Text from Encounters
and Reflections", by Arthur Danto
"ON JANUARY 24, 1937 the Catalan
artist Joan Miró, prevented by civil war from
returning to his homeland, set up in the gallery
of his Paris dealer, Pierre Loeb, a still life
on which he worked every day for a month. The
painting was finished in his studio on May 29 of
that difficult year. It consists of an apple,
into which a lethal, six-tined fork has been
stuck; a gin bottle shrouded in torn newspaper,
secured with a thong; a heel of bread; and a
left shoe, its lace untied. The apple is brown,
so perhaps rotten; the bread is dried; the shoe,
we learn from the title Still Life with Old
Shoe, is worn. Each object relates to a
heavy shadow, represented by black free-forms of
the sort we associate with Miró's vocabulary of
shapes-forms that came to be emblems of modern
art in the plaques of Hans Arp, in the flat metal pieces on Calder
mobiles and in modernesque jewelry and coffee
tables, and which have their natural
counterparts in deeply lobed leaves or kidneys
or human feet. It is possible to read the shadow
cast by the gin bottle as a weeping silhouette,
but it is also possible to read too much into
the painting, wanting it to be deep. The shoe is
painted in yellows and greens, reds and bright
blues-footwear for a one-legged harlequin. James
Thrall Soby compared the work-polemical,
memorial, ostensibly lamentational-with
Picasso's Guernica, to which it was allegedly
intended as an artistic response.
"Form for me is never something abstract,"
Miró once said. "It is always a token of
something. . . . For me, form is never an end in
itself." So here is a work of political
reference and artistic allusion, a work supposed
to draw its meaning from the events that
elicited it and from other art elicited by those
events. But how could one tell, descending the
coiled ramp of the Guggenheim Museum, that this
is a piece of political art, an exile's
meditation on war and loss, a dark poem in a
dark time, a counterthrust in the style wars of
Paris? It looks like what its title says it is:
a still life with a shoe. The shoe is luminous,
parti-colored, comical. But the image is
otherwise realistic and recognizable, like a
good cartoon. That fact sets it off from the
works that immediately surround it: Miró had not
painted objects realistically and recognizably
since 1923, even if his forms were always tokens
of real things. But that fact, if it is even
relevant, would not be visible in the painting
alone, without the context of its peers.
"I saw this wonderful exhibition on a
sparkling May morning. The Guggenheim must have
had its skylight washed of the accumulated
Manhattan soot for the occasion, and the
brilliant sky was mirrored in the blue pool
(itself almost a Miró shape) at the base of the
ramp, making the museum's core a well of light.
Outside in the park, under the new green, there
were runners in bright costumes, vendors,
children, dogs. The paintings themselves were
gay and playful, and filled with creatures so
inventive and good-humored that one had the
sense of passing through a display of zoological
or botanical or entomological
extravagances-whiskered, flittering innocent
beings, utterly unsuited to the struggle for
existence, goggle-eyed, bearing the blank
staring expressions of brilliant fish in
tropical waters, or insects in flower-mad
gardens, or radiant birds flying among
ornamental planets. Where there were humans,
they seemed mainly to be carriers of jolly
genitalia. Still Life with Old Shoe ought
to have stood darkly against the ambient gaiety
like the Ancient Mariner at the wedding feast.
Instead, it looked like part of the carnival, as
if the wedding guests had refused to accept the
spell of the old loon's tale, had decked the
mariner out with silk and ribbons and made him
part of the dance. The external knowledge of the
circumstances in which the painting was made,
however, fought against this spontaneous
assimilation, and demanded that one reflect on
the fact that one was traversing a total life in
art (Miró died in 1983, at the age of ninety).
Ought the contradiction between what we know
about this painting and the overall sense of
hedonistic celebration call the latter into
question? After all, that is exactly the
contradiction between the meaning of the
painting and its surface. Or is this particular
painting a failure, Miró not being up to
expressing that level of intention?
"It would, I think, be remarkable if each of
the paintings in the show held a tension at all
like the one I find in Still Life with Old
Shoe, for then their meanings would be so
external to their formal achievement that we
would need a dictionary to read the show. A
shoe, a bottle, a piece of fruit with a fork in
it or a knife, a crust of bread-these compose
the pedagogical still life set up in the art
academies of that era. For all one knows, Miró's
painting is an exercise in nostalgia for the
Barcelona art schools of his youth. There is a
tradition of mystical still life painting in
Spain, where achingly familiar objects are
transfigured by an unearthly light against an
impenetrable blackness. In 1922 Miró had painted
a number of severe still lifes of carbide lamps
and grills, kitchen utensils and, in one case, a
blade of wheat, displayed like the emblems of
martyrdom in uncanny spaces and immersed in a
light so absolute that the shadows have been
reduced to thin drawn lines. But these, like
almost everything he did before 1923, seem to be
about art. There is an early still life in the
Cubist manner, in which a live rabbit and
rooster are juxtaposed with a demijohn and a
smoked fish on a sheet of newspaper together
with an onion, a pepper and some greens, which
may refer to the bodegón tradition of Spanish
still life painting, or for that matter may
refer to Cubism rather than stand solidly in that
style of representation. Standing outside a
style to which he refers, a stranger and a
commentator, detached, a bit derisive, putting
bits and pieces of art to his own ends,
associated with the
Surrealists but never finally one of them, a
Parisian but an outsider, Miró seems
insufficiently in the world to be making a
statement about it rather than a statement about
statements or about styles. So Still Life
with Old Shoe comes as an interruption.
