Catalan artist Joan Miró saw the world: Though born in Spain, he lived in both Spain and France. The country that inspired him the most, though, was the United States.
“Miró and the United States,” a new exhibit at the Phillips Collection, explores how the United States influenced Miró — and how Miró influenced American artists — by showing his work, often juxtaposed with that of the American artists who befriended him and collected his work.
Befitting Miró’s American side, the exhibit begins at a large scale. A mural in Miró’s characteristic style, all bright colors and pictograph-like shapes, stretches across one wall opposite a row of vast canvases. Even a bronze cast of “Personage and Birds,” only a few feet tall, serves as the model for a 55-foot sculpture displayed at the JPMorganChase Tower in Houston.
“It was Miró’s mischievous aspect that appealed to me,” Tower architect I. M. Pei said. “His work is a celebration of life.”
One feels the celebration of life most acutely in Miró’s smaller works. Titling one of these colorful, tiny paintings that straddle the divide between figurative and abstract art, Miró referred to “ciphers and constellations” — an apt description for these pieces. Beautiful and otherworldly, these paintings are also enigmatic; their meaning changes depending on the way you look at them.
In “Woman in the Night,” an eye is contained in a shape that appears to be a bird unfurling its wings, but, from a distance, can be seen as the chamber of a human heart. In “The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers,” every wide eye is the shape of a painted bird. Music is everywhere in Miró’s works, which contain symbolic shapes as well as literal representations — eighth notes are hidden behind dots and stars, while stylized, spiraling treble clefs dot nearly every painting.
Not all of Miró’s work seems to celebrate, though. His “Still Life with Old Shoe,” which, of all the Miró pieces in the exhibit, approaches the closest to representational art, is grim and shadowy. “Still Life,” painted in psychedelic colors but shot through with swathes of thick black, depicts a loaf of bread, a gin bottle and a shoe on a table. The gin bottle seems to be melting as reality itself warps. Composed in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, which Miró fled, the artwork suggests the haunting nature of the time period. Its meaning, however, is up to interpretation.
“You just can’t look at it on the surface level,” said exhibit attendee Matteo Muñoz on observing Miró’s paintings, noting that, in order to uncover meaning from the works, he had to analyze them and “pick” them “apart” — Miró’s works are “ciphers” indeed.
In addition to displaying Miró’s art, “Miró and the United States” features a lovely selection of contemporary artwork by artists with personal ties to Miró.
Other astounding works by Miró contemporaries include abstract paintings by luminaries Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler, whose muted yet beautiful color palette in “Canyon” provides a nice contrast to Miró’s. Some painters included in the exhibit, stylistically closer to Miró, used pictographs modeled after those of ancient civilizations to express their art. Miró’s friend Len Lye’s works toe the thin line between abstract art and photography in colorful, exposed-film shots, including a “portrait” of Miró.
The most incredible works in the exhibit are not paintings, though, but sculptures.
A tiny mobile by Alexander Calder, a close friend of Miró, resembles a three-dimensional version of Miró’s paintings. Though delicate, the mobile is so exquisitely crafted that it catches the eye more than vast canvases and murals.
Another notable series of sculptures, by mosaicist Jeanne Reynal, subverts all expectations. These cement columns stand strikingly in the gallery, covered in circling mosaic patterns and shells.
In showing these modern works, from Miró to Reynal, the exhibit truly excels, not just by serving as a homage to the artist’s work, but by allowing viewers to appreciate the glory of Miró’s circle of innovative, intriguing contemporaries.