Artdaily The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is opening the exhibition Miró: Earth. It offers a totally innovative presentation of the work of Joan Miró that focuses on a recurrent concept in the artist’s work: the earth. For the first time this theme will be the subject of a major monographic exhibition covering Miró’s entire career from 1918, the year of his first solo exhibition, to his death in 1983.

All of Miró’s output is profoundly related to the concept of the earth in its broadest and most symbolic sense: from his deep-rooted connection with his native Catalunya, its people and traditions, his fascination with the rural world and ancestor cults, to themes related to sensuality and fertility, hell and metamorphosis, life and death, matter and the negation of form. The exhibition, jointly organised by the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Ferrara Arte, offers the visitor a re-reading of the complex and fascinating world of Joan Miró from this innovative and little-known viewpoint. Miró: Earth is an ambitious project that has counted on the support of the Successió Miró from the outset.
Two Women by Joan Miro
“Two Women”, oil on cardboard from 1935, one of the seventy works of art that form part of the exhibition “Miró: Earth” which opens today at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Around 70 works – primarily paintings, but also sculptures, drawings, collages and ceramics – loaned from numerous museums and collections around the world have been selected for the display by the exhibition’s curator Tomàs Llorens, who is presenting a re-reading of Miró’s art in opposition to traditional art-historical interpretations that have generally focused on his connections with Surrealism. This new interpretative key also allows for a re-examination of various aspects of Miró’s output and his career that have not been sufficiently appreciated to date, for example, his work executed after World War II and in particular his three-dimensional creations (sculpture, ceramics, textiles and other objects). It also allows for an understanding of the dialogue that Miró established during these years with the Informalist artists of the generation following his own (Dubuffet, Tàpies, Millares and Saura, among others). The result is to present a different viewpoint, from which Miró’s art created in the second half of his life acquires a greater importance than has traditionally been granted to it.

From a formal perspective, Miró’s interest in the concept of “earth” is manifested in an emphasis on matter and the materials from which the work of art is created. This interest led him to arrive at unprecedented and remarkable formal solutions, comparable to those of some of the most important 20th-century art movements such as US and European Informalism.

Among the works in the exhibition are a number of exceptional loans, including the most important work by the artist in the MoMA, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), the two most important works by Miró in the Guggenheim, New York, Tilled Soil and Landscape (The Hare), and the works loaned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Farmer’s Wife and Painting-Object. All these are key works within the artist’s career but have rarely been seen in Madrid. Also notable is another group of loans from private international collections. These works are almost unknown and their inclusion in the present exhibition will thus prove nothing less than a revelation.

tierra-labrada.jpg
Joan Miró, Tierra labrada, 1923-1924 (La Terre labourée) Oil on canvas. 66 x 92,7 cm

The exhibition is organised into seven thematic/chronological sections that encompass Miró’s entire career:

1. Mont-roig:
The exhibition opens with works inspired by the rural atmosphere of the Catalan village of Mont-roig. These landscapes, painted between 1918 and 1921, convey the true revelation of the rural world for the artist and are imbued with a particular sense of place in contrast to the rootless world of his native Barcelona. Among the works in this room is the oil painting The Farmer’s Wife, loaned by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. In this work the hieratic presence of the female figure represents the cycle of life through the daily ritual of county labours.

2. Living transparencies:
This section brings together a second group of landscapes primarily painted in Paris. They reveal Miró’s contact with the Parisian avant-garde and the birth of a new type of “metaphorical” landscape in which the expression of the rural shifts from an immediate experience to the realm of memory. Earth thus loses its specific sense and once again becomes “transparent”, although still retaining its most fundamental quality, that of being the dwelling place of figures and archetypes that take form in a mythical space. This process of progressive abstraction began with The Tilled Field (reproduced at the top of this press release) and is further emphasised in Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) on the left. These are two key works of 1923-1924 and are both loaned from New York, the first from the Guggenheim and the second from the MoMA. They are on display alongside two version of the Miró’s Catalan Peasant: one from the permanent collection of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the other from the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

3. Origins in Landscape:
The play of memory and the quest for the fundamental led on to the genesis myth: a myth that reaches its pictorial culmination in a group of large-format landscapes painted in 1927. They include Landscape (The Hare) from the Guggenheim in New York (on the right) and Landscape with Rabbit and Flower from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, also included in the exhibition. In these works Miró evoked the primal image of his native Catalunya, giving life to a unique representation of the creation myth.

