Editor’s Note: This exhibition has been closed down until further notice.
Like many artists born at the turn of the century, Joan Miró lived and worked through a turbulent time of war and dictatorship. Born in Barcelona in 1893, Miró’s connection to his birthplace was strong and throughout his work he comes back to the Catalonian people and landscape. His desire to be an international artist led him to Paris in the 1920s where he developed his work into a distinctive yet constantly experimental style.
In 1936, war broke out in Spain between the Fascists and the Republican government. After three years and great loss of life and liberty, General Franco’s Fascists won. After the war, many of those who fought for the Republicans or were left-leaning fled the country or were killed. Miró managed to get his family out and settled in Normandy in 1939. However, the bombardment of France the year after, during the Second World War, forced the family to return to Spain.
This must have been a difficult decision. Miró had been openly anti-Fascist during the Spanish Civil War, producing artworks to aide the Republicans. Moreover, Franco’s Spain was a place in which artistic freedom and regional identity were brutally suppressed. Miró found himself in a state of internal exile; living in Spain but unable to be part of society. Desperate to be elsewhere yet devoted to Catalonia, his playful and escapist work provided an outlet.
The exhibition at Tophane-i Amire displays a collection of Miró’s prints made throughout his long career. At first sight, the works strike you as spontaneous, abstract and playful, but a closer inspection reveals more. These seemingly impulsive works are actually the result of the arduous and pain-staking lithographic process. The liveliness is deliberate and well planned.
Another thing that becomes apparent is that Miró’s work is abstracted but never abstract. Everything is rooted in reality. Figures abound in his work and are joined by a number of motifs that appear again and again; eyes, ladders, stars and suns range across his fantastic landscapes.
The playful nature of these works is also questionable. The bright primary colours and bold lines give the works a childlike quality. But the figures are sometimes twisted, bearing their teeth in pain or anger, or consumed by the surrounding chaos of colour and line.
It’s often said that Miró wasn’t a very political artist. He rarely engaged with politics in the forthright and critical way of Picasso, for instance, but that’s not to say he wasn’t engaged at all. This exhibition speaks of a more personal experience and of the emotional effect of living in an oppressed society. In the prints we can see a glimpse of the monsters that haunted Spain, while ladders and magical landscapes point to the dream of escape that so many citizens must have had. But there’s also joy in these works; demonstrating that even in the direst situations, people have the need and, more importantly, the ability to feel happy.
This is what I take from Miró and from this exhibition. He witnessed monstrous human behaviour and yet still painted about hope and joy. Not in a blinkered or vainly optimistic way, but in a frank way that accepts and acknowledges the good and the bad of the human circumstance. It’s this frankness that makes the hope and joy all the more poignant.
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According to the exhibition blurb, Miró had a ‘childlike sensibility’ and much of what you hear about him seems to agree he was a kind, open and playful person. For this reason, I suspect he would really appreciate the second part of this exhibition: Miró Çocuk. A large space is provided at the end of the hall so that little artists can have a go at creating their own Miró.
The exhibition runs until Sunday, 19 January. For more information please visit our event listing.
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Beth Thomas is a contributor for Yabangee.
