Joan Miro's Drawing-Collage, August 8, 1933: the "intellectual obscenities" of postcards

In 1933, Joan Miro produced over a dozen Drawing-Collages. They are held by major collections, have been included in numerous exhibitions, and are present in nearly every major publication on Miro since they were made in the early 1930s. Yet their significance to the artist and to art history has been virtually ignored by contemporary historians and critics. The Drawing-Collages are disturbing; they tensely combine the careful draftsmanship of an artist with the unpredictability of an idiosyncratic collector. On easel-size paper in white, green, or dark brown, Miro used conte crayon lines to connect mass-produced images cut from advertisements, anatomical engravings, and commercial chromolithographs. Though not the first works in which Miro would incorporate or draw inspiration from postcards, (1) the series features unmanipulated postcards prominently and repeatedly. Puncturing the visual field, these mechanically reproduced elements from popular culture make forceful intrusions into the space of Miro's artwork.

As a public display of the productive use of mass culture, each of the Drawing-Collages presents the viewer with a uniquely constructed world within a frame. They are violent and playful, erotic and innocent, calculated and full of chance. They are also, I would argue, historically specific works that are densely layered and informed by Miro's connections to Paris and Barcelona, as well as to the world of art and the world of spectacle. To trace the formal qualities and interpretive weight of the entire series or even a select number of the Drawing-Collages would be an ambitious project. My goal in this essay is far more modest. I want to attempt a first reading of the Museum of Modern Art's Drawing-Collage of August 8, 1933.

The works in Miro's series have been published with the titles Collage, Collage-Drawing, Drawing-Collage, and Untitled. Throughout this essay, I refer to the series as Drawing-Collages and to the individual work as Drawing-Collage.

This article was supported by a Dean's Special Grant, College of Fine and Applied Arts, and a grant from the Research Board of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I thank Jonathan Fineberg, Paul Hammond, Robert Lubar, Charles Palermo, and Anne Umland for their encouragement and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Anne, who has graciously and repeatedly answered my questions. My research assistants Jenni Linkogel, Guisela Latorrre, and Ana Tallone contributed time and expertise to this project. This essay is part of a larger book project on Surrealism and postcards. All translations into English are by the author unless otherwise noted.

This Drawing-Collage, perhaps more than any other, relates Miro's artistic choices of the summer of 1933 to the particular attention that he and other artists in France and Spain paid to such turn-of-the-century pleasures as postcards and music halls. Tracking the appearance of both in the work of Miro and his fellow artists demonstrates their cross-national appeal as avant-grade subjects. Once documented, however, questions emerge about the significance of the avant-garde's fascination with forms of cultural production that performed the spectacle of modernity through sentimentality and nostalgia. Why, in 1934, when the French poet Paul Eluard published his "Les plus belles cartes postales" in Minotaure, were members of the Catalan avant-garde taking stock of their own collections of turn-of-the-century ephemera? What was the trigger that sent Surrealists and non-Surrealists alike back into the postcard albums of their parents' generation? Why bring private collections and desires out into the public, especially when the bad taste and decadence of middle-class kitsch characterized the objects and images from these collections? What was it about the "golden age" of the prewar period that resonated with artists in the 1930s? To answer these questions, this article takes Miro's Drawing-Collages of 1933 as a point of departure to reconsider the relationship of mass culture to the European avant-garde.

Collage Criticism

Critics in France and Spain offered initial responses to Miro Drawing-Collages even before the works had been widely exhibited. Differences emerge within the brief but important historic reception of the series. Similarities also exist: all of the writings of the 1930s comment on the hybrid nature of these works and their connection to Surrealism (albeit sometimes contested). In the 1934 special issue of Cahiers d' art dedicated to Miro, Christian Zervos included a brief description of the Drawing-Collages. He placed them in relation to the artist's other recent achievements and in contrast to the work that Miro had just finished during the spring of 1933, in which he used cutouts of mass imagery in collage sketches for large-scale paintings:

     In the summer of this same year, 1933, Miro changes once again.
     Instead of using commonplace images in order to incite the driving
     emotional response, he fixes on the canvas the image and the
     automatic writing that it provoked. In these works, which have not
     yet been shown to the public, Miro has counterposed the most
     ordinary reality with the hallucinations that gave birth to the
     excitation.
          As with his previous canvases, Miro' works without
     preconceived ideas. He begins by pasting, anywhere on the canvas,
     an image cut from a catalogue, or newspaper, or sometimes a
     postcard. This leads him to draw a form, which in turn compels him
     to paste another image, until the moment when the picture attains
     the most intense poetic expression without the discipline of the
     plastic arts losing its privilege. (2)