The assassin who failed - Museum of Modern Art retrospective on Joan Miro, New york, New York - Column

National Review, Dec 27, 1993 by James Gardner

NOTHING kills an artist quite like a full-dress retrospective. Henri Matisse and Robert Ryman, though fine painters, are looking a little wan these days, after their life's work was assembled for all to see at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Such exhibitions, occasioned by our love of an artist's best and most famous works, invariably bring us into unlovely confrontation with what he himself might have wished to conceal, and few artists can survive such close scrutiny.

Unexpectedly then, Joan Miro, who was always impressive, has emerged from his ordeal at the Modern even more admirable than before. At the same time, this gifted Catalan, whose centenary we celebrate, seems more marginal than we realized. Of course, the point of the exhibit was to assert not his marginality but his centrality, since he spent most of his life in Paris when Paris was the center of everything, and he was acclaimed by the greatest cultural minds of that time and place. Picasso, for example, his Catalan compatriot, thought Mir5 the only artist to have taken painting beyond the point where Picasso had left it.

And yet, as the exhibition reveals, though Miro may reflect many tendencies of Modernism, especially Surrealism, he summed up none of the art that preceded him and he gave rise to none of the art that came after. Thus we are able to say of him, as we could not say of Klee or Mondrian or even Matta, that if he had never existed the history of art would not have been very different from what it is.

Or rather, it would have been different in only one sense, namely that it would not have included Joan Miro, and that would have been a very great omission. For MirS, in his steady, dependable way, was one of the visual giants of the century. His work is effortlessly and almost infallibly beautiful. His images have no message to them, yet they are living human documents of an almost unfathomable sensitivity.

Allied to this emotional integrity was an early mastery of color and form. Miro began as an Expressionist, reveling in the thrilling chromatic possibilities of pigment liberated from its ancient fealty to the retinal world. But he did not pursue this with the scientific pretensions of the early Picasso, and he seems never to have seen the point of Cezanne. Rather, what charmed him were pure colors illogically applied, as in an early scene of Prades, a Catalonian village. This view could almost be by Cezanne, except that there are more pinks, cobalts, mustards, and mauves in the lower half of the composition than Cezanne used in his entire career. When, a year later, Miro painted a pair of Cubist nudes, he was too devoted to color in the first, and to realistic details in the second, to employ the Cubist idiom with any kind of conviction.

Miro fully comes into his own in his stunning scenes of the small provincial village of Montroig. Against a steel blue sky stands an adobe house fronted by a palm tree and a snuff--colored field. The power of this and similar works is in the successful balance of cold dispassion in registering the specific details and a highly personal, even sentimental touch in the paint itself.

But Miro is at his best and most typical when he is most abstract, much as he would have hated to hear that. He let it be known fairly early on that, "I consider it an insult to be placed in the category of 'abstract' painters." Yet even if his images never lose that final link to the real world, their charm is almost wholly that of abstraction. In The Birth of the World, against one of those foggy moodscapes that Miro often chose as his backgrounds, there occurs the drama of a reddish spermlike dot, trailing a yellow tail, snaking its way between a pair of angular black shapes. Dog Barking at the Moon is a sparsely composed, immaculately balanced image in which a brightly illumined ladder recedes into the blackness of the night, while a rainbow-colored canine bays at a Cubistic moon.

Miro is a far more elegant if less passionate painter than Picasso. Even in Barcelona Composition, March 31, 1933, whose swirling forms and grasping, disembodied arms recall the later Picasso's figural vocabulary, there is a noticeable sense of well-being rather than emotional intensity. In every way the painting is more elegant than anything Picasso would ever have attempted. It is a polished performance in which fields of navy and russet and forest green seep into one another in an unresisting dream-like legato. Miro's art is remarkably inventive within a fairly circumscribed number of artistic terms, and thirty years after that first painting, in Blue H from the early Sixties, he achieved a similarly beautiful effect with a fiery stripe and a syncopation of black dots puttering across a cool blue field.

His final work, made when he was in his seventies and eighties, represents a slight falling off. One reason for this is his attempts at sculpture, of which he acquitted himself with more competence than inspiration by imitating a far inferior artist, Max Ernst. As for his later paintings, some of them have power, but they are no longer infallible, straining as they do toward a passion and panache which the younger artist would have resisted.