Small wonder we would never have known it was a
response to the Civil War in Spain if no one
told us. Small wonder it fails to communicate
the feeling it was intended to convey. Small
wonder the surrounding works refuse to allow it
to speak of suffering. It is too isolated, like
a single serious and direct thing-"By the way, I
am dying"-uttered in the monologue of a great
comedian.
"Consider in this light Miró's climactic
masterpiece, The Farm, executed over nine
months in the three places that defined his life
from 1921 to 1922: the parental farm at
Montroig, Barcelona and Paris. In those years,
indeed as a regular rhythm until the Civil War
put a stop to it, Miró moved between Catalonia
and Paris, between the tradition in which he
sought his identity and the brittle world of
Parisian intellect, where he lived among poets
and thinkers rather than the cultural patriots
of his native province. The two forms of life,
one feels, pulled him in two directions, and
this tension is embodied in The Farm. The
painting has the unsettling quality of something
observed and at the same time dreamed of or
remembered. Hemingway, who owned it, described
it perfectly: "It has in it all that you feel
about Spain when you are there and all that you
feel when you are away and cannot go there."
Hemingway went on to say, "No one else has been
able to paint these two very opposing things."
What is remarkable about the painting is the
oppositions it internalizes, just as Miró
himself internalized as a matter of personality
the circumstances of his shuttled existence.
Picasso belonged wherever he was. Miró belonged
only where he wasn't: his not being in Paris
defined his Spanish reality, and vice versa.
"The Farm is energized by two
incompatible artistic realities, corresponding
to the polarities of Miró's life. It has the
obsessive documentation of visual reality that
we find in primitive painting: each leaf on the
dominating eucalyptus tree is separately
painted, each rock in the stony field to the
right is given an autonomous space, each blade
of grass is given its own identity. The lichen
on the cracked façade of the farm building on
the left defeats this impulse: you cannot
register lichen spore by spore, at least not in
the middle distance of a landscape where spores
would be negligible specks in proportion to the
façade they adhere to-though the particularity
of treatment gives an uncanny microscopy to that
surface. The barking dog, the rabbit, the snail,
the cock, the donkey, the dove, the pail, the
watering can, the wagon, the plow, the dozens of
farm implements, the farmer's wife, the baby by
the wash trough, are each suspended in the
shadowless clarity of a metaphysical
illumination-it is the kind of light one gets
through an optical instrument. The space recedes
to distant mountains, but the trees and bushes
at the horizon are treated with the same
measured detail as the foreground objects, as if
perception were indifferent to distance. All
this pulls the farthest objects forward to the
surface plane, and indeed, when we look
carefully, we notice that the plane on which all
these objects are arrayed, and which seems to
recede, is itself tipped up. There is, for
instance, a tiled area, supposed to be lying
flat on the ground, which in fact is parallel to
the surface. Behind it, again, is a path that
seems at once to go back and to rise up, like an
abstract flame. It is as though the artist had
intermixed, in a single work, the illusory space
of traditional landscape with the shallow space
of Cubism, so that everything is on the surface
and at the same time bears no relation to the
surface, which, after all, is not part of the
landscape. There is, for example, a trestle
table in the middle distance in the form of a
letter A. If it is a letter, it belongs on the
surface, as writing. An A in the landscape is
dissonant, as if the work were a rebus puzzle.
But a table, of course, belongs to the world of
a farm. Everything is inside and outside at
once. And superimposed on the primitive
meticulousness of a picturesque farm are the
devices of the most sophisticated painting of
the century so far. Part of what brings
everything to the surface are the Cubist
rhythms, the sense of pattern, of fragmentation,
of reduction and abstraction. "No one could look
at it," Hemingway wrote, "and not know it had
been painted by a great painter." He is right,
but no one who knows great painting can look at
it without sensing the divided consciousness and
the aesthetic indeterminacy of an artist who
sank into his art the oppositions of his vision:
Catalan and Parisian, traditionalist and Cubist,
naif and cosmopolite.
"Of this great painting, Miró later said, "It
was the summary of one period of my work, but
also the point of departure for what was to
follow." And though he could not then have known
what precisely was to follow, the fact that it
is the largest painting he had undertaken up to
that time is an indication that he had chosen to
make an important statement through it. Miró was
perhaps not as poor at that stage of his life as
artistic mythology maintains, but canvas and
paint, then as now, were costly items,
especially if one had no idea if one's work was
going to sell. The size of the canvas plays a
part in an affecting vignette left us by
Hemingway, who describes how he bore it home as
a birthday present for his wife, Hadley, after
paying off the last installment of the 5,000
francs it cost: "In the open taxi the wind
caught the big canvas as though it were a sail,
and we made the taxi driver crawl along."
