I was looking for some Ian McEwan books on WOB last week and as I was typing McEwan into their search function, ‘Miro’ came up, so I had to satisfy my curiosity. I’d seen some of his work in Majorca back in the 80s and it had a definite attraction for me. Little did I know that we would have something in common then, or in the future, now.
I had always liked his shapes and colours, and today I discovered, in Janis Mink’s book, that in 1918, when he was 25, he made four landscapes in which he expressed his regard for the infra-ordinary, long before Perec.
On p.19, below the Caption for The Vegetable Garden with Donkey, she states, “Like The Waggon Tracks this picture is rich in detail, reflecting Miro’s treasuring of small things, of the ‘unimportant‘.”
Mink reports on p. 22 that, in July 1918, Miro writes to a fellow Courbet group member, ” … Right now what interests me is the calligraphy of a tree or a rooftop, leaf by leaf, twig by twig, blade of grass by blade of grass, tile by tile. This does not mean that these landscapes will not finally end up being Cubist or wildly synthetic.” A month later he wrote to another Courbet group member, ” .. This week I hope to finish two landscapes. (…) As you see, I work very slowly. As I work on a canvas I fall in love with it, love that is born of slow understanding. Slow understanding of the nuances – concentrated – which the sun gives. Joy at learning to understand a tiny blade of grass in the landscape. Why belittle it? … A blade of grass is as enchanting as a tree or mountain. … Everyone looks for and paints only the huge masses of trees, of mountains, without hearing the music of blades of grass and little flowers and without paying attention to the tiny pebbles of a ravine – enchanting.”
He shows a great interest in observing small details, and their importance, but also in the possibility of their portrayal being unrealistic, Cubist or surrealistic.
MInk also refers to the treatment of the shirt in the 1919 self-portrait on p. 22, ” … While one side of the pyjama probably shows its original pattern, the other side has been allowed to flower into a Cubist inspired balance of triangular depths and folds. “
On p.23 under the caption, Mink refers to the image on p. 24, The Table (Still Life with Rabbit), “On the table ornamented in Cubist style lie naturalistically presented animals and objects. Unlike the Cubists, Miro does not incorporate the realistic elements into the geometrical structure of the picture. Thus the unbridgeable gap between the two worlds remains.”
I decided to have a go at this, but making the human image also Cubist too. The image is my graduation photo from Brock U. So, half realistic, half cubist.
[A funny memory about the original image – it was taken in February 78 and I hadn’t done my final exam or had my thesis defence until a month later! Also, the fancy robe and bow tie were a cape, fastened at the back with velcro. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Well, it was funny for me.]
After 1923 Miro’s attitude changes and he went through several artistic genres in his long career, but often, in his abstract paintings, he ignored physical reality with regard to scale and would paint small objects as big as mountains (see ‘Poetical licence’ in Mink’s book).
Source: Janis Mink, Joan Miro 1893-1983, the Poet among the Surrealists, Taschen America Llc, (2012)
