Homage to Catalunya Joan Miró BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	Miró By Jacques Dupin. Flammarion, 480 pages, $85. Miró By Walter Erben. Taschen, 240 pages, $20 (softcover).

Despite producing three of the most original and influential artistic figures of the past 100 years — Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, Salvador Dalí I Domènech, and Joan Miró Ferrà — Catalunya remains best known for the Spanish Civil War experiences of George Orwell and for its adopted artist son, Pablo Picasso, who passed through Barcelona on his way to Paris. But this independent-minded and sometimes revolutionary region of Spain descends from the Western Mediterranean culture that produced the mediæval troubadours and whose language, which is closer to Latin than either French or Spanish, continues to be spoken today in both southern France (Provençal and the other Occitan languages) and eastern Spain (Catalan and Valencian). Catalunya’s visual language has been given eloquent expression by Gaudí’s hyperbolic parabolas and Dalí’s oneiric surrealism. Miró has been perhaps less celebrated for an art that is as protean as it is prolix. It’s easier to come to terms with Gaudí and Dalí — and for that matter, Picasso — but that doesn’t make them greater artists.

The 2004 revised editions of two Miró monographs, one large, one small, are a potent reminder. "Joan Miró’s existence was so lacking in adventure, so utterly devoid of anecdotal interest, that it is almost as if he had deliberately planned to make things difficult for his biographer," writes Jacques Dupin at the beginning of Flammarion’s mammoth Miró. And this from the man whom Miró chose in 1957 to go to Mallorca and write about his work. Miró put so much into his art, there was nothing left for his life.

He was born in 1893 in Barcelona. His father had grown up the son of a blacksmith in the south of Catalunya before moving to Barcelona and becoming a goldsmith and watchmaker. His mother was the daughter of a cabinet maker from Palma de Mallorca. Although Miró came from a family of artisans, his father did not see painting as an appropriate career, so he was sent to business school. He also attended classes at La Llotja, where in the wake of Picasso, who nine years earlier had been a prodigy there, he showed no particular promise. At age 17, he became a bookkeeper, but after a bout with typhoid fever and a minor nervous breakdown, he was allowed to enter the Galí School of Applied Design. By 1920, he had outgrown Barcelona and was ready for Paris, where he was accepted by his peers but not by the public. He married Pilar Juncosa, a woman from Palma, in 1929; their only child, a daughter, was born the next year. The Depression forced him to move back to Barcelona in the early ’30s; the Spanish Civil War caused him to return to Paris in 1936 (during which time he executed The Reaper for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair); and when in 1940 the Nazis descended on Paris, he had to return to Franco’s Spain. During and after the war, he found success in New York and received commissions worldwide, including the UNESCO Building in Paris. In 1956, he moved to Mallorca, where the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert built for him the large studio he’d always wanted. He died on Christmas Day in 1983.

Early on in his Miró, Dupin makes the intelligent observation that Miró was always balancing. "He had two real homelands: the town of Mont-roig in the region of Tarragona, where his father was born, and the island of Majorca, where his mother’s family had lived for generations. To complete this geography of Miró’s affections, history obliges us to add that he often chose to live in Paris. We may imagine these three places forming a perfect triangle, within which the painter’s entire personality was enclosed." Montroig was Miró’s earth, Mallorca his water; Barcelona was his life, Paris his art. In Barcelona, he had mediated between the Noucentisme and Modernista movements, between Romanesque and Gothic; in Paris, he lived first in Montparnasse, then in Montmartre. Whether a triangle or any other shape could contain his personality is another matter; his mature art keeps evolving toward open forms, and in the end even the universe depicted in his World War II Constellations series is too confining.

That evolution was as original as the art itself. Miró’s pre-Parisian pieces show him making his way through Cézanne, the Fauves, Van Gogh, Braque, Picasso, Léger; in his career, he would ingest, digest, and excrete every major art movement. He worked on burlap, cardboard, masonite, cement, and cork as well as paper and canvas; he turned out sculptures, ceramics, murals, tapestries, rugs, stained-glass windows. His road took him away from the human figure; as Dupin suggests, "Before the human figure Miró seems to have been seized with something like real terror, a sort of vertigo that impelled him to react violently with all his being." His persons are vertiginously distorted; it’s his Miroglyphic ideograms that restore his equipoise and command his affection. In 1920, he wrote, "Picasso very fine, very sensitive, a great painter. The visit to his studio made my spirits sink. Everything is done for his dealer, for the money." Long after Picasso seemed to have put his art on automatic pilot, Miró continued to explore. Where other artists declaim, he proposes. His art remains enigmatic because it requires the viewer to complete it.

Seeing is, then, communicating, and according to Flammarion’s press sheet, "Jacques Dupin’s Miró features 450 stunning color images — ‘more Miró’ than any other hardcover book in print, showcasing the artist’s wide-ranging influences." I counted 192 color images. Done by the Barcelona company Reprocolor Llovet, the separations outclass those of the Miró monographs from Rizzoli and Prestel and the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s centennial Miró exhibition in 1993. The MoMA catalogue, however, does have more color. And the black-and-white images that fill out Flammarion’s 450 count are largely wasted on this artist — in Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird (1926), the rooster’s blue face and red comb are invisible. The MoMA catalogue shows all 23 Constellations, arguably Miró’s most important work; Flammarion has just six, only three in color.