Homage to Catalunya (continued)

Then there are the production problems. What Dupin describes as Seated Woman I (1938) is actually Seated Woman II (1938), and vice versa. His Flight of a Bird over a Plain I (1938) likewise does not describe the image with that title, and his account of Woman in the Night (1946) is keyed to an image called Women in the Night that may or may not be the work he’s talking about. The marginal notations that link the text to the images are not always correct, and too often there’s an extended analysis of a piece that’s not illustrated. We don’t even see the originals of the three Dutch Interior "copies" that Miró did in 1928 after a trip to the Netherlands, never mind context in the form of work by Dalí or Max Ernst or Paul Klee.

The translator is identified as James Petterson; suffice to say that no one who turns out sentences like "Miró assisted to a bullfight as if it were a popular festival erotically tainted" and "Miró’s painting on cloth an unraveled band of cloth bearing freed miroglyphs, was hang in the Salle des Superstitions" should have been given the assignment. Under such circumstances, it’s hard to evaluate Dupin’s text. It’s filled with insight: of the 1960 Woman and Bird series, he says (again with little help from the translator), "The analogy between the two creatures, and the interlacing of their lines are something so strong that it is hard to say where the woman ends and the bird begins, whether they do not after all form one marvelous hybrid creature. . . . This suspended union, at once expectation, trial and consummation, takes place in the privileged space of a carnal night, in an intimacy of nature, which Miró never departed from. Reality is revealed as a sort of break in the smooth flow of time." Dupin takes great pains with Miró’s seminal three early-’20s landscapes (in which the artist’s mature style develops before your eyes): The Farm, The Tilled Field, and Catalan Landscape (The Hunter); yet he leaves to it Erben to point out that the letters "s a r d" at the bottom right of Catalan Landscape could stand for either "sardina" (sardine) or "sardana" (the Catalan national folk dance), and he fails to elucidate the humorous contrast between the "jour" of the folded newspaper and the night that’s falling from the upper right-hand corner of The Tilled Field. And when he writes, "In most cases, starting from the new techniques, to which his prodigious sensitivity to materials and accidental discoveries gives unexpected powers, Miró goes beyond these to effect a pictorial and poetic operation raised to the second power, from which arise new meanings," he’s sliding away from perception and toward promotion. Perhaps that’s the inevitable consequence of being hired to write about an artist’s work, an artist who becomes your collaborator and friend.

Walter Erben’s Miró is a very different book, one more like the artist himself: small, unassuming, full of matter. Its 240 pages contain some 200 illustrations, 177 in color. The first of the two parts begins with the author’s 1957 visit to Miró’s Mallorca studio. Erben had in his pocket "a letter from the Galerie Maeght in Paris, informing me that ‘Miró felt flattered by my interest in his work and would be pleased to talk with me, if I came to Palma’ but no guarantee that the artist would be there when he arrived, and he opens his memoir with a comical account of trying to make his way from Palma to Miró’s home in Cala Major. "Suddenly he was standing in front of me: a short, thickset man who hardly looked his sixty years. He was wearing blue linen trousers and a coarsely woven white linen shirt with a open neck and short sleeves. On his feet he had straw sandals. In his left hand he was holding Maeght’s letter. He extended his right hand and welcomed me. His round, rugged face with the sleek grey hair and exceedingly lively eyes inspired confidence. The words he spoke were those of commonplace politeness, yet there was immediately established between us that pleasant tension which links people who already know one another and are happy to be meeting again after a longish separation. I had no need to fall back on my laboriously contrived sentences."

Erben finds a place to stay near Miró; he visits Miró’s studio; he explores Mallorca, and he and Miró make a day trip to Port Andratx. The following summer, he returns, this time exploring Barcelona, meeting two of Miró’s friends, the hatmaker Joan Prats and the artist Josep Llorens Artigas. The second half of the monograph traces Miró’s life and career in simple, straightforward language. A closing chapter by Hajo Düchting addresses "Miró’s Late Works."

Whether he’s speaking with Miró or the artist’s friends, Erben reproduces conversations verbatim (did he have a tape recorder?), and the result is intelligent everyday art talk as opposed to Dupin’s critical vacuum. "Every poet is a philosopher," Miró says, "and I think many philosophers have a poet’s gifts. Klee was a poet and a tremendous thinker." And in the margins of his running text, he provides trenchant commentary on the illustrations (though in this context it’s hardly politic to call Sert a "Spanish architect"). Of Maternity (1924), he says, "Instead of evoking associations of maternal comfort, the giant, black pendulum — a mother’s womb — reminds one of the bizarre stories of Edgar Allan Poe."

During World War I, Miró wrote, "These days of the successful Allied offensive are for us Francophiles the greatest joy. We will see whether they can’t throw out this uncouth mob once and for all, and then we shall all go to Paris and surrender ourselves to France’s delights, which we can see in their most expressive form in Renoir’s painting (his Moulin de la Galette, his women, his nudes!)." When he did get to Paris, he was dismayed to find his fellow painters "stealing from Renoir (whose only value now is as a classic)." In a lesser artist, this might seem a contradiction, but Miró was a master of stepping back while moving forward. No form could contain him, and certainly no book, but these two pay due homage.