Joan Miro Art - Information - Page 2

Original Joan Miro Lithographs, Etchings & Aquatints

The start of Joan Miro's adventures as a painter occurred simultaneously with, and inseparably from, the beginning of his connections with literature. Both can be said to have developed concurrently over the years, producing some remarkable results: the extensive output of book illustrations, and editions de luxe, - a record of some of the most outstanding names in the literature of the time, and evidence of the perfect mastery and technique adapted to a support that by the very nature allows the finished work to be considered more, perhaps, as object than as painting.

However, Miro's interest in literature was not just one-sided; it was a response to feedback produced by the interest his work arroused in poets and writers. The first reviews of Miro's work in newspapers and journals were due in large measure to poets and writers such as J.V. Foix and Charles Sindreu. Joan Miro did identify strongly with the Surrealist poets, finding in their verse the inspiration he sought for his own efforts. Their reward was his friendship and collaboration on many artists’ books, to which he would contribute the illustrations for their poetry.

One of Miro's earliest printmaking commissions was to illustrate "Il etait une petite pie", 1928. For this project, Miro utilized the pochoir or stencil technique, which consists in cutting out the shape or motif on a zinc plate and inking in the holes or spaces in the zinc. Although stenciling is not strictly speaking a printing technique, "Il etait une petite pie" can certainly be considered the direct predecessor of the real edition de luxe. For the first time Miro produced illustrations concentrating on the sense of the accompanying text. This resulted in eight compositions along the lines of his painting at the time, dominated by signs, magic and mystery, which closely matched the text.

Miro used stencils again in 1984 for illustrations in the reviews D'aci i d'alla, published in Barcelona and Cahiers d'art, published in Paris. The latter also reproduced another stenciled picture by Miro in 1937 that became universally famous:" Aidez l'Espagne". Miro did this stencil, which was planned to be used for a postage stamp to raise funds for the Republican cause, a year after the start of the Spanish Civil War. Viewed on the basis of the stylistic patterns that characterized the work of Miro at the time - dominated by deformed figures, particularly human figures with which the artist tried to show his rejection of the events going on around him - "Aidez l'Espagne" was a forerunner of Miro's later posters, which were to great extent the fruit of his concern, on a social rather than a political level, with his environment. Meanwhile, however, Miro had already applied lithographic and intaglio techniques to the art of book illustration. This opened the way for his graphic work, which because of its specific importance can by no means be considered a merely a minor or secondary part of his pictorial output.

In the late twenties and early thirties Miro experienced a crisis of expression that led him to manifest on several occasions his rejection of painting, which he considered in decline since the age of cave-dwellers. As a result of this, he took up collage, studying the possibilities it offered, and explored three dimensional through the creation of objects. But importantly: before reaching this stage, Miro had set himself the strict discipline of analyzing forms through drawing-which he considered the first and essential step in the materialization of a picture. And which played a fundamental role in the development of his plastic language.

In 1929, Miro, in a style very close drawing, produced his first lithographs to illustrate "L'Abre des voyageurs" by Tristan Tzara, which was published in 1930. This first joint work by Tzara and Miro was not just the start of a fruitful collaboration but was also a step towards other adventures. Tzara introduced Miro to Louis Marcoussis, the cubist painter who had mastered with great skill, the techniques of drypoint, line engraving and etching, the secrets of which he imparted to Miro. It was as a result of this introduction that, in 1933, Miro was able to produce his first three etchings, as book illustration for Georges Hugonet's "Enfances". One can detect some progress in his mastery of the use of blank spaces that emphasize the volume of forms and make them stand against the flat ground of the paper.

Miro spent the post-war years in almost silent retreat. The completion of the twenty three gouaches of the "Constellations" series in Palma in 1941 marked the end of a period of crisis and productive investigation and the beginning of another, shorter phase in which the artist questioned aspects not of painting but of the environment.

The disillusionment caused by the senselessness of using technical advances for methodical and organized destruction, in which the supposedly most civilized countries of the world had participated, provoked a mental response to the reactionary and self-centered bourgeois attitude that found its theoretical background in existentialism. There was no exact parallel in the plastic arts, despite a desire to return to the essence of things, to an authenticity beyond pure market values. In the case of Miro, as with Picasso, the alternative was found in ceramics.

After several years of working almost exclusively on paper, Miro began this new adventure in 1944 and devoted two years of his life to it. From ceramics he went to bronze sculpture, and then from not having touched a copperplate or lithographic stone for seven years, he left Europe and went to spend nine months in New York. The reason for going to the United States was to work on a mural painting for a skyscraper in Cincinnati. What Miro did not realize was that he was taking the first step toward resuming a facet of his professional life that he had abandoned shortly after starting it - his graphic work and book illustrations.

In this unexpected return to illustration, Miro started on a new and exciting adventure illustrating" La Deseperanto", volume II of Tristan and Tzara's" L'Antitete". The period between 1960 and 1982 was the one in which Miro produced the most numerous and varied book illustrations, mastering large formats and working with a great many authors. For this reason it is difficult to discuss each edition individually. Its important to point out though that there is a remarkable unity between the rest of Miro's oeuvre and his book illustrations.

By the beginning of the sixties he was working and would continue to work on ceramic murals and large format paintings though without abandoning smaller paintings. At the same time he tended toward large format books whilst continuing to illustrate smaller ones. The change of dimensions as far as painting was concerned was accompanied by a new form of brushstroke. Miro abandoned the controlled execution of the fifties in favor of the gesture and the tension generated thereby. In books, this change can be detected in two of the PAB editions:" La" and "Un Jour entire, both dated 1960, and is shown more forcibly in the etching illustrating Poemes civil" by Joan Brossa, published 1961. In his paintings, the nearest equivalent would be "Triptych on white ground for hermit's cell", 1968, where in each of the three canvases a single black line on the vast white surface transmits the anxiety of someone who feels imprisoned, alone and isolated.

Miro's three-dimensional work also has its parallels in the world of illustration. In 1966, after completing a set of bronze sculptures, he began the task of illustrating Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Ro"i, published by Teriade. The result was certainly surprising: each of the thirteen prints is treated more as a stage set than as a drawing, as if it were a space in which volumes, in this case the characters in the play, can move freely. The grotesque rounded forms of the characters - they seem to be inflated - undoubtedly came from a profound study of Jarry's text that had so impressed Miro. Here contrary to his usual practice, the artist illustrated the text as if he were staging the play, following it to the very letter. Some time later, in 1978, these "sets" of Miro's were used for a play put on by the Claca Teatre group, Mori el Merma, which was based on Jarry's text, Miro's illustrations and all the material, both published and unpublished, produced by Miro in connection with character created by Alfred Jarry.

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