In the history of this century’s art, Joan Miro is without parallel for the energy, sense of fun, the gift of metamorphosis, the implicit violence and the darting, imperious, unballasted imagination which he has been putting to multifarious uses for well over fifty years. From a formal point of view, he is the major Surrealist painter, although his influence on later Abstraction entirely transcends the Surrealist program, to which he actively adhered only from 1924-1929.
His work, while direct and child like in quality, is nevertheless highly sophisticated, and a note of perversity as well as a haunting primitivist aura often belies the optimistic Matissean color and gaily floating forms. Miro has insisted that his work is never abstract, that a form is that of an illustrator; Rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting, and as I paint, the picture begins to assert itself or suggest itself under my brush.
He is a one- man repository of so many things which in others might seem contradictory, high art and the vis comica, a virile color sense and a liking for the fine drawn exploratory line, pioneers work with the color field and a sharp eye for biomorphic form, subversion and the taste for a remote, unchanging way of life. He came to know Picabia in 1917, Picasso in 1919, and Max Ernst, Anotonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Paul Elauard and Alexander Calder in the 1920’s, a time when he experimented with automatism.
Miro has a virtue which both Matisse and Braque exemplified throughout their long careers, he knows just where to direct his energies. He knows just when to drop a certain medium, a certain kind o imagery, a certain predictable format. He knows when to go slow and when to go fast. He knows when to let the international art world into the work and when to keep it out.
Spontaneity and freshness in expression are characteristics one immediately associates with Miro’s work: the ability to strip his art of apparent intellectual sophistication in direct proportion to the degree in which he develops it in technical terms. Once asked whom he liked best among contemporary artists, Matisse replied, Miro yes, Miro because he may well represent anything on canvas but if, on a certain point, he has placed a red spot, you can be sure it is there and no where else that it had to be.
My personages have undergone the same process of simplification as the colours. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and more alive than if they had been represented in all their details. Had they been represented in all their details, they would lack that imaginary life which amplifies everything.
And that is the creative process of Joan Miro, of that art which has been considered one of the most original and revealing of this Century. Its purity, its expressive strength and its forcefulness also help to place it on a par with the greatest creations of all time, side by side with the works of the great masters. And thus its significance also lays bare the yearnings and preoccupations of contemporary thought and sensitivity.