Joan Miró Poetry of Fantastic Imagination and Life
Connecting every day objects with fine art by Joan Miró
Joan Miró body of work
Joan Miró’s body of work “…helps us to see the world in different ways and allows us to negotiate the complexity of the world in which we live,” explained Dr Marko Daniel, director of the Joan Miró Foundation.
“What we celebrate here is a particular look at Miró through the dual lenses of poetry and humble, ordinary objects, and the many different ways in which Miró took those two perspectives and created new art objects and new art, always with an eye on helping the visitor to unleash their own creativity.”
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The 94 artworks on display, The Poetry of Everyday Life exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, are on loan from the Joan Miró Foundation, a museum based in Barcelona founded by Miró, now encompassing 18,000 objects.
Foundation Joan Miró
The Foundation’s mission is to research, promote and help the enjoyment and understanding of the work of Miró.
The Foundation’s mission is to research, promote and help the enjoyment and understanding of the work of Miró.
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Dr Daniel says, “We are focusing on connecting fine art with the everyday life of our visitors so that they would feel inspired, they would enjoy art more, and they would ignite their curiosity in art, even though they might not come from an art background.”
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Collection of Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Miró’s love for humble, everyday objects and their intrinsic poetic qualities is apparent in his work. Those objects provide him with a tangible connection to the lives of ordinary people and a medium to share his poetry.
Story of painting and poetry
The concept of poetry was fundamental to him, as poetry represented the most concise way in which he could express complex and multiple meanings simultaneously, with no difference between painting and poetry.
They are parts of the same story.
Joan Miró loyal to Catalonia
Miró lived ninety years, passing away in 1983. He resided in and was fiercely loyal to Catalonia, an autonomous community in Spain.
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He witnessed the horrors of World War I and like fellow Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, was influenced by the writings of psychologist Sigmund Freud and philosopher Karl Marx, which drew him to the literary, intellectual and artistic movement called Surrealism, an art form committed to the belief in the importance of dreams, free from the constraints of reason.
Child-like creativity
It is not difficult to understand Miró’s artwork; imagine a child equipped with the intelligence of an adult trying to portray nature, writes Walter Erben for Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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Dr Daniel elaborates on how Miró developed as an artist. Miró started out painting very detailed, naturalistic scenes, perhaps one of the most famous early paintings being The Farm, in which he depicts – in minute detail – the architecture of a rural building in the Catalan countryside.
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Details include the fields before it, the stables and animals ranging from a snail to a horse. He began to simplify, condense and distil his visual language from that origin.
Over his long life as an artist, he created his own image writing (iconography) for women, birds and celestial bodies.
Iconographic images
His iconographic images are found and replicated in many of his works.
A red circle often represents the sun and a blue circle the moon. There are many paintings in which any shape, just by adding three or four lines, becomes a head. Three or four lines represent hair, and hair represents a head.
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Miró had this way of taking elements, making them very simple and reducing them to a form or shape. But it was also essential for Miró, who defined himself as a universal Catalan, that the elements included be rooted in his own experience and place.
So, he valued the notion of place, both small elements like insects, more general concepts like a figure of a woman or a man and then the highly grand and universal, such as the moon, sun and stars.
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With this iconography, Miró balanced ordinary earthly things with dreams, where the earth elements represent reality, and sky elements represent dreams.
Birds connect reality and dreams because they both touch the ground and fly. These elements mean things, never just one thing.
Multiple meanings
They have multiple meanings and multiple levels of meaning.
As you look at a Miró artwork, you’re invited to imaginatively interact with that work and create meaning by reading the elements and the relationship between those and your experiences.
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The artworks relate to the exhibition’s concept, as expressed in the title, The Poetry of Everyday Life.
They are works that deal with ordinary found objects, objects you would find in a typical house, kitchen or on a farm.
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Miró would take an object or collection of these and paint on them, assemble them to make sculptures, cast that assemblage into bronze, or paint those bronzed sculptures.
