Joan Miró

In 2016, Joan Miró designed part of the set and costumes for the Romeo and Juliet ballet, on the invitation of director Sergei Diaghilev for the Russian Ballets. Reinterpreted by Diaghilev in a realistic fashion, the first production at the Sarah Bernhardt Théâtre in Paris was abruptly interrupted mid-performance by surrealists André Breton and Louis Aragon. They threw protesting leaflets into the theatre, objecting to a show that in their eyes was commercial, and for which Max Ernst (who designed the set and costumes for the first act) and Joan Miró had made the great sin of “authorising reproductions of their paintings on set”. This leaflet marks the starting point for the exhibition’s narrative. With this “protest” addressed against him, the rupture between Miró and surrealism took a step towards his quest for another, desublimated type of painting.

Thanks to the success of Romeo and Juliet, Miró worked again with the Russian Ballets in 1932, this time for Jeux d’enfants. The photographs and drawings brought together here present a set designed as an assemblage-collage made of a few painted panels between which dancers moved in colour-blocked costumes patterned with geometric designs. The canvas was no longer flat; it was made alive by Miró’s artistic research. Then the artwork itself became an object.

During this period, Miró’s paintings used unlikely materials like sand, tar or sandpaper. Materials never before applied to painting and a variety of textures were coming together onto raw, uncoated canvases or Masonite board, such as in the Masonite series. Taking his experiments ever further, he also made “painting-objects”, collages of motley objects. By appearing to mistreat the canvas, Miró carried out his first “assassination of painting”. This represented his desire to free himself from all notion of virtuosity and make painting an objectified gesture, intentionally ugly or even irritating.

In 1937, Joan Miró and his family fled the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) for Paris. He returned to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, a famous private art academy in the Montparnasse neighbourhood that he had attended in the 1920s, along with Alberto Giacometti and Amedeo Modigliani.

Miró took this opportunity to question his artistic practice and created a series of nudes from life models. Comprising around one hundred drawings, including the fifty-four presented here, La Grande Chaumière series reveals misshapen and contorted nudes, with unadorned and confident lines sketched on plain white sheets. The series illustrates how Miró’s work was not linear, but alternated between a certain form of academicism and its total rejection. This research also expresses the torment felt by the artist, upset as he was by the drama of the civil war in Spain. The figures convey the aggressivity that gripped him and are reminiscent of the bodies distorted by pain and terror painted by his friend Pablo Picasso, notably in the artwork Guernica, presented to the public for the first time in 1937 in Paris.

The dictatorship imposed in Spain by General Francisco Franco would significantly influence the work of Miró, who conducted his social activism through art. In 1937, The Reaper, the monumental portrait of a Catalan peasant holding a sickle, was presented in the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Paris World Fair. From that point onwards, denunciation of Francoist abuses permeated his work, as seen here in two major series of etchings, the Black and Red Series (1938) and the Barcelona Series (1939–1944), which have seldom been presented together. Images from the latter were used by film director Pere Portabella and combined with archival images from the Spanish Civil War for the film Aidez l’Espagne (1969). Commissioned for a retrospective dedicated to Miró by the Architects’ Association of Catalonia, the film marked a moment of intergenerational collaboration between the painter and the filmmaker, two artists united in their artistic and political battle.

Joan Miró transformed his art into a dissenting tool against the Francoist regime. He adopted several approaches – caricature, as in the Black and Red Series, but also a more minimalist form of painting. The large formats he produced from the 1960s to 1980s show the extent to which, beyond the apparent abstraction of his artworks, his was above all a painting of history. At this time, Miró began a serial, almost meditative work, with the creation of an ensemble of apparently simple canvases. Characterised by a certain starkness, the use of bold strokes and colourful shapes, the canvases brought together here avoid traditional representations of a historical event. And yet, they reflect a trauma, the eloquent silence of painting faced with a drama taking place. With their radical aesthetic, these artworks evoke in particular the famous triptych The Hope of a Condemned Man, which Miró is said to have completed on 2 March 1974, the day of the execution of Salvador Puig Antich, a militant belonging to the MIL (Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación).

