![]() ![]() Consequently considerably less emphasis has been placed on techniques and composition and more on content and the intentions behind his paintings. This retrospective exhibition is unusual in that its attempt to highlight political engagement, takes us beyond his best-known work in the forties and fifties into the less well known later part of his career in the sixties and early seventies. On the contrary Miró insisted that he was a realist. Coinciding with the anti- formalist tendencies of Post Modernism far greater emphasis has been placed on the historical and political context of Miró’s work calling into question assumptions that Miró’s universe, as expressions of a surrealist dream world, is essentially hedonistic, whimsical and celebratory. What brings him closer to Surrealism is his private language of symbols and signs, such as the ladder that represents escape and freedom on which the curators focus in their argument that Miró’s work has a political orientation.ĭevelopments in recent Miró studies that challenge the Surrealist appropriation of his work form the intellectual backdrop of this exhibition. Indeed throughout the twenties though his vision was unconventional his modernist techniques were relatively conventional in terms of his use of non-naturalistic, fauvist colour, his rejection of perspective, and his flattening of the picture plane. ![]() On the contrary, he scrupulously and methodically planned each painting in advance and his preparatory drawings invariably squared up. ![]() Miró remained through out a radical and independent artist whose output was not dependent on hallucinogens or hypnosis. He never became an official member of Breton’s Surrealist club and, much like de Chirico, his own idiosyncratic style, which some might say prefigured the pictorial rhetoric of Surrealism, was already formed by the time he moved to Paris from Barcelona in 1920.Īlthough he considered his technique ‘automatic’ Miró relied neither on the total abdication of conscious thought “beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupations” that Breton demanded of his stable of artists, nor on the latter’s predilection for photographic surrealism as exemplified by Dali and Magritte. That Breton despite himself may have been partly correct in his intuition about an artist whose paintings he had introduced to the public when he took over the editorship of ‘La Revolution Surrealiste’ in 1924 has been demonstrated by the fact that Miró was, from the beginning of his time in Paris, closer intellectually and geographically to the rue Blomet group of artists that included Masson and the writers Leiris and Bataille than he was to Breton. It is curious that André Breton who cited Miró as "the most Surrealist of us all" should also berate him for lacking any real social awareness, attacking him for his "petit Bourgeois spirit." This exhibition sets out to disprove Breton’s misgivings by arguing that Miró was not only personally engulfed by events such as the Spanish civil war and sensitive to political issues, but also that his work was principally a means of communicating his rage and near despair.
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