covers


MIRÓ
Tate Modern 14 April–11 September 2011

‘A painting must be fertile. It must give birth
to a world. It doesn’t matter if it depicts
flowers or people or horses, as long as it
reveals a world, something alive. Two and
twodonotmakefour.Onlyaccountantsthink
that. But that is not enough, a painting must
make this clear; it must fertilise the
imagination.’

So said Joan Miró, the Catalan painter
who has a major retrospective at the Tate
Modern, in an interview in 1959. This
exhibition links his work skillfully with events
that were occurring in Spain and Europe
generally and demonstrates how the
suppression of Catalan autonomy, the
Spanish civil war, the rise of Franco and
Fascism, even the student riots of 1968 are
influential on the surreal abstractism of
Miró’s painting.
Miró was born in 1893 in Barcelona, in a

Catalonia that was an autonomous region of
Spain. Modern and free-thinking, the
optimismandfreedomofthosetimescanbe
gauged by the extraordinary outputs of other
Catalan artists of the period, notably Antoni
Gaudi and Salvador Dali. Miró always
acknowledged, and frequently came back to,
his Catalan roots. Abstract representations
of peasants, possibly reduced to a motif of

the characteristic red cap, populate many of
his paintings (Catalan Landscape [The
Hunter], Head of a Catalan Peasant). The
cap, the barretina, becomes a symbol that,
even when only just recognisable, evokes the
sensation of an earthy peasant.
The barretina acts as a rosetta stone

translating Miró’s work. How can these bold
colourful pictures with abstract, though
frequently biomorphic and vaguely organic,
shapes be so insightful, provocative, funny,
sexy, and moving? Is it because we recognise
a quality or motif about them that, even if we
are not aware and cannot name it, evokes
these responses? A parallel would be Jung’s
archetypes: ‘innate universal psychic
dispositions that form the substrate from
which the basic symbols or representations
of unconscious experience emerge’. It is
postulated that the universal presence of
certain character representations (for
example the wicked witch, the young prince)
in the folk tales of many diverse cultures is
because they represent manifestations of
these ‘innate universal psychic dispositions’.
Perhaps the attraction of Miró is that he taps
into ‘representations of the unconscious
experience’.
Miró himself was in no doubt that his

paintings were not meant as pretty and
colourful designs. In 1937 he said:

‘I cannot understand — and consider it an
insult — to be placed in the category of
“abstractpainters”...AsifthemarksIputon

a canvas did not correspond to a
concrete representation of my mind,
did not possess a profound reality,
were not part of the real itself!’.1

The exhibition at the Tate Modern
displayed about 150 paintings, with
some sculptures and installations, in
a chronological order that allowed
you to see the evolution of his work
and the effects of the major external
influences. The first room is
dominated by the work The Farm
(1921–1922). This is an almost
pictorial representation of his family
home in Catalonia. While some
architectural and environmental
detail is faithfully replicated there is
the use of symbolic shapes that
foretell his future direction.
Around this time Miró moved to

Paris and spent time with Surrealist
artists and poets, including his fellow

Spaniard Pablo Picasso. The spirit of these
times is captured by the riotous energy of
such paintings as Harlequin’s Carnival
(1924–1925). Events in his homeland then
started to affect the mood of his work; as
savage political events occurred in Spain so
the paintings become more bleak and
barren. By the time General Franco comes
to power in the late 1930s the figures are
grotesque and menacing (Head of a Woman,
1938).Believing‘theartist...useshisvoiceto
say something’, copies of his propaganda
print Aidez l’Espagne were sold to fund the
Republican cause at an exhibition where
Picasso’s Guernica was displayed.
During and after the Second World War

Miró and his family lived in ‘internal exile’ in
Mallorca. At first his work is angry and
disturbed, illustrated by the Barcelona
Series of lithographs depicting distorted,
violent caricatures. Later a more benign
mood is apparent. With a growing
international reputation he seemed to want
to explore his inner world rather than rage
against the forces affecting his outer world.
By the 1960s, which should have been a
natural home for him, we see sparse but
powerful works illustrated by Painting on
White Background for the Cell of a Recluse
(1968) and the triptych The Hope of the
Condemned Man (1974). These canvases
are no longer filled with busy symbols but
speak loudly through their simplicity.
Miró lived long enough to see the fall of

Franco and the restoration of democracy in
Spain. His work records his emotional
responsetothetumultuouseventsofhislife.
We cannot be aware of the unconscious by
definition, but Miró’s paintings give a little
insight into this world. We recognise
something that he has managed to capture
and represent, and that two and two do not
always make four.

RichardStevens,
GP, East Oxford Health Centre, Oxford.

DOI: 10.3399/bjgp11X613241

Exhibition review
TheReview

ADDRESSFORCORRESPONDENCE

RichardStevens
East Oxford Health Centre, Manzil Way, Cowley
Road, Oxford, OX4 1XD, UK.

E-mail:Rstevens.oxford@gmail.com

Joan Miró. Head of a Catalan Peasant , 1925.
Oil on canvas. 920 x 732 x 26 mm

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748 British Journal of General Practice, December 2011

REFERENCE
1. Candela I. Joan Miro. London: Tate Publishing,

2011.