In these ways, he ennobles ordinary objects and transforms them into high art.
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For example, consider Woman in front of the Moon. The relationship between the finished artwork and a very ordinary object is apparent.
A four-sided hat box – staples and all – has been flattened to form the ‘canvas’ for the painting.
Levels of interpretation
Iconography is evident; the blue circle is the moon. There is a figure, a woman’s torso, arms, neck and face. And there are multiple levels of meaning and interpretation.
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Seeing a bird doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination. The unresolved ambiguity provides different levels of meaning, characteristic of Miró.
Miró uses a cardboard box for more than just the inspiration of The Wind Clock.
This time he takes a hatbox, sticks a wooden spoon diagonally into it, and it becomes what he calls a wind clock.
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A surreal object made from the humblest of materials that would be thrown away under normal circumstances. He converts it through casting into the noble material of high art – a bronze sculpture.
In their archives, The Foundation found a collage of very ordinary objects cut out from newspapers and catalogues, which Miró arranged seemingly randomly. In it are kitchen utensils: plates, a knife, glasses; and tools: a saw, a pair of pliers and a wheelchair.
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This became the draft for a painting, one of the early works in this show in which we see some fundamental surrealist transformation of objects taken from the real world that transform, for example, a butcher’s knife into a face and figure.
The addition of four hairs turns it into an unmistakable figure. The stack of plates floating at the top left in the collage becomes a series of circles.
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Other elements of ordinary objects collaged onto a sheet of paper become other figures with faces that relate to each other and interact. The work is called Painting,1933.
collection of Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Dr Daniel went on to say, “The neutrality of the title is really both a statement of facts about the significance of the act of painting as an artistic, creative act and an open signal for us to read this painting in ways that are suggested to us by the forms, but where we ourselves have to complete the meaning.”
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“I make no distinction between painting and poetry.” Dr Daniel relates to Miró’s reading and understanding of Chinese art as part of his explanation of Poem (III), 1968.
Collection of Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
He goes on to expound on this multi-layered, multi-technique artwork that includes stencilled letters, gestural paintings of great force, delicate lines, and painted elements—all in dialogue with each other.
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It is one of the most cogent expressions of the relationship between painting and poetry, painting as visual poetry.
The great red circle at the bottom right corner is the first to draw the eye. It’s a large circle made of small circles, a red sun. And then, just next to it, the letters ‘M’ and ‘A’ are not made by the artist’s hand but by applying and holding a stencil against the canvas and then applying a much thinner black paint.
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Of course, when we see letters, we want to attach meaning, and we ask what does this mean? Miró very actively and consciously frustrates this.
If he doesn’t answer, there is no specific meaning. If we try to continue reading, the meaning disappears as the units of linguistic meaning turn into amorphous blobs of black.
The signature motifs are there: four intersecting lines, a star and a blue crescent moon. But next to it, we have a completely different way of mark-making.
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The blue moon has a thin black outline, which he traced first to define the moon’s shape. There is a difference in how he conceives the use of black; black, in that sense, defines meaning, and blue relates to our emotional engagement with the forms and shapes on this canvas.
So, this multi-layered, multi-technique artwork sets out many ways of being an artist.
Poem (III), 1968 is painting-poetry that speaks plainly about being an artist, making art, about the different ways of seeing, transforming, and processing the world and turning it into new objects.
Our way of looking at this work allows us to see the world in new ways through the eyes of Miró.
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There is something particular to how Joan Miró not only worked as a visual poet but also in the way he employed everyday objects so important to him, which allowed him to engage with popular culture, with artisans and with craftspeople to create art that goes beyond a mere canvas hanging on the wall to art that speaks to all of us.
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“That the art exists for itself. It speaks for itself, but it also allows us to see the world in new ways and in ways that allow us to negotiate the complexity of our contemporary world.”
Text & photos by Martin Wray
