MIRÓ AND THE EARTH
‘I
have always been inspired by nature. As early as 1922 in my Mont-Roig farm, I
had been making sculptures from natural shapes such as stones, plants…… These
shapes were later covered in plaster and used as models for my first ceramics.
The powerful Catalan countryside constituted as essential element of my aesthetic
and poetic conception.’ (Joan
Miró)
A.
In the painting
The quotation allows us to imagine the very first
sculptures that Miró created – during the period when he was painting ‘La
Ferme’ (the farm) – a major work, which was followed by ‘Le Paysage Catalan’
(Catalan countryside). He always
attaches an almost religious respect to natural objects; as much as to man-made
objects.
‘La Ferme’ appears as in inventory of everything
occupying the artist’s visual field.
Every object, animal and figure stands in equal and shadow free
light. The central theme of the painting
appears to be fertility, but also maternity – the painter pretended he has been
working in this painting during nine months, ‘the time to carry a child’. Is it the child, hairless and naked,
crouching like an idol statue near a woman leaning over the drinking trough?
‘I must think about this story of the
farm. This direct contact with the
ground and the people who cultivate it, with the elements attached to it, would
be of a great human value to me, it would enrich me as a man and as an artist.’
Could it be compared with the numerous ploughing
scenes engraved on the rocks of the ‘Vallée des Merveilles’? It seems an obvious comparison.
La ferme, 1921/22
In the Paysage Catalan, Miró develops a new pictorial language,
reduced to a few rudimentary signs; geometric shapes and small ‘abbreviations’
of abstract objects, listed by Raymond Queneau as Chinese ideograms. Queneau went as far as to imagine a
‘Miróglyphic’ lexicon on order to learn how to interpret Miró, a pure poetic
language. (see footnote)
Thus, only the Catalan farmer’s pipe can be recognised,
the rest being reduced to some undulating, dotted or angled lines.
This painting is a great hymn to Miró’s native city and
its myths. At the bottom right the letters
SARD, forming the beginning of a word, refer on one hand to the Sardane, a
Catalan dance, and on the other hand to the sardine, which represents both an
important branch of activity and to a symbol of fertility.
Many sexual symbols correspond to the myth of woman,
which is deep-rooted in Mediterranean culture – a big round shape on the right,
and on the left, above an almond-shaped sign topped by streaming hair – found
constantly in Miró’s works.
Almost all the anthropomorphic and human figures, as well
as the schematic representations in prehistoric art have sexual organs, which
are exaggerated in scale and prominence.
Fecundity cults do not focus narrowly on sexuality as
such; rather they have a broad view of procreation and a concern for the transfer
and retention of an essential life-energy.
Similarly,
Miró’s concern was not so much with sexuality or eroticism, but with the
continuity of life. Miró states: ‘When I
am making a large female sex image, it is for me a goddess, as the birth of
humanity.
Paysage Catalan (Le
chasseur) – 1923/24
Finally, both inferior and superior halves are so similar
in terms of intensity and colour that the painting seems almost not to be
divided into sky and earth.
Ubiquity of space implies that there is no fundamental
difference between space and solid matter.
Nothingness is not inanimate emptiness, but rather becomes an
environment in which the formation of substances and the creation of life are
natural consequences. Nevertheless space
is conceived in a quite ambiguous way, as an external thing, as science teaches
that it is present in the smallest particle.
This significant paradox for both scientists and poets was marvellously
explored by Joan Miró, as it had been in fact so spontaneously by the Bronze
Age men in their worship of the Bull God.
Miró expresses the results of his forays in this vast
domain through two distinct languages: painting and sculpture.
As a painter he knows how to recognise the details in
nature revealing the fundamental unity between great and small, and thus how to
achieve a deeper knowledge of these mysteries.
Therefore, the apparent size of the objects becomes just an illusion. Imbued by this spirit, he got ahead of
spacemen when visiting the Moon – his painting makes us familiar with the
movements and tensions that occur in these natural spaces, whose infinity
exceeds our understanding. Miró populated the spaces of his own constellations
with the snail’s luminous trail. When
looking at his painting, we discover that the artist’s concern for detail is
but a way to reflect the notion of infinite space.
B.In the sculpture
Because of their three dimensions, Miró tries to bring
out the space in the sculptures as if we were in them, and to connect us with
the imaginary life which quivers within them.
While the pictorial illusions evoke a sensation of
transcendence which goes beyond the materiality of canvasses, sculpture – more
earth linked and less ethereal, becomes the tabernacle of life. Thus to the question ‘how do we come to
sculpture?’ Miró answered:
‘Through a very close contact with the
ground, with stones, with a tree…. a sculpture must hold in open air, in open
nature. Once brought closer, these
elements must make a whole. If you fly
over this sculpture by aeroplane, it must totally merge with its surroundings.’
The Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-De-Vence offered Miró
the opportunity to create works within a specifically Mediterranean space
scale. ‘Le Labyrinthe’ (The Labyrinth)
is a garden made of sculptures and ceramics.
