Word: mir
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Birth of a World. If there is one word for the qualities of Miró's art, it is liberty, the freedom to invent, to associate image and shape at will, to sit easily in one's fantasies...
...flatness of Miró's pictures begins in the formalized Romanesque murals he saw as a child in the museums and churches round Barcelona. His drawing, too, is in Catalan. It stems from art nouveau, the civic style of turn-of-the-century Barcelona, whose façades and courtyards Architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) and his disciples encrusted with an exuberant riot of decorative line. In Gaudi's hands, art nouveau took on a tumid, visceral energy that no other European architect could manage...
...this enveloping character of metamorphic fantasy that Miró responded. A painting like Landscape (The Hare) is its reduction: the horizon line drawn clean as a wire, yet with an irrational undular flourish; the absurd and soulful hare, like a creature from a comic strip. Its gaze is fixed on what appears to be a rifle ball, ricocheting in a spiral from the gun of a disembodied hunter. The color, too, is unique - the broad planes of earth and sky like a flag, interspersed by echoing flecks of red, or ange and yellow on the body of the hare...
...matter how abstract in appearance Miró's paintings become, they are rarely so in origin. What he would like to do is turn the process around: instead of nature generating art, "the picture should be fecund. It must bring a world to birth." In Miró's view, it can do so if it is animistic enough...
...when Miró produced his ravishing color-field paintings of the 1960s, like Blue II, the space was not neutral: it was the sky, swelling with blue, a historical and literary blue that has woven through modern French culture ever since Stephane Mallarme's paean to I'azur. "In my pictures there are tiny forms in vast empty spaces. Empty space, empty horizons, empty plains, everything that is stripped has always impressed...