Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape
14 April to 11 September
Tate Modern Gallery - Admission Charge
I don’t think it makes sense to give more importance to a mountain than to an ant. Joan Miró
Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, now open at Tate Modern, examines definitive moments across Miró’s very long career. He was born in Barcelona in 1893, capital of Catalan in northern Spain. In 1911 his parents bought a farm in Montroig. It was country life that inspired his earliest works, like The Farm (1921-2) and Vegetable Garden (1918).
These astonishing renditions of rural life demonstrate Miró’s awareness of the organic nature of things, and of nature itself. Pretty, pastoral landscapes they are not. The Farm could be read as a pictorial catalogue of the minutiae involved in agriculture; the organic growths on the gable of the stable building, the hind quarters of the stabled horse visible through a doorway, the rope hoist on the stable’s upper storey, the covered wagon in the lean-to, the worker leaning over the horse-trough, her footprints in the dirt-track, the barking dog, the agricultural calendar beside the watering can, the intricate rendering of the penned smaller animals, the snail and lizard on the ground, the stones, the roots of a tree and, soaring above it all, the tree itself. Indeed, the upper half of The Farm is dominated by the branches of this one tree spread against an electric-blue sky, a yellow sun in the corner. We are made aware of the interconnectedness of life, of cause and effect, of heaven and of earth, the microcosm and the macrocosm. This theme of connectedness runs throughout the exhibition, a kind of poetry binding its various parts together.
In 1923 André Breton published his manifesto on surrealism. By now,
Miró was in Paris, where he had already become acquainted
with Pablo Picasso. He also knew André Masson, Max Ernst and Jean Arp. Miró’s
series Animated Landscapes dates from this point in his life. The lush detail
of his earlier works is absent from Dog Barking at the Moon (1926).
The image has been stripped down to a ladder firmly rooted in the ground retreating
into the farther reaches of a pitch-black night sky. A cartoon dog on the
ground bays at a quarter moon rendered so that it has a seemingly human
profile. By now, Miró’s realism had narrowed in focus, but heightened to a
dream-like consciousness, a tenet of surrealism.
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| Joan Miró The Escape Ladder 1940 Museum of Modern Art, New York © Joan Miró and Fundacio Joan Miró, Barcelona |
In spite of these images, Miró’s works never look inwards but remain connected to national politics and events. In late 1935 and 1936 he made a sequence of extraordinarily-coloured paintings on copper and masonite, including Nocturne ( 9-16 November, 1935), a response to the brutal suppression of the declaration of a Catalonian Republic in 1935. The Barcelona Series is, by contrast, entirely monochrome, a series of black and white lithographs from 1944. By now, General Franco controlled all of Spain and the series is Miró’s pictorial satire on dictatorship. In the prints we see all of humanity; huge, grinning heads with triangular teeth, and the hapless stares of the other, subjugated members of the population. But in spite of his pain at the political situation, Miró continued to paint beautiful canvases like Woman and Bird in the Moonlight (October, 1949). By now, introspection had begun to appear in the work of the artist, Self-Portrait being painted between 1937 and 1960. At the exhibition, this portrait overlooks a selection of Miró’s sculptures, Silent Constellation (1940-1) being a particularly thought-provoking piece. The title of this piece, no doubt, refers to The Constellations, (1940-1), the series of paintings that includes the title piece, The Escape Ladder (31 January, 1940). The motifs in this painting, the ladder, the spider with staring eyes, and other small, staring animals refer to a number of other, exhibited works. There is much more to see, including the coloured Triptychs, 1961-2, May 1968, and the Burnt Canvases 1968-73, also the less intense Triptychs 1968-73.
Joan Miró lived until 1983, outliving General
Franco, whose dictatorship died with him in 1975. In 1979, Miró was awarded a
doctorate by Barcelona University and in 1980, the Spanish Gold Medal for Fine
Arts by King Juan Carlos. The exhibition is open until September 11, and is a
must-see for those interested in surrealism, pictorial poetry and, of course,
Miró himself.
Mary Phelan, 2011