It constitutes a topographic plotting of apparently disparate elements
gathered together by the artist, which complement or fit with each other like a
huge jigsaw. He tames marble in
‘L’oiseau solaire’ (The Solar Bird), naturally comparing the latter to
‘L’oiseau lunaire’ (The Lunar Bird), just as both these stars are inseparable
and also so far away. Above, ‘La déesse’
(The Goddess) – made of terracotta of the first period, with a large breast and
a strange sex made of a turtle shell – reigns as the mistress of fertility, of
soils and of harvests.
The sculptures nestle in a space which they do not seem
appropriate for, and this is because of Miró’s choice of a surprising place
which allows a comparison between Miró’s ‘Labyrinthe’ and the site of the
‘Vallée des Merveilles’.
Miró’s bronze sculpture is made almost completely of
salvaged material. Scrap is an
incredibly rich mine of insignificant objects to choose from - Miró’s choice is
mostly anthropomorphic.
Bronze unifies the most heterogeneous objects which come
mainly from the natural and man-made world.
The artist gave them a completely new existence by metamorphosing them
through reassembly.
Le Labyrinthe : The
great arch, 1963
The Bull
Pastorale (1923 – 24) gathers a regular repetition of signs and
shapes in an apparently simple drawing, which here also led the painter to
penetrate the very essence of things. Notable
elements:
·
The
woman with a tulip-shaped dress with one foot emerging. The diviner’s instinct leads Miró where the
primordial energy abounds and quivers.
There, in the bowels of the earth, he guesses it and makes it
sacred. He wrote ‘Power comes through feet’. And this energy answers to the stamp of
a bare foot and rises from the earth. It
irrigates the whole body, it excites senses and sex and it ignites the
painter’s mind.
The
bull (or cow) dotted with ochre, in the manner of animals painted in
prehistoric caves.
La pastorale, 1923/24
La Caresse d’un oiseau (The caress of a bird) gives an impressive demonstration
of Miró’s assembling technique – shown below.
These pieces, often found by chance, emanated for Miró a primal
attraction, a creative instant. Structure and shape launch a chain of
combinations, recalling the Surrealist process with which he had got in touch.
‘I need a starting point, even if only a
speck or a sparkle. This shape
procreates a series of things, each thing creating another one. Thus, a piece of thread can initiate a whole
world to me. (….) The matter, the instruments dictate a technique to me, a way
of bringing life to a thing. The meeting
of matter and instrument produces a shock that is something alive. ’ (Joan Miró)
A
fabulous being was born this way, whose origin in scraps can hardly be
recognised. The tortoise’s shell is
transformed into a woman’s knee, the table top into a feminine body, the hat
into an indiscreet face, and on the very top a small blue bull sits imposingly,
the horns forming the matriarchal crescent of the moon.
Composition (1925) painted during the same period as ‘La couleur des rêves’
(The colour of the dreams) attests his proverbial precision and meticulousness. His apparent minimalism hides an extreme
complexity, imposing images as evidence that one could hardly consider as not
having always existed.
Here I concentrate on this curious T-shaped figure on a
white cloud background, piercing a black point and put on a red shape. The black point with its horned shape could encapsulate
by itself through its totally purified style of drawing; all the metaphors
about The Bull, from bullfighting to the principal Earth-female, perfectly
balancing its opposite sky/male, black whirl shading off to blue.
The whole creation is revealed in this painting when one
discovers the perfect harmony of the two original rectangles in the background.
MIRÓ AND THE SKY
‘I am deeply distressed by the spectacle of
the sky. I am distressed when I see the
crescent of the moon or the sun in the immense sky. In my paintings there are very little shapes
in large empty spaces. Empty spaces,
empty horizons, empty plains, I was always impressed by all that is bare. ’ (Joan Miró)
In his large series of Constellations (1940 – 1941), Miró invests in the entirety of
space, as if he wants to capture a portion of the vault of heaven without
favouring the least point. He creates a
cosmos punctuated by stars, moons, suns and various signs that reveal a new
poetic richness that influences his ulterior works.
The carefully prepared backgrounds, with restless
structures covered with marks, carry a multitude of signs and figures which are
all subordinate to a cosmic flow which drags them along and inculcates in them
its order. To explain their genesis Miró
wrote:
I was feeling an
ardent desire to escape. I was
withdrawing into myself, voluntarily.
Night, music and stars begun to play an essential role, they were
suggesting paintings to me ’ .
Miró understood the
importance of the night, above all because if the freedom it allows, and
because of the ambiguities and contrasts it implies. It is the means to escape everyday life, and
the artist gave substance to visions coming from the subconscious. His attraction for the inaccessible, his
mystic unions with the stars are passionate and lasting emotions, but the way
he chooses to express them is visual, well-defined and remarkably efficient.
Le Triptyque Bleu I, II, III,
1961 (The Blue Triptych I, II, III)
‘It took me a long time to make them. Not to paint them but to meditate them. I made a huge effort, a very strong inner
effort to reach the required lack of ornamentation…. It was like a celebration
of a religious rite, like taking holy orders.
