'Joan Miro, 1927-1937' at MoMA, part two

Continued from part one.

Date shows are tricky: The curator must explain why she has chosen two particular dates and then she must argue that they're as important for a given artist (or movement) as s/he says they are. For her recent Joan Miro show at MoMA, curator Anne Umland chose to focus on a decade of Miro's evolution as a painter: 1927-1937. [Image: Joan Miro, The Farm, 1921-22. It is not in Umland's show.] So is 1927 as clear a re-beginning point for Miro as Umland presents in both her catalogue and in the show's opening galleries? I don't think so.

In her introductory essay, Umland wrote that she chose 1927 as her start date because Miro may have used the phrase 'I want to assassinate painting' in 1927. In an extensively footnoted paragraph, Umland also concedes that Miro may have said no such thing, that art critic Maurice Raynal may have made up the quote and attributed it to Miro.

Either way, Umland says that kind of "assaultive rhetoric is entirely consistent with that found in Miro's private correspondence as early as 1924." The show does not start in 1924, it starts in 1927.

No matter: By a 1962 interview -- conducted when Miro was standing in front of works from 1929 and 1930 -- the artist was more than happy to associate himself with the 'a-word,' So the show starts not in 1924, 1929 or 1930, but in 1927.

There is a certain peril in listening too much to what artists say -- or to what they might have said, or to how they position themselves 35 years after the fact. Artists make their strongest comments about their art through their art. Furthermore, artists rarely make the decisive breaks that 'date shows' require. In fact, several years before 1927 Miro had started the push-me, pull-you process of moving away from the amalgamation of -isms that had characterized his work until then.

That's not to say that Umland wasn't on to something: Take a look at the Miro of 1921-22, of 1923-24, of 1924 (immediately above: Miro's Head of a Catalan Peasant), of 1925 and of 1926.

Between the NGA's The Farm of 1921-22 (above) and SFMOMA's Painting of 1926 (below), Miro often worked to dramatically reduce everything in his art: compositional elements, colors -- and cribs from established isms. He narrowed his interest from, say, a scene that includes many factors of Catalan life, to intensely abstracted and boiled-down portraits of a single Catalan person (four of which he painted in 1924) or to even more abstracted references such as a dreamy cloud of a grinning white dot in an abstracted, barely delineated space (in 1926).

In short, that's Umland's argument for her "painting and anti-painting" show: Between 1927 and 1937 Miro pared painting down, down, down, eliminating as much as he could before building his paintings back up with fuller, more complicated and loaded compositions, at which point he'd tear it all down again. MoMA's clever exhibition website makes it easy to see Umland's thesis in action by scrolling across the show's chronology. (In the show's final gallery, Umland argued that Miro came out the other side of all this back-and-forth in 1937, having re-created what a Miro is in MoMA's weird 1937 Still Life with Old Shoe.)

But: Miro didn't do this just from 1927 on, he was doing this in the years before Umland starts her show. Even as Miro was paring down in the 1924 NGA painting and in the 1926 SFMOMA painting, he built back up too, such as in the Albright-Knox's great 1924-25 Carnival of Harlequin. In other words: Miro's pare-and-build gyrations weren't limited to Umland's decade; they started sooner. 

Next time: I'll pick up in 1927, and with the eight beautiful paintings with which Umland opened her show.

Related: Part one.