![]() Palma is the native island of his wife, to whom he is deeply devoted. There was a time in the ’twenties when Miró was so poor that he gave André Masson a lunch of radishes and butter and bread it was then that he wrote a lovely piece called I Dream of a Big Studio. He lives in a magnificent studio-house in Palma, designed for him by José Luis Sert, now of Harvard, who designed the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair in 1937 that was decorated by Miró and by Picasso’s Guernica. With the outbreak of the war in 1939, Miró as a neutral returned to the relative artistic isolation of his native Catalonia, a part of Spain that is energetic, hard-headed, republican and straight, involved in neither mysticism nor blood-ritual. But he worked in France during the ’twenties and ’thirties, mainly in the Surrealist milieu, to which he is greatly indebted, and of which he is, among other things, a leading exponent. He has the advantage of liking his own origins. He is a brave man, of dignity and modesty, passion and grace. One might say that originality is what originates just in one’s own being. He believes that one’s salvation is one’s own responsibility, but with his own sense of right. His advice to young artists has been: “Work hard-and then say merde!” It never occurs to him to terrorize the personnel of the art-world, anxiety-ridden and insecure, as many of our contemporaries, angry and hurt, do. He is not in competition with past masters or contemporary reputations, does nothing to give his work an immortal air. ![]() To me the Renaissance does not have the same interest.” He is his own man, liking what he likes, indifferent to the rest. No major artist’s atavism flies across so many thousands of years (yet no artist is more modern): “My favorite schools of painting are as far back as possible-the primitives. A sensitive balance between nature and man’s works, almost lost in contemporary art, saturates Miró’s art, so that his work, so original that hardly anyone has any conception of how original, immediately strikes us to the depths. I like everything about Miró-his clear-eyed face, his modesty, his ironically-edged reticence as a person, his constant hard work, his Mediterranean sensibility, and other qualities that manifest themselves in a continually growing body of work that, for me, is the most moving and beautiful now being made in Europe. An American abstractionist discusses Miró’s role in modern art and its evaluation, as shown in the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective ![]()
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