"It is instructive to think of The Farm
together with Still Life with Old Shoe.
The latter is a failure, not so much as a
painting but as a painting about war, for its
subject never penetrates the work save by the
external imposition of a symbolic
interpretation. "In some sense," Jacques Dupin
claims in his catalogue essay, "this unique and
fantastic painting stands as Miró's Guernica."
Dupin curated the show, and he is an enthusiast.
But as Miró's Guemica, the painting fails. Miró
was certainly sickened by the war in Spain, but
he was not finally a political person: Art was
the substance of his life and hence of his art,
which is most genuine and best when, as in
The Farm, it is about its own processes. The
first works we encounter in the show are two
drawings from 1917, before Miró had visited
Paris for the first time. They are dense with
Parisian references and mannerisms even so: the
male and female nudes are geometrized, all arcs
and angles, evidence that the news of Cubism had
arrived in Spain and was deflecting advanced
artists from whatever path their training would
have set them on if the twentieth century had
not happened instead. Miró was still dealing
with Cubism in The Farm, painted five
years later.
"Dealing with Cubism, for he felt at
once its seductiveness and its dangers. It could
not be ignored, but at the same time it almost
guaranteed artistic mediocrity, for Paris in the
early 1920s was full of second-generation
Cubists. Picasso confided to his dealer, Daniel
Henry Kahnweiler, that he had become rich by
selling his license to paint guitars, alluding
to the endless cubed and stretched guitars that
formed the motif of the Cubist legions. The
Farm was a liberation, even if Cubism
remained an internal force in its dynamics. "I
will smash their guitar," Miró said when he
realized he had found another path, visible in
The Farm only in the light radiating from
his later work, which began, abruptly, in 1923.
The Tilled Field of that year shows us
the Miró we know and love. The space has moved
so far forward that the ground is nearly
vertical. A tree shows an eye amid its leaves,
and has grown a hallucinatory ear from its
trunk. The farm animals are there, still
recognizable, but the hen has taken the form of
a grotesquely unbalanced dumbbell, with a
globular body and a tiny head. The mare has
developed immovably thick legs, as wavy as sine
curves, and her tall swishes forward like a
calligraphic question mark. The whole painting
is like an exultation at having broken through
to the style-pictographic, idiomatic,
autographic-that was to be his from now on. If
he were a poet, we would say he had found his
voice.
The art historian Michael Baxandall has
introduced an interesting concept in discussing
Picasso's portrait of Kahnweiler. There is a
system of interchange between advanced artists
and their patrons and critics which is analogous
to a market, but which involves ideas and
refinements instead of money. He gives this
system the name troc, which means
"barter" in French. Picasso was en troc
with poets like Apollinaire and intellectuals
like Kahnweiler, who demanded certain artistic
performances from which they and the artist
benefited. The great American painters of the
1950s were en troc with Harold Rosenberg
and Clement Greenberg. Troc requires
mutual interchange rather than unilateral
influence, so that present-day artists are not
en troc with the intellectuals they
admire, such as Derrida, who knows little about
painting, and Baudrillard, who cares little for
it. Miró was intensely en troc with the
poets and the theorists of Surrealism, with
Picabia and Tzara, Breton and Masson, Artaud,
Próvert, Desnos and Michel Leiris. My own sense
is that his breakthrough owes a lot to this
intimacy. He showed with the Surrealists, and
took over a great deal of their ideology and a
degree of their silliness, but as long as the
conversations rang in his head, as long as he
was painting for an audience that was instantly
responsive and critical, he maintained a minor
greatness.
"Miró remained in Paris from 1936 to 1941,
the year Normandy was bombed, when he settled in
Palma de Mallorca, his mother's birthplace. The
next year he returned to Barcelona, where he
found he could live after all. His work thinned
after the war, though his productivity remained,
and his influence became immense, especially in
New York, where his ideas were absorbed and
transcended by Gorky and
Pollock and Motherwell. In a way, his truly
creative life ended when the troc ended.
In this regard he bears a resemblance to
Chagall, who was a great artist when he was
in tension with the ideologues of the School of
Paris, but who simply manufactured Chagalls when
the tensions eased and commerce took over. One
senses that the greatness of Picasso and
Matisse in part consists in their being
en troc with themselves as their own
intellectuals. Appropriately, there is
proportionately little painting in the
Guggenheim show after 1950. In those years
Miró's energies mainly went into ceramics and
into a kind of terra cotta sculpture. This was
an artistic return, of sorts, to Catalonia, and
it was a nice way to round off Miró's particular
life. The show has the cadences of a marvelous
biography. Go on a really sunny day." |