canvases became larger and he began to make sculpture and ceramics with an eye to leaving behind monuments in our cities.'
Although the Guggenheim show is called a retrospective, the bulk of the art on view was created before the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when Miro fled with his family to Paris for the duration. It covers the most extraordinary period of Miro's creativity thoroughly but slights the later years, when he tended to repeat his earlier subject matter as did Marc Chagall.
The show also should have more examples of Miro's sculpture and his prolific outpouring of drawings. There are only a few Dadaist assemblages from the 1930s, some totemic ceramic sculptures from the 1950s, the ceramic tile wall commissioned for the Guggenheim in 1965, and ceramic masks from the 1970s. Only a few works on paper later than 1937 are included.
Thus, paintings are the stars of the show. They range from realistic landscapes and portraits touched with cubism painted prior to 1920, through the explosive surrealist landscapes of the early 1920s, to the dream landscapes of the 1920s and 1930s filled with abstract pictographs occasionally captioned in script or mingled with isolated alphabet letters.
The amazing aspect of Miro's art is his pendulum swing between canvases that are filled with symbols wriggling with life and those which are all space and minimal movement. In his ability to free himself by casting off any reference to perspective and dimension in creating his highly personal imagery, he has much in common with the Russian-German non-objective master, Vasili Kandinsky.
Dupin has cleverly arranged related groups or series of pictures in the individual bays of the museum's spiral ramp, so that subtle changes in Miro's style and coloration, which run from vigorous, almost phosphorescent color to monochrome tones, are dramatically underscored. For instance, his 1925 'blue period' paintings are grouped together, as are his 1934 painting collages on sandpaper. 'Miro was influenced by the Romanesque architecture and art he was familiar with in Catalonia when he was a child and later he became aware of prehistoric Spanish cave painting, from reproductions he saw in the Barcelona museum and from visits to the actual caves at Altamira. He was also much influenced by Antonio Gaudi, the Catalan architect.'
But what of Miro's influences on his contemporaries and successors in modern art, Dupin was asked.
'Just look about you, especially here in the United States,' he answered.
Miro is known to have influenced many American abstract expressionists -- Marc Rothko, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman, to name a few.
Miro made four trips to the United States after World War II and was himself impressed and influenced by the American expressionists, whose work tended toward the monumental. He tried painting mural-size canvases with rough, heavy brush strokes but was never completely at home working on the scale preferred by the New York school.