Two monumental canvases greeted the visitor at Son Abrines, Joan Miró’s studio in Mallorca, which was designed in 1962 by architect Josep Lluís Sert. Installed at the very back of the space in 1968, they were impassive witnesses to the artist’s final decades. They bear the traces of the continual thought and transformation to which he subjected his artworks, as proven by photographs taken in the studio. At Les Abattoirs, these two large canvases are presented on their side, as Miró himself decided at one point in Son Abrines. His continual search for meaning literally oriented the view he had of his creations, and it also invited spectators to question the way in which they can be read and understood. Here they enter into a conversation with three Untitled canvases that look like landscapes, comprising a black circle, a sort of negative celestial body, and a clean line of horizon. This was the period of Miró’s large formats where black gradually contaminated the compositions until it almost entirely covered them, as in the artwork Tête (1973).

In 1973, at the Farinera, a former mill in the city of Tarragona transformed into a studio with the help of gallery owner Aimé Maeght, Miró began a new phase in his efforts to go beyond painting. After the so-called “savage paintings” of the 1930s, he ended up physically attacking his canvases and burning them. Five artworks form the Burnt Canvases series, whose creation was documented by Francesc Català-Roca. Before the camera lens, Miró places the paintings on the ground, throws paint at them, and then sets them alight. Closely observing the flames as they devour the canvas, he stands to the side with a broom and water, ready to spring into action as soon as he is satisfied with the result. Destruction becomes an act of creation, marking the climax of a quest begun decades earlier: desecrating the canvas to assassinate painting.

In this room, a Burnt Canvas from 1973 stands alongside other artworks illustrating Miró’s successive experiments. He added new elements to his compositions, such as string or rope, a recurring object in his oeuvre, harking back, no doubt, to his textile work, as well as to the surrealist tradition.

In 1969, the meeting between Joan Miró and the tapestry artisan Josep Royo marked the beginning of a long and intense collaboration. They set up their studio in the Farinera in Tarragona, and together perfected a technique Miró had begun to develop in 1960. This is when he made his first sobreteixims (“over-weavings”), small-format textile artworks that demonstrate his artistic vocabulary – colour, motifs and clean lines – with a rich material. The tapestries made in the 1970s combined Josep Royo’s expertise with Miró’s research, and took on greater breadth. The ensemble exhibited here reveals the evolution in size and the addition of objects such as scissors, brooms, cardboard tubes and jute bags. The partnership reached its high point with the monumental tapestries Tapís de Tarragona (1970) and the tapestry of the Fondation Maeght, the ultimate large format designed in 1980.

In 1976, Joan Miró renewed his association with the theatre and worked with La Claca, a puppet and street theatre troupe founded by Teresa Calafell (1943–2000) and Joan Baixas (born in 1946). Together they adapted the play Ubu roi written by Alfred Jarry in 1896, and for which Miró designed the costumes and accessories. Mori el Merma [Death to the figurehead] tells the story of the final day of a despot, the caricature of General Franco. Against a backdrop portraying a spiral (evoking Ubu’s “gidouille”, the spiral painted on his fat belly), grotesque-looking characters shout and bellow in a tumult of shapes and colours. Six of these figures are presented here alongside historical films that document both the artistic and political unrest. Performed in Palma in 1978, then in Paris, Barcelona and the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1979, Mori el Merma is a virulent criticism of authoritarianism, forming part of Miró’s vision of creativity, which is collective not solitary.

Père Ubu, invented by Alfred Jarry in 1896, is a character whose unbridled grotesque ambition inspired many avant-garde artists. André Breton, Max Ernst and even Pablo Picasso adopted him as the ideal incarnation of the figure of the dictator. Miró gave life to this “Ubuesque” world in several of his artworks, in particular, on a copy of the first edition of Jarry’s book, which he covered in drawings in the 1950s. Provocation and black humour fuelled near-total freedom, and Miró chose Ubu to embody General Franco. He can be found in illustrated works published by Tériade, such as Ubu roi (1966), Ubu aux Baléares (1971) and L’Enfance d’Ubu (1975). The complete set of colour plates from these books are presented here.