PARIS.- This retrospective on the great Catalan master Joan Miró (1893-1983) brings together nearly 150 key pieces to give this unique and important body of work its rightful place in modernity. This exhibition takes place forty-four years after the one organised by Jean Leymarie and Jacques Dupin at the same venue in 1974. Exceptional loans from some of the most important museums in Europe, America and across the globe, as well as major private collections, place the emphasis on the pivotal periods for Miró, who once declared: “People will understand more and more that I opened the doors to another future, that runs against all falsehood, all fanaticism.” The work of this exceptional artist shaped art throughout the 20th century, radiating its power and poetry for almost seven decades with unrivalled generosity and originality.
The exhibition has been designed specifically for the
Grand Palais spaces and evokes Miró’s Mediterranean world, with major works (paintings and drawings, sculptures and ceramic, illustrated books) displayed together to illuminate an artistic career defined by continuous renewal. The exhibition begins on the first floor, with the fauvist, cubist and detailist periods, followed by a surrealist period where Miró invented a poetic world that was previously unseen in the world of 20th century painting. These fruitful periods demonstrate the artist’s investigations and research, as well as his colour palette, which fuelled a vocabulary of new and unusual forms. Neither abstract nor figurative and boasting a wealth of inventions, the poetic exhibition circuit reveals the resolutely new language that Miró continued to develop. He found the sources for his art in the vitality of daily life, blossoming into a previously unknown world where the dreams of the creator have pride of place. “I need a point of departure,” explained Miró, “be it a speck of dust or a shaft of light. This shape offers me a range of ideas, with one thing leading to another. In this way, a single thread can open up a whole new world to me.”
The rise of fascism in the 1930s saw him engaged in an endless quest for freedom. The so-called “wild” paintings illustrate the strange and unprecedented power that he gave his work during these extremely tense times. In the 1940s, the appearance of the Constellations, an exceptional series of small-format works produced at Varengeville-sur-Mer, in Normandy, opened up a dialogue with unfulfilled dreams. His investigations into ceramics soon gave rise to a form of sculpture that also demonstrated his passion for reality and a sense of reverie that seemed unimaginable in this discipline.
Miró transformed the world around him with an apparent simplicity of means, whether a symbol, the tracing of a finger or water on paper, a seemingly fragile line on the canvas, a line in the ground fused with fire, or an insignificant object paired with another. He conjured a world full of poetic transformations from these surprising juxtapositions and unusual marriages, restoring enchantment to the world. “For me, a painting should be like sparks. It should dazzle you like the beauty of a woman or a poem.”
The final rooms are dedicated to the last twenty-five years of the painter’s work. In his large Palma de Mallorca studio built by his friend, the architect Josep Lluis Sert, Miró painted larger formats that gave a new dimension to his technique, which remained just as meticulously precise. Here, the void would fill a large part of the long-meditated canvases. Miró deployed a new energy with symbols and forms that demonstrate incessant creativity. Large bronze sculptures from this period, sometimes painted, also demonstrate a happy juxtaposition between the real and unreal. In his final works, where black frequently emerges with new force, tragedy walks hand in hand with hope. In this way, Miró invested the pictorial and sculptural universe with an acuity nourished by the passage of time.
Jean-Louis Prat, former director of the Fondation Maeght (1969-2004), member of the Joan Miró Committee and friend of the artist, to whom he has dedicated a number of exhibitions, the most recent of which was held at the Albertina Museum in Vienna in 2012, is curating this retrospective at the Galleries nationales du Grand Palais in 2018.
Curator: Jean-Louis Prat, former director of the Fondation Maeght (1969-2004), art historian, member of the Joan Miró Committee and friend of the artist.
Set design: Atelier Maciej Fiszer
