Slapdash Savant

An artist plays with ideas; the reason we shouldn't take them too seriously when they talk about serious things. Less philosophers than children, whose concepts are but toys. So what follows, the profundity of innocence or just silly….

In Miró’s treatment of the Dutch masters there was an element of admiration, mixed with a touch of mockery at the pedestrian conception which underlies their search for reality. There seemed to be something radically absurd in an art which limited itself to a photographic resemblance dolled up with the artificiality of academic arrangement. The illusion which these painters were striving to create in the name of reality might be enjoyed, with a certain indulgence but it contained a pitiful misunderstanding of the true meaning of art.1

Like many artists Miró lacks the historical sense. But before getting onto this, I need to talk definitions. What does Miró mean by reality? The life of the spirit, our mental metaphysics, an atmosphere, a feeling - of the unknowable, of the invisible, of a vaguely felt form, its ghosts and ghouls - this is the real; a vast quantity of psychic lava to be shaped and frozen by an artist’s talent. A reality that changes over the centuries. The Dutch were painting at a time when the real was understood through a Christianity intimate with domestic life; God’s spirit embedded in the well-ordered home. No longer to be captured by a church painting, whose saints, dressed in aristocratic garb, had become the heroes and heroines of some epic saga. No. Now it is the small urban tale, where God is seen at his most amenable and useful. To paint the little details is to touch the divine.

Would a Catholic understand such a Protestant art? An irrelevant question. For Miró is a peculiarly modern artist, whose religious spirit is mystic and superstitious; thus the abstract nature of much of his oeuvre. Reality is pure form. God’s glance the artist’s inspiration, a brushstroke on canvas.

There are risks. We see them in Miró’s later work, where an attention to detail loses out to the inspired stroke: the artist’s divine fingers alone enough to make art. Not craft, not discipline, not care, not patience, no; nothing but a flash of insight and an act of instinct. For sure, there are moments he comes close to the Chinese calligraphers…but such moments are rare. Too much of this work looks slapdash; its only value those of an auctioneer’s: made by the hand of Miró: a million pounds please! It is the mystique of the Artist, a Midas who turns all things into aesthetic treasure. 

The author enthuses on Miró’s experiments, his prolific output. I suspect the results of age; that here is a man who no longer has the energy to apply himself to Blake’s minute particulars. A talent has gone slack. This artist grown garrulous…talk, not atmosphere, not a ghost’s whisper, not the feel of form, is what’s creating these objects. 

A curator walks across to where I am standing lecturing a friend. She asks me to leave the room; and follows me until I stroll out through the museum’s doors. Not even a salute to the Constellations is enough to win a forgiving smile.

This lack of an historical sense, with its misreading of the creative mind - both inspiration and craft; eureka! and the homely details, themselves divine - has led Miró astray. Talent sacrificed to a false belief; the quality of the workmanship given up to the idea of the Artist (we watch him paint that capital A). We can blame Surrealism, DADA, Abstraction, the Expressionists; indeed, let’s point the finger at the whole of the 20th-century avant-garde, who all shared a common vision: a distrust of art. Virtuoso? Nah. An artisan’s artistry? Gotta be joking. Spend time on the little things? Reactionary!2 The results don’t matter only the performance counts. Feeling over talent; what we express not how it is done; the individual before any artifice. We want it authentic man!…none of your fancy brushwork. The egalitarianism of our political age a virus caught even by geniuses. Poor Miró. He mistook a hospital for infectious diseases for a studio.

And yet and yet…those immortal works. Then he’s so wise about the artist and how they create art.

Things come slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for example - I didn’t discover it all at once. It formed itself almost in spite of me. Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. I must graft. I must water, as with lettuces. Ripening goes on in my mind. So I’m always working on a great many things at the same time.3

Words to carve into a bed’s headboard. Let’s dream on them!

________

Notes

1. Roland Penrose, Miró.

2. Contrast with a radical of the 19th-century: Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time. How much of modern art was a reaction against the preceding generation?

3. Penrose himself no slouch when writing about art. His last chapter on Miró’s symbols is a master’s performance.