- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
- London
When audiences visit Tate Modern’s current retrospective, they should feel reminded of such past exhibitions such as Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World in 2010, Futurism and Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism in 2009 as well as the exhibition The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World as Tate Britain this year. Similarly these related exhibitions appear as breaks in between the gallery’s recent line of block-buster shows that include Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh.
Although the exhibition is intended as an analysis and re-evaluation of one of the famed Surrealist artists of the twentieth century, the historical and psychoanalytical background to this particular artist are almost non-existent within the complied work that spans a lifetime, yet the retrospective makes little connection between the artist and the Surrealist. Focusing on work that complimented his imaginative visions and creations with the aggressive events witnessed in his lifetime, the show exhibits the artist as Catalonia’s favourite son and as something as the ‘Surrealist Picasso’, transforming the easily recognised Catalan landscapes into some of the most bizarre signs and symbols ever seen in avant-garde art.
As a Surrealist, Miró was painting and representing almost hallucinogenic imagery that faintly resemble mathematical equations, scattered across the canvas with less refined technique than that of fellow Surrealists Salvador Dalí or Max Ernst. The exhibited work certainly displays Miró’s transcendence from landscape paintings to Surreal drawings, morphed sculptures and Abstract Expressionism and aid the term ‘ladder of escape’ as one of Surreal distraction and lifelong in immunity to events that altered the artist’s personal identity not as a Surrealist but as a Catalan.
Some of the results of his bizarre stick figure transformations from mildly expressive to violently agitated are in keeping with the political and social instability he witnessed not just in reality but also in surreality (his consciousness), as in keeping with the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. These later figures feel particularly noticeable in picture-friendly, advertising imagery of 1940s/50’s America, when Modern, graphic style was influencing sun-shaped clocks and stars to provide a sense of pop friendliness that is, just like the times, falsely represented a reality non-existent – perhaps not far off from the original intentions. Also, without the full knowledge of neurones or microscopic cellular life, Miró’s figures seemed to ascertain an imagery of invented, interconnected dreams not witnessed before.
There is no doubting the influence of Miró on some of today’s contemporary artists, perhaps even Takashi Murakami, whose own surreal work often splashes his own anime characters across canvases evocative of Pollock or Miró. Namely Murakami’s mushrooms contain similarities to work like Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird (1941) or others from the Constellations series which were completed by Miró’s return to Mont-roig. In both case studies the bizarre images, reminiscent of cabinets of curiosities, are represented as exotic and uncanny artefacts on display. Immediately, both these artists were being uncanny towards fulfilling their own identity crises as either a post-colonised Japanoise or a colonised Catalonian.
Nonetheless, Miró was no doubt a singular artist who adopted the Surrealist movement, incorporating objects as sculptures or paintings that relayed conscious and unconscious significance as explorations of identity or acting as portals to the mind. A measure of his two realities is present in works such as A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress (Painting Poem) (1938) which depicts lyrical and artistic poetry and The Hope of a Condemned Man (1973) triptych is in tune with the truth facing Spain’s political crisis, representing an anti-Franco anarchist.
Miró was as Surreal and Abstract as could be and an artist present in two worlds as a Catalonian and Spaniard.
