How Joan Miró and America Were Made for Each Other

‘Miró and the United StatesThe Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, D.C.Until July 5Entering the lively Miró show at the Phillips Collection feels like being the last guest to arrive at a party. Conversations are already in full swing, everyone’s a few drinks ahead of you, and every few feet you are arrested by someone with something urgent to say, all before you can take off your coat and get a glass of whatever they’re having. Creative conversation — enthusiastic, experimental, sometimes adulating, often loud — is at the heart of “Miró and the United States” which has just opened in Washington, D.C.Indeed, the curators from the Phillips and the Fundació Joan Miró, the transatlantic team responsible for the exhibition, revel in the artistic, philosophical, and even social exchanges between the thirty-odd artists included in their exhibition. When Joan Miró visited the United States, which he did on seven occasions, he hobnobbed with many of the artists exhibited, attending a party at Arshile Gorky’s house one night, bumping elbows with Louise Bourgeois at the home of Peggy Guggenheim the next. During Miró’s stays in the United States, the artists exchanged studio visits, attended each other’s exhibitions, interviewed each other, bought each other’s work, and most importantly for this show paid homage to each other in the methods and modes of their art.Miró first visited the United States in 1947, two years after his groundbreaking, sell-out “Constellations” show of twenty-two gouaches in New York City, organized by the art dealer Pierre Matisse, Henri Matisse’s son. Even before his arrival, America, particularly New York, loomed large in his imagination as a bastion of energy, vigor, creative liberty and, above all, modernity. At the same time, thanks in part to the support of forward-thinking art collectors, young American artists (as well as expatriate artists and intellectuals fleeing oppressive European regimes) were coming to revere Miró as an artistic prophet, bringing radical concepts and creative innovation from the Old World to the New World.By the time the man himself arrived in New York City in 1947, the ground was laid for Miró’s stateside success, both as artist and an artistic phenomenon. “Miró and the United States” traces this meteoric American career, and convincingly argues that the encounter between Miró and Stateside artists resulted in a veritable Big Bang within the New York City art scene, the effects of which would reverberate through American art for decades to come.“Miró and the United States” opens chronologically with some of the first works by Miró to be exhibited in America. In the first gallery hangs “Somersault” (1924), one of two paintings by Miró included for his American debut, the Société Anonyme’s International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1926, a groundbreaking group exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, organized by famed collector Katherine Dreier. The canvas is washed wall-to-wall in a rich yet translucent ochre hue, creating a satisfying, fluid background. The scene itself is minimally presented: a spidery stick figure tumbling from a barely-rendered horse, while the phrases “AH!!” and “HoO!” float above and below the unlucky rider, grounding the picture space as some of the only legible markings. Although less monumental than some of his works further on, and less graceful than the dazzling “Constellation” series, “Somersault” reveals Miró’s deft hand at atmospheric storytelling, as well as a wry, clownish sense of humor that recurs throughout his oeuvre.Another early work on view, “Painting (Fratellini)” (1927), was acquired the same year it was painted by another influential collector A. E. Gallatin, the founder of the Gallery of Living Art at New York University. In “Painting (Fratellini),” a brushy background of luminous cobalt cradles a handful of mysterious, vaguely human forms of black, white, yellow, green, and red. Both the palette and sketchy figures create a carnivalesque, dreamlike atmosphere, yet the work is predominantly abstract and its sense is elusive. Henry McBride, a close associate of Gallatin and then-critic for the Sun, wrote of “Peinture (Fratellini)” in this newspaper, “It is really difficult. It will be mentally accessible, I fear, only to those who lean readily toward the mystical.” In 1928, Gallatin added Miró’s “Chien aboyant à la lune (Dog Barking at the Moon)” (1926) to his collection. Today’s audience may view Miró’s narrative ambiguities with more leniency but at the time Gallatin’s public support represented a milestone both in Miró’s career and in the tenacity of new forms of abstraction in American art.Joan Miró, “Constellations” 1959. Via Joan Miró FoundationThe highlight of “Miro and the United States,” and the crux of the most meaningful artistic dialogue in the exhibition, is the reproduction of his “Constellations” series, which exhibits not the original gouaches, but a set of hand-stenciled prints (called pochoirs) made in 1959, faithfully based on the originals. For a show whose significance is so historically charged, the “Constellations” gallery of the exhibition presents a crescendo where we can witness a key moment when Miró’s influence took hold. Seeing the “Constellations” themselves all assembled, it is not hard to understand why artists like Lee Krasner became infatuated with Miró at this juncture.At once playful and grotesque, elegant and impertinent, chaotic and meticulously ordered, these works inspired Krasner to describe each as a “little miracle” and to embark on her own “Little Image” works in 1946. Using Miró’s extraordinary paintings as a touchstone, she riffed on his gestural and compositional innovations in her own, more muscular, abstract style. Krasner’s “Little Image” on view in this exhibition reads with the kinetic force of an entire lightning storm captured in a single moment. Jagged slashes of black laid over limpid blues, yellows, oranges and reds in rhythmic strokes recall the percussive play of quasi-abstract forms up and down and across the paper in some of Miró’s busier “Constellations.” Decades later, Krasner admitted to an interviewer she had indeed been “Mad for Miró.”She was in good company. Arshile Gorky was an outspoken admirer and friend of Miró’s. His “Garden in Sochi” lovingly echoes Miró’s “Still Life with Old Shoe,” a work Gorky encountered in MoMA’s 1941 solo exhibition of Miró’s works (and one of the darkest, most overtly political paintings in the Phillips show.) In 1944, Lee Krasner’s husband, Jackson Pollock identified Picasso and Miró as “the two artists I admire most,” while in 1952, Miró stated that Pollock’s “Number 14,” also on view in this exhibition, “showed me a direction I wanted to take but which up to then had remained at the stage of unfulfilled desire.”Lee Krasner, Untitled [Little Image Painting], 1947-48. Munson Museum of ArtIndeed to put it rather crudely, “Miró and the United States,” is an artistic lovefest, between Miró and the American art world. This is at once the exhibition’s strength and its sole flaw. The connection the artists felt to each other is evident in the works themselves, and supported by the wall text and exhibition catalogue which draws heavily from Miró’s own correspondence, highlighting the intensely personal nature of his professional relationships in the United States. It is certainly exciting to see the eager, energetic conversations between Calder, Miró, Pollock, Krasner and Gorky, manifested on canvas, paper, ceramic, wooden, and brass surfaces.Yet, like many fabulous parties, this one is also, inherently, a little inaccessible. One can imagine that impish scene in “Manhattan” between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, in which he fails to impress her with his taste in modern art, (“Really? You liked the Plexiglass, huh?”), playing itself out in front of some of Miró’s early less approachable works included in the exhibition. The language that enthralls and inspires sophisticated artists and critics is not universally legible, even to the New York intelligentsia fictionalized in “Manhattan.”Some of Miró’s works may verge on the inscrutable; the exhibition itself does not. The cross-cultural affinities between Miró and the American artists assembled are clearly visible and explained, and reveal a significant and overlooked inflection point in the history of twentieth century art. For those who take an interest and, per my predecessor Henry McBride, for those who “lean readily toward the mystical,” this unique artistic party is well worth the price of admission.

How Joan Miró and America Were Made for Each Other

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