GRENOBLE.- The musée de Grenoble presents, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, an exhibition dedicated to Joan Miró. Bringing together more than 130 artworks, the exhibition titled Miró. Un brasier de signes, offers an overview of the artist’s production from the collection of the national museum of modern art, completed by additional artworks from the musée de Grenoble and the Miró Foundation in Barcelona. Within this remarkable loan, three “Bleu” exceptionally traveled out of Paris and remains as a deposit in the musée de Grenoble.
Emphasizing the artist’s iconoclastic nature, creative energy, and artistic modernity, this exhibition wanders through his career, offering a privileged insight on his final work from the 1960s-1970s, a period of introspective exile and intense experimentation. Reviewing artworks from a crucial 20th century artist, this exhibition follows the programme of remarkable temporary exhibitions at the museum, including Picasso, Bonnard, Twombly. Such event prefigures the Centre Pompidou | Constellation programme in partnership with the greatest national and international cultural institutions, an opportunity for the Centre Pompidou to keep expanding during its maintenance.
Through its underlying creative freedom and iconoclasm, Joan Miró’s oeuvre, similarly to Picasso’s, embraces a remarkable position within 20th century art, raising it to the rank of universal myth. Rooted in the Catalan land of the artist’s childhood, his oeuvre emerges in the 1910s with “detailist” paintings from Montroig, realistic rural scenes inspired by Naïve art and Cubism. Later, in the mid-1920s, his “dream Paintings”, which poetic magic seduces many surrealists, including Robert Desnos and Michel Leiris, grant him a considerable artistic recognition. Either astonished or distressed about the world surrounding him, Miró embodies his biographer’s, Jacques Dupin, expressions “Mirómonde” and “Brasier de signes”. Through this ambivalent language, both stellar and ardent, a complex mythology flourishes where the azure merges with the darkness, and Miró’s childish wit with his inner demons.
From 1956 onward, Miró’s oeuvre takes a new turn, impacted by his arrival in Palma de Mallorca. In the course of this intense creative period, his work metamorphoses, becoming more gestural and direct, making references to “wild Paintings” emerging in the 1930s and influenced by the rise of Nazism.
In the Centre Pompidou’s collections, Miró’s ultimate period of production from the 1960-1970s is particularly emphasized; a period of great productivity for the artist asserting his desire for freedom and experimentation, the antidote to academicism and oppression. Among the artworks presented, the three “Bleu” (1961) appear as the centerpiece. Embodying three stages from one oeuvre, the “Bleu” underline the achievement of Miró’s plastic and poetic research. Their celestial colour, celebrating peace and serenity, invites us on a contemplative journey.
