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

Last week I discussed how fascinated I was by the push-me-pull-you narrative of MoMA curator Anne Umland's recent exhibition 'Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting: 1927-1937.' In short I loved the show, but I had some quibbles with Umland's start date of 1927. (I also didn't buy that Miro was 'assassinating' anything: I think Umland's story reveals that Miro was exploring painting with high-paced intensity.) Today I want to focus on 1927 and to suggest that Miro's journey through that the Umland's decade is even more of a roller-coaster than she presents.

Umland's show opened with eight thrilling paintings from early 1927. [Image above: Miro, Painting, 1927.] The chronology section of MoMA's exhibition website shows all eight -- out of a series of 18 that Miro painted -- and the affinity between them is apparent.

In the exhibition's catalogue Umland argues that with these paintings on bare canvas Miro takes an abrupt turn in his work: "By 1927 the pulsing, amorphous colors and loose, washy brushwork essential to creating the 'oneiric atmosphere' that, for [the author of the Miro catalogue raisonne Jacques] Dupin, defines the 'dream paintings' Miro produced in 1925, 1926, and 1927... were eliminated." Umland then immediately moved from these early 1927 paintings to the 'Spanish Dancer' series of 1928, a group of four works that mix paint and household materials.

Walking through the show and looking at MoMA's website-revealed chronology, it's easy to see how that's an attractively tidy story -- but it leaves out 'the rest' of 1927, which for Miro was a spectacularly active, productive and varied year. After Miro made the 18 bare-ground works early in 1927, he made at least 33 more paintings before getting to the Spanish Dancer works in 1928. (And some these other 1927 paintings had plenty of "loose, washy brushwork.")

Umland relegates these other series to a footnote or two in her catalogue essay. Had she included them in her show she might have provided an even more exciting, fuller picture of how Miro moved from the early 1927 abstractions into the 'combine-style' Spanish Dancer works of 1928.

As Umland notes in one of those footnotes, one of those additional series was painted on varied brown backgrounds, another featured blue backgrounds. The picture above is the Hirshhorn's Calder-inspired 1927 Painting (Circus Horse). With this series of paintings -- and in particular with the Hirshhorn canvas -- Miro is getting away from the nearly full-field compositions of the early 1927 paintings. He has abstracted down his references to people, objects and spaces to a dot here and a line there. Furthermore, Miro has also figured out how to link these elements in as spare a way as possible. (The early 1927 paintings generally feature a lot of paint. By the end of the year Miro is reducing, distilling, and is using as little paint as he can get away with.)

In another 1927 series, this one featuring washy blue backgrounds, Miro does much the same thing. The 1927 Tate Painting at right covers some of the same territory. The white blobular figure is an abstracted horse. The black figure at right appears to be a person having some kind of interaction with the horse. The circle in the top-center of the painting may be a cubist-style 'overhead' reference to a circus ring. As in the Hirshhorn canvas, Miro has figured out how to hold together disparate elements within a fairly naked painting.

At the end of these works and at the beginning of 1928, Miro arrives at the Spanish Dancers, which are also fairly naked and which include sculptural elements. In Umland's presentation it's easy -- and thrilling -- to see a connection between the MFA Boston's Cloud and Birds and the Pompidou's Portrait of a Dancer: Hello feathers.

But I think Umland missed an opportunity to link the fuller body of Miro's 1927 work with the Dancers, to tell the full arc of the story: At left is Miro's first Spanish Dancer painting, from the collection of the Reina Sofia. It seems directly informed by the Hirshhorn painting from the previous year, including the use of a simple dot to connote a person's head, or perhaps the dots as a cubist-infused aerial view grounding humans within the field. Miro also re-uses the power of the 'V' shape to unite a composition. Finally, in the late 1927 paintings Miro learned to trust the viewer's eye to fill in the empty space in the canvas, to allow the viewer 'solve' the relationship between the painted elements on his/her own.

That's a key breakthrough, and one that made it possible for Miro to make works as spare, as empty and as allusive as the Spanish Dancer foursome. Without the developments of late 1927, the Dancers would not have been as thrilling and perverse. I think that seeing how Miro first trotted out some of those techniques in works such as Painting (Circus Horse) makes his narrative arc all the more exciting.

(The likely influence of Calder on Miro that I mentioned above is potentially key (but is also speculative) and was not examined in Umland's catalogue: Calder moved to Paris in 1926 and started making wire sculptures almost immediately. It's easy to see a lot of Calder in Miro's 1927 paintings... but did Calder's creative use of materials also inspire Miro's own creative use of materials in the Spanish Dancers works? The two men began a correspondence in December, 1928, but it's likely that Miro would have been aware of Calder's work before they started writing to each other.)

Related: Introducing MoMA's recent Joan Miro exhibition. So how about 1927 as a start date?