Amid a range of U.S.-focused cultural events this year commemorating America’s 250th, the Phillips Collection has taken a different approach, staging an extensive exhibition on the Catalan modernist Joan Miró — viewed through the lens of his creative interactions with more than 30 U.S. artists.
That framing makes for an engaging showcase of dozens of Miró’s paintings and sculptures, along with works by other significant 20th-century artists, including Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Mark Rothko. The Phillips organized “Miró and the United States” jointly with the Fundació Joan Miró, which hosted its own version of the show in the fall in his birthplace, Barcelona.
The exhibition highlights exchanges between Miró and his U.S.-based counterparts during seven visits between the 1940s and ’60s, positing that these connections significantly shaped modern art on both sides of the Atlantic.
U.S. art circles were introduced to Miró in 1926, when two of his paintings, including the doodle-like “Somersault,” on view at the Phillips, were shown at the Brooklyn Museum. Miró wasn’t an immediate success — some critics found his surrealism baffling — but his first U.S. museum retrospective, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1941, helped bring him wide acclaim.
By 1945, when the Pierre Matisse Gallery (established by Henri Matisse’s son) in New York presented Miró’s “Constellations,” a series of small gouache and oil works on paper, every piece sold. Vogue magazine even staged a fashion shoot at the show, according to archival materials included in the Phillips exhibition.
“Constellations” was so popular that Miró later produced a limited-edition set of prints of the 23 originals. The prints, which fill a room at the Phillips, evince an incredible joy for life with their bright compositions of shapes and forms strung together by flowing lines, as well as with whimsical titles such as “People at Night Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails.”
“Miró and the United States” traces how multiple U.S. artists working in surrealism and abstraction took inspiration from Miró during this period. Krasner, who deemed the “Constellation” pieces “a little miracle,” and other abstract expressionists embraced a similar “allover” technique. Examples include Janet Sobel’s “Illusion of Solidity” (1945), Pollock’s “Eyes in the Heat” (1946) and Krasner’s “Untitled [Little Image Painting]” (1947-1948).
Arshile Gorky’s 1943 “Garden in Sochi,” meanwhile, drew heavily from Miró’s “Still Life With Old Shoe,” which had appeared at MoMA in 1941. Miró, working in 1937 amid the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, depicts a shoe, bottle, fork and other items, sinuous and distorted as if seen through curved glass. In Gorky’s oil painting, hung beside it, Miró’s eerie black background becomes a more upbeat off-white, but the household objects, composition, and primary colors of yellow, green and red bear a strong resemblance.
The exhibition also draws connections between Miró’s artistic practice and works by Isamu Noguchi, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (who lived in New York in the ’40s), among others.
Miró didn’t visit the U.S. until 1947, arriving in New York on a commission to paint a 30-foot mural for Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza Hotel and staying eight months. The mural, of which an original sketch along with a smaller version of the real thing are on view, encapsulates Miró’s style at the time, with colorful shapes and dreamlike forms floating across a pale-blue field.
During that stint and shorter visits up through 1968, Miró developed personal relationships with many U.S.-based artists, and it’s clear the influence went both ways. He spoke admiringly of Pollock’s “black pourings” from the early ’50s, such as “Number 14,” displayed at the Phillips.
At the Atelier 17 printmaking studio in New York, Miró became acquainted with Louise Bourgeois, two of whose elongated, vaguely anthropomorphic abstract sculptures in painted metal, “Listening One” (1947) and “Untitled” (1947-1949), are in the show. They are echoed in three lithe wooden and metal “Majesty” sculptures created by Miró nearly 30 years later, arranged on the Phillips’s second-floor landing.
Calder, who met Miró in Paris in 1928, launching a decades-long friendship, is the best-represented U.S. artist, with five pieces, including a hanging wire portrait he made of Miró in 1930. (In 2004, the Phillips organized an entire show on their relationship, “Calder, Miro.”)
“Black Polygons” and “Red Polygons,” two delicate Calder mobiles suspended at the entrance to the exhibition, appear almost like 3D manifestations of Miró’s biomorphic shapes connected by swirling painted lines — but the reverse could be said, too: Miró’s canvases at times look like two-dimensional incarnations of Calder’s works. “Miró and the United States,” it may be said, makes a powerful argument for artistic exchange.
Miró and the United States Through July 5 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW. phillipscollection.org.
The post Miró helped shape modern art. The U.S. helped shape Miró. appeared first on Washington Post.