4. Polymorphisms:
From 1929 the element of “earth” in Miró’s work can be associated with a specific characteristic of his art: the priority given to matter over form. This rejection of form evokes, on the one hand, the Freudian notion of polymorphism, while it also implies a radical disdain for the “artistic”. Examples include collages and assemblages of the early 1930s, among them Object of 1931 loaned by the MoMA, New York. It represents the artist’s first incursion into the field of sculpture (image on the left).

5. Plutonic figures:
The earth’s fertility is fed from underground, a realm that has been associated with Hades or Pluto since classical antiquity. The phrase “Plutonic figures” has been used here to describe a sizeable group of paintings, many of them of small-format, which Miró executed between 1934 and 1936. In these works he frequently used unusual techniques and materials and ones traditionally undervalued, such as copper supports, as well as a brighter, bolder chromatic range. The result was to give life to a series of landscapes that seem to belong to another world peopled with mysterious creatures. Among these compositions is a series of paintings on Masonite produced in Mont-roig during the summer of 1936 in which Miró used different materials such as casein, tar and sand. By doing so he achieved a degree of expressivity close to Informalism. For the first time the exhibition brings together a selection of six of these pieces (image on the right: Painting. Private collection).

6. The Return:
Miró’s re-encounter with the farm at Mont-roig came about in the sombre years following the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The artist’s work, which was now largely on paper, conjures up a swarm of people, many of them winged and hostile like the Eumenides (Aeschylus’ “old gods”). During the early 1950s Miró returned to the polymorphic objects of the 1930s, now emphasising the primary importance of the material. He experimented with ceramics and returned with a new boldness and daring to his use of unusual materials, producing a group of works that manifest the art of a mature artist who had achieved international success. They include the sculpture Woman, a masterpiece loaned by the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, produced in bone, grinding stone, iron and oil on stoneware (image on the right). Underlying the wide range of techniques with which these works are created we can detect the moral climate of a Europe in which the memory of the war remained fresh. They are also the years in which Miró made contact with young Informalist artists.

7. Series:
Miró permanently moved to Palma de Mallorca in 1956. His new studio allowed him to devoted himself more consistently to sculpture and to increase his experimentation with materials. His closeness to the rural world coincided with his old age and the proximity of the cycle of life and death. This final section of the exhibition is devoted to the output of these years in which Miró also frequently worked on a monumental scale and focused on themes associated with the female or with sensuality in its most primordial and earthly sense. These are issues that touched his most profound, inner sensibility, from his series of women and birds to the sculptures of women in bronze and ceramic (schematic and mysterious like primitive idols), to the assemblages that continued to include new materials, such as the emblematic forms that comprise the series Sobreteixim (1971-1973). All these works reveal an artist engaged in a constant quest for new and original creative processes and new forms of expression.

Joan Miró received his art training at La Llotja in Barcelona and then at Francesc d’A. Galí’s Academy, which had a more innovative approach. In the latter school and at the Cercle Artistic San Lluc he met his close friends E. C. Ricart and J. F. Ràfols, two artists who initially had a modernising outlook but who subsequently remained close to the moderate noucentista trend. From an early age Miró associated himself with the most artistically advanced circles in Barcelona which were flourshing at this period. In 1917 Picabia arrived in Barcelona, founded the Dada publication 391 and introduced young Catalan artists to the international art scene.

In the late 1920s Miró travelled to Paris for the first time, where he met Picasso. During that decade he lived Paris in the winter and spent lengthy periods on the family farm at Mont-roig in the Tarragona countryside. These would be crucial years for the development of his career, during which time he formulated his own artistic idiom. In 1921 he began to work in Pablo Gargallo’s studio on rue Blomet, Paris, where his neighbour was André Masson. Masson was the key figure of the “rue Blomet” group, which would be the nucleus of the subsequent Surrealist group. Miró also met Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy and possibly Tristan Tzara. His imagination founds its true outlet through his contacts with the Dada poets and the Surrealist group. Miró shared many of the latter’s theoretical ideas but was not a full member of the group nor did he regularly participate in their meetings or activities. The poet and anthropologist Michel Leiris, who was an expert on primitive ritual and non-western art, became one of Miró’s closest friends.

From the 1930s Miró became one of the leading figures of international art and a key artist of the 20th century. He spent the last years of his life in Palma de Mallorca working in his studio, Son Abrines, designed by Josep Lluís Sert.

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