At the end of this retrospective of the surrealist painter Joan Miró stands one of his last works, an enormous triptych featuring spatters of paint on a white background – inverted fireworks if you will. The paintings characterise what, for some, is wrong with modern art. Five triptychs, never displayed before, are the centrepiece of this exhibition. All share their simplicity and resistance to interpretation. One features a solitary, single black line drawn across three canvases.
This comprehensive exhibition, in its chronological look at the remarkable progress of Miró’s creative process, seems almost designed specifically to give works like this a sense of bulk, dialogue and significance. Artists are not simply fountains of creativity and works do not stand alone, alien from their context. Artists have friends, families, idols, countries, loves and hatreds. It seems that works emerge more often from this melee than from some inner ‘vision’ of the artist himself. Miró’s gradual development through symbolism to surrealism and finally to a lack of form is traced here through a combination of major works, notebooks and studies, with additional context, both political and personal, provided by the curators.
His repeated motifs of stars, ladders and the Catalan peasant provide a framework on which to explore ideas of freedom and nationality. The Catalan peasant is gradually reduced to a triangular head and stick figure body showing the increasing archetypal significance of this figure for Miró and its importance in a resistance to the centralisation of power in Spain.
Another repeated figure, the ladder, is poignantly shown again and again. Curators obviously wanted to emphasise this symbol, the exhibition is even titled ‘The ladder of escape’. Alastair Sooke of The Telegraph has criticised the ‘politicisation’ of Miró in this exhibition, however, it seems impossible to view Miró’s works as distinct from his fierce Catalan nationalism. The chronology seems to act as a commentary of national events, as much as a commentary on Miró’s inner life.
The ladder is thought to be a connection between two worlds. Sometimes, as in ‘Dog Barking at the Moon’, it seems to have physical substance and depth. Yet in others, as in the ‘Ladder of Escape’ or ‘La caresse des étoiles’, the ladders are mere stick drawings. In a moving sketch titled ‘Naked Woman Going Up Stairs’, a tired, swollen woman with a huge nose climbs steps determinedly, face set. And yet in the background hovers this ladder once more, unable to take her weight, unable to offer escape. It is an odd combination of surrealism and more traditional figurative art and shows the meeting point of abstractions and life which Miró plays with throughout his works.
It is difficult to know how political Miró was ever trying to be. For a man promising to ‘assassinate painting’ he certainly left many paintings behind. While perhaps this retrospective pulls forward politics too much, the contradictions and rapid changes in style show Miró’s interest in matching form with event. He said an artist is someone who, “in the midst of others’ silence, uses his own voice to say something and who makes sure that what he says is not useless, but something that is useful to mankind.” This is not the voice of a man uninterested in politics and society.
Though the vast triptychs are perhaps the hardest of Miró’s works to understand, having walked through the thirteen rooms of Miró’s life and politics, those three ‘Fireworks’ canvases say more to the viewer than even his most famous work, ‘The Farm’. His resistance to form, even to toe the line of the Surrealist school he belonged to, was remarkable and continued into his eighties.
This retrospective is painstakingly ordered and curated to tell the story of Miró’s life and twentieth century Spain. Often overshadowed by his contemporaries, Picasso and Dali, this exhibition proves that Miró is more than worth the canvas he’s painted on.
Exhibition at Tate Modern runs until the 11th September
