Joan Miro: Poetry and Prints

This essay was written by Jacques Dupin, who worked closely with Joan Miro to compile the information presented here. This essay offers personal incite into Joan Miro's relationship to poetry and its authors, and how it inspired his work in lithography and etching.

From 1959 to 1956, Joan Miro mostly worked in the workshops of Galerie Maeght in Levallois with Robert Dutou, and with him again in the Arte printing shop on rue Daguerre. He would also climb up the hill of Montmarte to the Felaut-Lacouriere workshop for fruitful visits, or print in Gili and Torralba's workshops in Barcelona. He required from all his partners a lot more than is usually offered to painters. He instigated, hustled, questioned, he wanted more and he wanted something else, and the more he asked for, the more he obtained. With Miro, the engraver and copperplate printer are not just doing a great artist a favor, it is a creative adventure they share and follow through with him, hand in hand. Joan Miro Himself had the aptitude to create an atmosphere of trust and friendship witch makes encounters and teamwork possible.

In Levallois, until 1966, Miro engraved some fifty prints, mostly etchings and aquatints, and fewer dry-point etchings. As in his [painting at the same time, he was influenced by new paintings and most of all by Pollock and abstract expressionism, and his imagination, in order to spread out, needed to react to a free intrusion of spots, drippings and accidents which provide the initial shock, an interpellation of the informal and the unformulated, and like a spring board for take off. With this impetus the gesture, set free, whisks the tool along, and the jubilatory stroke, its liveliness, express the pleasure of engraving, inventing, over-achieving, and of entrapping far off the beaten tracks as if to get away from the precise, set, deep-rooted signs for the Mironian repertoire. Miro often worked in series creating multiple variations from a black plate, for instance, a dappled bedding, as in Ouvrages du vent (wind works) where the same widespread black calls for counterpoints of greatly diversified aquatint colors. A similar serial language with Porteurs d'eau (Water bearers), in which the unraveled, fast line stands out against wash tints and, from one sheet to another, reveals a progressive enrichment or a bare starkness. He gives his preference to arabesque, his favorite, and sometimes multiplies it: La Chevelure de Berenice (Berenice's Hair) in entangled lines, in a thick and thin intricate intertwining. It is not enough for Miro to use conventional tools, noble but set in tradition. He prefers a nail, a comb, a screwdriver, a thousand year old dentist's drill or a raccoon tail, found at random and picked out of the scrap heap. And to fight a way through a jungle of searching and finding, double or treble writings are always superimposed, intricate, in the spirit of a palimpset, as though drawn lines should be contradicted, fought and confirmed by others; a s though ones eye should be constantly attracted and repelled, trapped and freed by an ambiguous reading. Lightness, tenuousness, or the Sonatine (Sonatina), incomplete narrative of the utmost simplicity as though blossoming forth from a Chinese bud or echoing calligraphy.