Review: “Miró and the United States” at The Phillips Collection

There is a marked difference between a genuinely naïve artist and one that is faux naïve. The genuine naïve is where you start: finding your way, exploring, experimenting, discovering your voice. The faux naïve is crafty, seeking approval under the guise of arrogance and superiority. Joan Miró is the genuine article and remained so his entire life. Like a child, he played, and the canvas and paints were his tools. Louise Bourgeois, who knew him, wrote of his character that he “was what he was and did not pretend or want to be anybody else. He believed in himself, and that is a great compliment. He really accepted himself. In the true naive there is no discrepancy between the person and the work. Miró was his work.”

This is also an apt description of Miró’s paintings, which exude a childlike wonder. Seeing 50 at the Phillips Collection in “Miró and the United States,” you can’t help but be filled with that same wonder. I heard laughter in the galleries and excited discussion—a sure sign of liveliness. His are not the hushed works of Rothko or the shimmering expanses of a Frankenthaler, also on view in the show. Miró’s paintings explode with joy and exuberance, and the joy is infectious. They simply make you happy.

But Miró is not doodling; he’s following the flow of his play with shapes, drips, splatters, sweeps, thin lines and swirls, dancing with color. He was in conversation with marks and alive to what they could represent. This is movement in two dimensions, and you follow, often giddy with Miró’s invention. Take his Constellations series. Created between 1940 and 1941, the 22 pochoirs (hand-colored stencil) on paper of his oil and gouache paintings adorn one gallery in a straight line, uniform in size and frame. You travel down the line, watching flying shapes form fish, women, birds, acrobats, stars, ladders, snails. The paintings offered Miró a respite from the horrors of war, which had forced him to flee France after the German invasion in World War II. He prized them so dearly that he carried the first 10 in his satchel as he fled. They, and those that would follow, were completed on his family farm in Montroig, Spain. The series was first shown in New York at Pierre Matisse Gallery, his dealer, and all sold. Matisse wrote to Miró, “Opinion is unanimous, the public finds your exhibition impressive.” The exuberance of the work is not only in the paintings themselves but also in their titles: Woman with Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars, The Nightingale’s Song at Midnight and Morning Rain, Women at the Edge of a Lake Made Iridescent by the Passage of a Swan, The Pink Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and Bird. On and on the work rolls by as an evocation of joy, and the artist’s joy begets yours.

The Phillips Collection exhibition is accompanied by works of many of Miró’s contemporaries who were in New York during his visits to the States, and his influence on their work is obvious. According to curator Elsa Smithgall, she and her team “searched for the finest examples by artists that had a strong affinity with Miró’s creative methods, vision, and/or aspects of his formal language. Our desire was to have a vibrant mix and to include not only well-known artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Louise Bourgeois with established links to Miró, but also Lee Krasner, Peter Miller, Sonya Sekula, and Alice Trumbull Mason, among others, for whom the connection to Miró has been less explored. An important aspect of the exhibition was bringing greater visibility to the many women artists who engaged deeply with Miró’s work and ideas, but whose contributions have not always been foregrounded in narratives of postwar modernism.”

There’s an expansive, meandering, exploratory feel to the show, much like Miró’s work. You enter up a sweeping staircase into a large first room painted in New York State of Mind Blue, and on through many smaller galleries that invite wandering. “The exhibition brings together many voices meant to embody the spirit of experimentation,” Smithgall added. “As visitors mount the spiral stairwell, they are surprised by some sculptural works by Miró before encountering at the top of the stairs, two mobiles, a wire portrait of Miró, and through the archway a small mobile-stabile—all by Alexander Calder. The exhibition unfolds chronologically with Miró’s art as a leitmotif in every room.”

Experiencing an artist’s work chronologically is always an added pleasure, as you can follow their evolution. A darling and outrageous self-portrait by Miró was reworked from 1937 to 1960. The final result captures the very essence of the man. The oil and pencil on canvas has a dense, dark graffitied background with his signature shapes, delicately shaded in fine detail. Over the top sits a round, thick black circle for the head with three fat sprouting black hairs, two large black circles for eyes and two lines connecting two curves for the body, with small circles of bright pink, blue, yellow and red. It is a child’s rendering of a body—a genuine naïve.

This is an expansive, important exhibition that offers an exciting display of Miró’s significance and his influence on American artists. As Barnett Newman said after seeing an exhibition of Miró’s gouaches in 1945, “Miró is a pioneer in a new field that will change the face of art for many years to come.” His work continues to thrill.

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