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The
current exhibit at MoMA, Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting
1927-1937, offers a panoramic spread of
Miró's paintings,
collages and collage-inspired paintings. They are organized
into twelve
series of paintings that examine various themes such as Spanish
dancers, Dutch interiors, Collages, Constructions and Objects,
Paintings on Masonite, etc. The series Dutch Interiors
and Imaginary Portraits, painted between 1928 and 1929, takes
Miró's stated quest to 'assassinate painting' and question
painterly traditions to marvelous lengths.
The
background of Portrait of Queen Louise of Prussia (1929)
is a
beautiful earthy palette of browns and ochres. With abstract
shapes that are little more than patches of dark green, red and
brown, shapes that were inspired by advertisements for an engine
and a shirt collar in a Catalan paper, Miró has created the small
abstract figure of the Queen. He attacks portrait painting -
the high subject expressed with low language - and instead creates
a marvelous composition of abstract form and color. In Portrait
of La Fornarina (1929), Miró again uses a few dark colors in
fluid shapes to deliver his particular take on Raphael's
original of a beautiful semi-nude woman said to be his lover and
muse. La Fornarina's black dress rises volcano-like on the
canvas. Her body spills out in rounded, simplified forms and
her face is disfigured: the overall effect is wonderfully
simplistic and irreverent, almost naïve. Color divides each
part of Miró's canvas: black dress, brown neck and face, darker
brown hair, the whole set against a deep blue-green
background. In other paintings in the series, the human form
is disfigured to comic effect, again by the clever use of color to
demarcate Miró's twisted blob-like forms.
In
Dutch Interiors I-III, Miró transforms realistic,
naturalistic Dutch interiors with flat, bold reds, blues and
yellows. In Dutch Interior I, a white and brown dog
takes on an almost cartoonish appearance - Miró worked from a
postcard reproduction of Hendrick Martensz Sorgh's De
Luitspeler. In Miró's version, colors clash and
seemingly leap off wall and canvas, and the result is a
wonderfully vivid excitement and energy. One of Miró's
great contributions is to demonstrate that color as much as form
is essential to abstract art as he wields it like a knife to
attack and subvert . . . to twist and recreate….
See:
Joan
Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937" runs through
Jan. 12 at the Museum of Modern Art
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