From surrealism to the murder of painting: the Guggenheim in Bilbao pays homage to Miró

Joan Miró took a picture of himself in 1919 dressed in a shirt that, over time, has become the best representation of that constant transformation and dilemma that his work went through.

The left half of the garment is woven with cubist lines.

The right half is reminiscent of the cultivated land, the one he saw from his farmhouse in Tarragona.

In that shirt is the impulse that he felt for the countryside, for his land and the influence that the avant-garde would have on his work.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao delves into this debate with the first monographic exhibition dedicated to the Catalan artist, which can be visited from this Friday until May 28.

The journey begins in the twenties when he arrives in Paris and his painting changes forever.

And it ends in the mid-forties when the great author of the

'Self-portrait', by Joan Miró (1893-1983).

Mathieu Rabeau / RMN-GP (Musee National Picasso, Paris / (C) Successio Miró / ADAGP)

That

-portrait , although it is the formal beginning of the exhibition

, is rather the epitaph of his first stage, in which he "resorted to portraits and landscapes, the most traditional genres of ancient painting," explains Enrique Juncosa, curator of the show.

Discarding any trace that could be translated into a figurative image, the artist gave himself up to what Surrealism called "absolute reality."

In other words, “the sum of what the eye saw and what the brain interpreted”, in the words of the person in charge of the exhibition.

Miró, like the rest of his colleagues who arrived in Paris at the beginning of the twenties, tried to follow the model promulgated by André Breton, father of surrealism, when he spread his belief between the union of dreams and reality. .

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Miró dreamed to the point of hallucinating when he fasted marathons.

Miró dreamed of the shapes of insects that he saw in the cracks of the wood that he used as canvases.

Miró dreamed of smokers and painted only their smoke and what looks like a lighter.

If a lion appeared in his dreams, in one of the exposed paintings what you see are the scratches from his claws and a drawing that looks like a mane.

The artist's dreams that are collected in the sample are sometimes so difficult to interpret that they remain in mysterious lines.

But never, the author insisted on making it clear, he was interested in pure abstraction.

Perhaps for this reason, Breton first accused him of being “childish and not very intellectual”, for a time later to consecrate him as “the most surreal of all”, Juncosa recalls this Thursday while walking through the exhibition.

'Catalan Peasant with Guitar (Paysan catalan à la guitare)', 1924. Oil on canvas.

Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum (© Sucesió Miró, 2022)

In the painting

(1926), one of the more than 80 pieces on display at the Guggenheim, is one of those examples that made Breton change his mind about Miró.

The insect, which is clearly interpreted, has a long blue tongue, that color that is in so many of his paintings and that gave its name to one of his defining works,

.

The animal jumps from a landscape with two volcanoes on which the painter put his name — "He is the landscape," explains Juncosa — to a planet with two other erupting volcanoes and a ladder.

“The staircase is one of the symbols of surrealism with mystical connotations.

It is the ascent to heaven.

The grasshopper leaps towards an erupting place that will take it even higher.

'The Grasshopper (La Sauterelle)', 1926. Oil on canvas. Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, Athens (© Sucesió Miró, 2022)

There is in Miró, as in Picasso, whom he met, a very special interest in cave paintings, petroglyphs, statuettes and prehistoric art in general, which he renews with his style in a series of paintings on a white background that give way to the final scene of the show: the constellations.

In the large rooms of the Guggenheim, the spaciousness contributes to the historical and narrative perspective.

Before success came to him in the market — ”he didn't start making money until the 50s ″, says the curator — he was recognized as one of the artists who murdered painting.

"The artist himself recognized that he made very ugly paintings," Juncosa explains of a series of paintings with a brown background known as masonites for the type of panel material on which he painted pieces during the summer that the Spanish Civil War began, with names as eloquent as

(1935).

These works, which somehow represented “the impossibility of painting to say something”, the curator points out, are the origin of his famous constellations.

“After painting, I would dip my brushes in white spirit and dry them on white sheets of paper, without following preconceived ideas.

The stained surface stimulated me and caused the birth of shapes, human figures, animals, stars, the sky, the sun and the moon.

He drew all these things, vigorously with charcoal.

[…] This took me a long time”, Miró wrote.

"A prodigy of concentration", Juncosa adds.

The 23 constellations were made between January 1940 and September 1941 and he finished them in Majorca, where he died in 1983, fed up with a Barcelona that was never as creative for him as Paris or the countryside.

And this is where the exhibition ends.

Although somehow it continues, as those responsible for it explain, in abstract expressionism and that automatic painting by Jackson Pollock.

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