'Painting disgusts me': destruction rather than childlike reverie was the driving force of the young Joan Miro, as Sebastian Smee found in the Centre Pompidou's ambitious exhibition

Apollo, May, 2004 by Sebastian Smee

John Updike's most recent novel, Seek My Face, is a fictionalised meditation on the gap between the grand intentions and the actual achievements of the American postwar Abstract Expressionists. 'They all still spoke of painting in terms of self-exploration and an agonised authenticity that would revolutionise the world and whatnot,' says the main character, Hope, 'but the results were a little like company logos, everybody working on the scale of 19th-century academic art but each of them having come up with some eye-catching simplification.'

The Spaniard Joan Miro was one of the formative influences on the Abstract Expressionists. Indeed, to see the exhibition of Miro's work at the Centre Pompidou is to feel that most of what Pollock, Rothko, Gorky and Motherwell achieved was there--overtly or in pulsating, embryonic form--in Miro's canvases of the mid- to late-1920s.

But one reason it may be time to look at this period (1917-34) of Miro's career again is precisely that his 'eye-catching simplifications' became, in the long years that followed his canonisation as a modern master (he lived until 1983), a repetitive, sometimes kitschy manner--not quite 'company logos', but good enough for UNESCO and Harvard University and any number of prestige-hungry museums wanting a touch of his 'magic'.

Miro deserves better. Andre Breton praised him for the childlike qualities of his art. But he also said he feared the painter's development 'had been arrested at the infantile stage'. This exhibition tries to show that the image of Miro as a painter of innocuous reveries and child like fancies is wrong. Instead, through a display of more than two hundred works and a judicious and scholarly unearthing of Miro's aims during these crucial years, it presents us with a painter of tremendous originality and untamed vigour.

'Early Miro' generally conjures up two or three decorative but rather extraordinary images from between 1918 and 1923: The kitchen garden with donkey, The farm, and Ploughed land. Their subjects are the fields and farmhouses of Montroig, the Catalan village where Miro convalesced after an illness in 1911, and to which he regularly returned. With its saturated colour and surreal iconography, Ploughed Land (1923-24) has always been considered the 'breakthrough' picture, pointing the way towards the simpler, symbolically-charged Miro we think we know.

But for all its strangeness, Ploughed Land remains a carefully planned and polished composition. Without quite disputing its importance, the curators of this show choose to follow it with a cascade of raw and freely inventive drawings from around the same period. Their aim is to emphasise the extreme tumult of this stage in Miro's development. 'My only certainty is that I want to destroy', he said, 'to destroy everything that exists in painting. I feel a profound contempt for painting, I'm interested only in pure mind ... Painting disgusts me. I can't look at any of my works'.

This, and comments like it, made Miro famous, and helped create a legend around his name. But what the works from the central part of the exhibition bring home is that Miro really meant what he said. In the summer of 1924, he began painting what he called X's--big, rough, simplified canvases made in deliberate counterpoint to the smaller, more charming works such as The farm and Ploughed land.

'This is hardly painting,' he wrote to Leiris that year, 'but I really don't give a damn.' Over the next four years, Miro's work was utterly transformed. His grounds became monochrome, laid on in brushy washes of lemon yellow, earthy green, ochre or what he called 'saliva blue' (he confessed to a strong desire to 'lick this beautiful sky'). They are punctuated by scattered incident in the form of straight, diagrammatic (sometimes dotted) lines, filled-in blobs, numbers, words, drips and smears. Much of this appears abstract but is in fact loosely representational or symbolic. Inherent in it all is Miro's challenge to traditional, single-point perspective, and his heavy emphasis on tactility, conveyed through brushwork and collage. Sex is central, and given a significance both metaphysical and sensual: signs for the female sex are conflated with signs for stars, while sperm-like traces and blotches recur all through the work.

But rather than any symbology, it is the demotic, arbitrary nature of Miro's creativity, and the sense it creates of a violent stripping away, that is most impressive. An essay by Remi Labrusse in the catalogue discusses Miro's work in relation to 'potlatch', the Chinook word for a form of socially competitive behaviour which involves making increasingly lavish gifts to neighbouring, rival tribes as a form of challenge, sometimes to the point of destroying the gifts in front of those rivals.

The idea of potlatch, introduced to Europe by anthropologists such as Frank Boas, was taken up by the sociologist Marcel Mauss as the keystone for his general theory of the social and the sacred, and subsequently by artists and writers in France after World War I. For many, potlatch constituted a critique of technological modernity and production-oriented views of the world. In his The notion of expenditure, Georges Bataille wrote that in art, 'the accent is placed on loss, which must he as great as possible for the activity to acquire its full meaning'. Miro was an associate of Bataille and strongly influenced by such ideas, as well as by the widespread interest in the primitive. Destruction was for him a way of bringing enchantment back into the world.