“For me, a picture should be like sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem. It must have radiance; it must be like those stones which Pyrenean shepherds use to light their pipes,” the great Surrealist painter Joan Miró said. He, who helped shape the course of Modern art, was a revolutionary and an upstart who used the canvas to attack bourgeois sensibilities in art and liberate painting from all that had come before.
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Imagine then, the studio of such a spirit, and what form it would take—the very space where a new pictorial language was born and had taken shape into poems, sonnets, and soliloquies from the brush of the man who declared,” I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”
Mayoral, Barcelona (Booth #402) delivers beautifully, turning their entire booth at The Armory Show into Miró’s Studio, an historically accurate recreation of the artist’s studio of Son Abrines in Mallorca, Spain. In1956, Miró collaborated with well known Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, who was working from exile in New York, to design the ideal space in which he would work.The studio was designed to allow the artist to work on massive canvases, as well as experiment with new materials, processes, and techniques.
Miró once observed, “I work like a laborer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself… That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.”
His style of working is fully in evidence in Miró’s Studio. The exhibition includes 22 paintings and drawings dating from his years at Son Abrines, situated on easels and hung from the walls, creating the luxurious sensation of being in the gardens while everything blooms around you. Because the exhibition is conceived as a studio, rather than as a gallery, there is the sense of progress and energy, at once captivating you with possibility. Miró’s Studio is positioned at the entrance to Pier 92: The Armory Show – Modern, setting the tone for the period perfectly.
The studio itself has a sense of intimacy and warmth, replete with period furniture, painting materials, household items, and personal effects of the artists dispersed throughout. Miró transformed his studio into a multifaceted world as both a space or creation as well as a museum for objects of inspiration. Woven among the artist’s works are the objects he adored, the small figurines and toys, beautiful stones, woven palm leaves from Palm Sunday, photographs, prints, and postcards. In their own way they are intriguing as the artworks themselves, each offering itself as a facet of the master to behold. We feel a sense of weight and depth in their presence, further underscored by Miró ‘s words, “For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.”
The cumulative experience of Miró’s Studio is one that combines curiosity, intimacy, and the emotion of being privy to the artist’s private sanctuary. It could be suggested that there are two crucial moments that served as turning points in Miró’s career: the first was when he traveled to Paris in 1920, immersing himself in the Dada and Surrealist scenes, integrating himself with the world of poets on Rue Blomet studio. The second moment took place years later in 1956, when he was able to actualize the words he spoke in 1938: “My dream, once I am able to settle down somewhere, is to have a very large studio.”
Miró worked in the studio on Son Abrines until his death in 1983. It is here that he lived and worked for more than a quarter of a century, spending his final years doing what he loved. Miró’s Studio gives us the opportunity to see the world in which he lived and worked. The spirit of Miró reigns supreme in his words, “I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.”
Al photos: ©Miss Rosen
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