This fight exhausted me. These
paintings represented the result of all I had tried to do. ’ (Joan Miró)
The big triptych summarises the whole essence of the
blue, the deep colour of dreams. This
blue endows the universe with a spiritual and soothing dimension, vibrated by
some signs – black marks, halos, lines, red shape.
This mystic space refers to a calligrapher, a Zen
disciple. The enchantment of the signs was replaced by poetry of space and pure
colour, like a haiku (a tree-verse Japanese poem).
Miró
realises his ideal: ‘a painter setting a
poem to music.’
BETWEEN THE SKY AND EARTH: THE SCALE OF EVASION
The notion of a primordial contact between sky and earth
– which was later broken – is almost universal.
The different aspects of the symbolism of the scale come
down to the unique problem of the relationship between sky and earth. It reveals the symbol of the ascension, and
also that of the exchanges between the two worlds. It stands as a unity whereby top and bottom
can meet. It indicates a hierarchy, a
movement.
The
scale appears several times as a long vertical column in the iconographic list
of Mont Bégo’s engravings. The scale is
a recurring motif in Miró’s paintings and even is his sculptures.
In Le chien aboyant à la lune
(1926) (Dog barking at the moon), a scale rests on the border of the
stretcher set against the curtain of the night.
From its summit, a shape is stretching towards a satellite – as if to
attain reaching it. Aesthetically
speaking the four represented elements allow the eye to turn tirelessly inside
the painting, going through this moon which has long represented seduction and
the anguish caused by everything we desire that eludes us.
Une étoile caresse le sein d’une négresse (1938) (A star caresses the breast of a Negress.)
Not an immediately apparent star track, apart from the red undulation. On the right, the scale remains the only
indication of a lost horizon.
Les échelles de l’évasion
(1939 – 1940) (The scales of
evasion) could be a metaphor for escaping the oppressive political
circumstances of that time.
He chose to cope by dreaming of escape and turned to
sources of quiet and positive reinforcement.
In his art he adopted the ladder as a sign of escape.
Les échelles en roue de feu
traversant l’azur (The
fire wheel shaped scales crossing the azure)
They are signs of the relationship between the artist and the creative
forces, and they evoke a very happy, pictorial world.
Miro self Portrait, 1937
and 1940
CONCLUSION
Miró’s signs come not only from Miró’s time, from his
relationships with people, from his childish curiosity for strange beauties of
the world, but also from the deep strata of human consciousness in which the
archaic structure of these signs originate.
His works, as original as they are familiar, as worrying
as they are happy, whose elementary mythology restores a kind of mental
pre-history, achieve the wonder of talking possibly the strangest and certainly
the most universal language.
‘It is inside man’s behaviour that any work of
art is rooted I’d like to refer to my conception of the artist as a person with
a particular civil responsibility. In
this sense we conceive of the artist as somebody who, in the others’ silence,
uses his own voice to tell things that should not be useless, but on the
contrary that should be useful to the others… May this voice be prophetic to a
certain extent. May this voice be that
of the community it belongs to. ’ (Joan
Miró, 2nd October, 1979)
In this mission of using an universal language, Miró defended
his will of anonymity, that of childhood and of graffiti, and a desire for an
immediate and deep communication.
The hypothesis of a correspondence between Miró’s signs
and the prehistoric pictures or engravings is of particular interest here,
though we must not think about it as a naïve copy, rather as a tie of
similarity, like the birth of an antique language still engraved in the body’s
memory that could be revived by hallucinatory or meditative states.
Miró is a painter of the beginnings, of the birth and of
the metamorphosis of the sign.
‘Miró discovered again the secret of the
rupestrian painting hidden in men’s consciousness. Bringing it back to the surface of the most
acute actuality, he found the childhood of the art at the level of the contemporary
man….. It’s the happiness of the earth – the blood of our flesh – bathed with a
unanimous sun, which meets our eyes in its victorious innocence……. Miró does
not look at what he leaves behind him.
It is rather from the point of view of the action than from that of the
contemplation that he intends to use the warbling of things….. ’ (Tristan Tazara, 1948)
Thus, the primitive magic of his art can fit with the
dynamism of modern societies. Miró
wanted to give back to the aesthetic language its primitive power, to give to
the gesture a primordial importance and to draw in one shot only shapes with
thick and aggressive lines (his Self-portrait redrawn 1960, Painting 1953,
Woman III 1965, Woman in the night 1970….)
‘As for my means of expression, I endeavour
to reach more and more clarity to reach power and aesthetic aggressiveness,
i.e. to induce first a physical sensation to get thereafter to the soul.’ (Joan Miró)
Could this physical sensation, this famous ‘shock’
recurring in his words, be linked to the physical sensations felt by the Bronze
Age men living at the bottom of Mont Bégo which they would have expressed and
sublimated in their engravings?
In the same way, were these aesthetic powers and
aggressiveness not necessary to the engravers, armed with a quartz tool, in
order that three thousand years later one still perceives their spiritual echo
in the ‘Vallée des Merveilles’?
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