Joan Mir

By ROBERT HUGHES

"I work like a gardener," said Joan Miro some years ago in one of his infrequent interviews. He was alluding to his habit of steady work, moving from ceramics to painting, from sculpture to lithography, as one might turn from picking the lettuces to watering the celery. Today, in his 82nd year, he continues to do so, ensconced in the enormous white studio his friend and fellow Catalan, the architect Jose Luis Sert, built for him on the island of Mallorca in 1956. Mird lives near by, among his peas, vines and carobs, in a house cluttered by found objects and rustic earthenware. He has been married to the same wife, Pilar Juncosa, since 1929; and in his manner of life and patterns of work (up at 6:30 a.m. to paint, never a day without a line) he is the epitome of industrious respectability.

"The more I work, the more I want to work," he says, recalling Picasso--but without the fear of death. Miro has always been a reclusive figure. The stubby squared-off head above the plain business suit could belong to any Barcelona merchant. What has issued from that head is a different matter: despite many trivial or self-parodying works, Miro is the last of the great stylists of early modern art, the most poetic and formally gifted of all the surrealists. His imagination, filled with juicy ironies and wry eroticism, has enriched generations of younger artists, including Pollock and Calder.

Column and Hawser. The present retrospective in Paris, of Miro's work, organized by the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs at the Grand Palais (through Oct. 13), is for all practical purposes definitive. It contains some 350 works, including last year's sculptures and beginning with early cubist-influenced paintings. One striking example is the superb Nude with a Mirror--solid as a column with those interlocking planes of pink flesh, the Khmer eyes, the thick hawser of plaited hair, and perched on a hassock whose needlepoint butterfly sums up Miro's pleasure in decorative enumeration.

With Gris and Picasso, Miro is one of the three great modern artists Spain has produced. Both Picasso and Gris immersed themselves in the cosmopolitan culture of Paris. They became European rather than "Spanish" artists. But, as Miro pointed out in a letter to a friend, he remained "an international Catalan." Miro without Catalonia would no longer be Miro.

Once the eye gets used to the quirks and secrecies of his inimitable shorthand, it discovers how deeply regional an artist he was. His leanest years were in Paris in the early '20s when, he claimed later, he was obliged to live on dried figs and use the hallucinations caused by hunger to loosen up his imagery. Even then Miro managed to raise the money to journey back to his family village of Montroig, a community of farmers and peasant craftsmen, where he spent six months of every year.

There is a very specific, dense and playful sense of nature that only a rural childhood can give. The bawdy animism of Miro's early paintings, done with a sharp, quizzical line that chirrups like a grasshopper in the Catalan dust, is a matter of detail and observation: getting the nose in and keeping it there. When he was working on one of his first great paintings, The Farm, a compendium of animal, vegetable and human life at Montroig, Miro even brought back some dried grasses from Catalonia to Paris to serve as a model. Ernest Hemingway, who bought the painting, later wrote, "It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there."

The flatness of Miro'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 fac,ades 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.

It was to this enveloping character of metamorphic fantasy that Miro 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, in the spiral and up on the horizon. Only Matisse could use color with the terse ness, the steady decorative assurance that Miro had achieved by his 35th birthday.

Birth of a World. If there is one word for the qualities of Miro's art, it is liberty, the freedom to invent, to associate image and shape at will, to sit easily in one's fantasies.

No matter how abstract in appearance Miro'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 Miro's view, it can do so if it is animistic enough.

So when Miro 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 me."

This contrast between precise objects, minuscule in size, and the limit less field across which they pullulate is central to Miro, and it corresponds to the fundamental experience of his vision. Even when Miro is at his most abstract, therefore, one is constantly reminded that his name, in Spanish, means "He saw."

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