“ART IS ABOUT PEOPLE AND FOR PEOPLE”
Joan Miró (1893-1983), undoubtedly one of the great modernist of the 20th century is the star of EMMA’s (Espoo Museum of Modern Art) spring exhibition. Although Miró worked and lived most of his life in Paris and Mallorca, he was a Catalonian artist and continues to have a strong influence in the region even today.
Interestingly, Miró seems to be exceptional among the great artistic personalities of his time. He did not built a reputation outside his art; Miró was not a wild ladies man, nor was he an unstable creator. What makes Miró’s art interesting is the art itself – the artist had his wild adventures through his work, and for him that was something he wished everyone to be able to enjoy.
Miró’s artistic career is long and impressive tough due to the pressure of his family, he first started working as an accountant. However, it soon became obvious that the young Miró had his calling in the arts. As early as in the 1920’s he travelled to Paris and quickly got acquainted with the surrealist and other abstract art movements of the time. Actually, Miró was the one who introduced young Dalí to the surrealists in Paris.
Although Miró is described as a surrealist, he never felt satisfied working under a single dogma, and this is the reason why he was never a member of the surrealist group. Surrealism gave Miró the liberty he needed in his artistic expression: the mechanisms of automatic painting and freedom from naturalistic form. Another interesting feature in his art was, that even though he was highly inspired by, for instance, cubism and Picasso, Miró’s art was never completely non-figurative. Deriving from the unconscious, for him everything in his work was essential and real.
In addition to refusing to label himself in any of the modernist movements, Miró was also experimental in his techniques. The EMMA exhibition is largely focused on the artist’s late work from 1960s and 1970s, including painting, graphics, drawings, and most of all – sculpture. Sculpture was a personal interest for Miró already in his earlier works, but when time passed he turned more and more to it. EMMA presents about 30 bronze pieces varying in size and style.
Perhaps the most important reason for making sculpture for Miró was his urge to get out from his studio and create art that is accessible for as many people as possible. Sculpture as a public art form has its uniqueness in that it belongs outside. Miró believed that art does not belong to offices and galleries, but should be experienced in nature. The same reason of attaining big public was why Miró was so interested in graphics; the artist even started to produce prints from his own paintings for them to be available and affordable for everyone.
This is truly an interesting fact about the artist, working in the time when ‘art’ had before been a highly autonomous system and through modernism getting more and more incomprehensive to the audiences. With a twinkle in his eyes Miró had this more or less social dimension and philosophy in his work.
In EMMA, one can encounter almost a hundred works by Miró. The exhibition truly shows the huge scale and consistency of his artistic career, which lasted six decades. Throughout his career, Miró’s work carried a primary colour scheme with strong blue, red, yellow, green and black. The recurring forms such as the crescent moon, starts, and eyes can be found in all techniques from drawings to sculpture, spiced with a warm humour that has always described the artist.
Indeed, Miró’s work is often approached through its playfulness and childlike irony and sincerity. But as the Museum Director of EMMA, Markku Valkonen pointed out, the EMMA exhibition also shows a Miró that is more dark, deep and even aggressive, than these first impressions give credit for. Like his sculpture, the overall ideas of the artist’s career should be seen from all directions.
Joan Miró 4.3.2011 – 12.6.2011 at EMMA, Espoo
The exhibition also includes a part “Miró and Finnish Fantasy”, where seven Finnish artists, who have in one way or the other been inspired by Miró offer a point of view to his art.
EMMA webpage: http://www.emma.museum/en/node/419
- Hanna Joensuu
