exhibit #1

Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937 (Moma)

I saw the first half of this exhibit in December, the second half today. One thing I'm gonna do this year is take notes when I go to museums- really reflect on what I'm seeing, and draw my own interpretations. I intend to add photo links to this entry. In the meantime, here is the online catalogue.

Painting, 1927. The white splash= inspiration. the rectangle= moment. the lines= discipline. the dots= the intersection, the destiny. It's an interpretation of the creative process. And it's color and it's sublime, but also miniscule. unremarkable. the grand, dramatic construction, and yet- "is this it?"

(Look up: illusionistic, as used in academic art history)

golden-brown color of unprimed canvass, evokes old newspapers or Rauschenberg

(Look up: Miro's Spanish Dancers)

portrait of a dancer- very cool

La Fornatina, Raphael

Dutch Interior (I) is PeeWee's Playhouse

Portrait of Queen Louise- He mocks the idea of a frame with a preening second frame. The corners of his room, shadeless, could be either inverted or shooting out into space. and the room is not even concrete, the black rectangle on the end- and the figure exists between the two walls.

In one of the collages... the foreground image suggests a weather vane, a direction, a field. And the background suggests planets, stars, galaxies. The circles all suggest different scales of size. The mundane and the heavenly- are they opposites or are they extensions of eachother?

His collages have some of the humor of his interiors, wuth the spareness and palette of his earlier works. You can destroy art but you cannot murder knowledge; memory, active or recessive, learned influences, learned lessons of the paint, you cannot destroy it, no matter how hard you try. The learned, the past, informs everything.

I wonder when Calder was doing his stuff. One of these collages really looks like a mobile.

It's amazing to think, when Miro said, 'these are gonna be my valedictory paintings,' that these are what he chose to make.

Head looks like a vicious storm, rain, flocks of black birds... the central black smear is like a tumor or a smokey explosion. It truly looks like the obliteration of painting.

Object, with the bone, evokes an anatomical study brief. An illustration of the creature in its native habitat, next to its scientifically dissected corpse. Morbid, morbid satire. And it forces the question, which do we prefer, which feels realer and more alive- Miro's cartoony depiction of this living creature, or the dead corpse of a bone, right in front of us?

When did Picasso make his guitar? (1912). One of Miro's reliefs is very reminiscent

I love this object. The wire makes it loook like the painting was caught in a net, as though art is a wild creature which is captured and domesticated for the pleasure of idiot strangers like me.

I really enjoy this next room in the exhibit. These are the style of Miro works that originally piqued my interest- the beautiful, fog of color backgrounds; the clean, precise, surreal shapes. March 4, 1933 is delightful. It looks like a duel between the two figures. A duel, or jousting. Or courtship even- the figure seems to swoon as the other approaches.

Such beautiful, strange creatures.

One theme of Miro's evolution seems to be a seesaw between rich, imposing color and a palette of browns, grays, raw materials. It's a palette that brings to mind Cornell, Rauschenberg, and the Dadaists.

His weird figures still exists. His relationship with appropriation changes. In an earlier gallery he made his abstract paintings based off collages of photographed objects- now those photographed objects share space within the artworks themselves, undistorted.

...it's strange seeing photos of cute girls from the 1930s. Reminds me of a conversation earlier this week with JD- think of the thousands of the most beautiful girls in history, born before photography, their faces will never be known.

When postcards of people, old fashioned romantic people, exist in the same canvass as Miro's whimsical creatures, it reminds me of Wall•E.

Pastels- and once again, a palette seesaw towards color.

The face of "woman" bears a great resemblance to the faces of Picasso's women. Not saying it's a deliberate homage- but an interesting similarity in their artistic visions.

Head of a Man- gorgeous blends of color.

His next gallery is described as a "self-orchestrated retrospective." Paintings on cardboard that seek to fuse some of his previous approaches.

One of the objects in this gallery is a sculpture of sorts, a painted tree stump with a coiled spring and some other elements. And the spring is actually trembling. It is absolutely haunting. It's like everything else here is evidence, but this object is a living witness, a participant. It reminds me so much of the earlier gallery, with the objects that evoked creatures in captivity.

The Farmer's Meal also reminds me of PeeWee's Playhouse.

Two Women is one of his most texturally interesting works, and the deep blue palette is quite beautiful.

Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement- beautiful, fierce color.

These tiny landscapes, it feels like its own planet- a weird, tiny world. There's a hotness and a dryness to most these landscapes. All of these characters look doomed, like they're lost in a desert… helpless is the word for all of this.

The Two Philosophers is funny. They look like a pair of weird idiots. There is one strange object between them, I like to think of Miro kindof mocking his audience- that the two philosophers, like any of us, are debating the meaning or identity of that weird object.

Personages attracted by the Form of a Mountain is also pretty funny. All these creatures crawling towards the mountain shape- what is it? art? power? I think of all these paintings, the sense of lost-ness, and this one is like a slice of the narrative- the characters in search of a landmark, a direction.

The Final Gallery. There truly is a sense of, recurrence and fusion. The brown, unprimed canvass palette, a focus on thick texture. Not as many of the weird characters. It reminds me of the first gallery, but now informed with the richness and strangeness of the ten years of innovation. The textural elements are much more savage- somewhat like his big ugly valedictory works. Some of the smears truly look like rocky vomit or shit.

Damn, Still Life with Old Shoe is So different from everything else he was doing. Painting from life, with intense, beautiful, hallucinogenic color. "Both still life and landscape," as moma describes it. This work makes for a fascinating epilogue- Miro has explored and conquered all of these techniques. "What's next?" someone asks. "Well," he says, "Whatever's next, of course." and then he rides off into the sunset.