Young at art: Miro at 100.

Over the past three months more than 150,000 people have visited MoMA's "Miro," a major exhibition on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth. Nine of them have contributed the following appreciations.

Louise Bourgeois Native Talent

I first encountered Joan Miro in Paris in the early '30s. He did not know me, as I was only a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and he was already famous, a protege of Picasso, exhibiting at the Galerie Pierre. This space was located at the corner of the rue des Beaux Arts and the rue de Seine, only a few steps away from the Ecole. I was living at 31 rue de Seine, where Andre Breton held court at his Gradiva gallery, and where Isadora and Raymond Duncan lived and had a gallery also.

While attending the Ecole, I walked by the Galerie Pierre every day on my way to lunch. I came to know Miro's works quite well. They were a wonderful esthetic shock for me--a liberation, because they were so different from what was taught at the Ecole. After going to the Beaux Arts in the mornings I was at the Grand Chaumiere, in Montparnasse, in the afternoons, where I was in charge of hiring the models. Miro would come there to sketch.

In the '20s, Miro had been part of a Spanish enclave that gathered in a modern cast-cement building on the rue Blomet, behind the Gare Montparnasse. All the artists in the Spanish community followed Pablo Picasso wherever he went; Picasso helped Miro tremendously, but did not influence him. Later, when Miro was established, Picasso was no longer a god to him. Miro loved to be told that he was greater than his master.

I would come to know Miro personally in New York, years later, when we saw each other again at Hayter's engraving workshop in 1947. Miro was in America to work on a commission. We would dine together at Pierre Matisse's, on East 96th Street, along with Matta, Le Corbusier, the filmmaker Thomas Bouchard, Rufino Tamayo, the composer Edgard Varese and his wife Louise (the translator), and Jose Luis Sert. Miro would hardly say a word, and when he spoke it was in broken French.

There is a type of artist who wants to appear naive--Alfonso Ossorio, for example, or Jean Dubuffet, or even Philip Guston. Whereas the genuine naive, though truly talented, is helpless, the faux naive is a crafty one. Anything will do to serve his ambition to seem naive. It is rare but not painful to have talent; you either have it or you don't. It is, however, laborious and painful to want to seem to have talent. The risk is great: the faux naive may fail to convince, may be perceived as coy. Dubuffet is not Adolf Wolfli--one is a put-on and one is genuine.

Miro was a true naive, trusting, unable to take two steps without his supporting family. When I knew him he always replied to every question, "I'll have to ask Pilar," his wife. His large brown eyes were innocent and serene. He was a truly naive person in the best sense of the word: someone who could not grow up. 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. Miro was his work.

In fact he was a prolific workaholic. However, he was also sensitive and vain. He was surrounded by people who praised him, and he liked that. When they told him what he was doing was marvelous, he went on doing it, like a good student. Miro wanted to be encouraged, and when he was encouraged he was like a child. His move to Paris was not altogether positive; in his early Catalan landscapes and portraits, and his very early abstract work, there was a deep emotion that seems to be lacking in his later years. We know that he was strong enough to shake off the hold of Breton--that he objected to anyone dictating his style.

But he was susceptible to flattery, and may have been sensitive in this way to the influence of the critics, poets, and dealers.

The person who is eager to please becomes an overachiever. He is not an ambitious person, for he has no relationship to a larger context, to the world of ideas. He has nothing to do with the Olympus complex; he has no notion of "pie in the sky"; the people he wants to please are those he knows and loves. His intensity is ferocious but localized, and therefore safe. Miro was successful. He found a formula and went on doing it for fifty years. After all, he had to sell. It was the dealers who turned him into a sculptor, which he was not--Miro's sculptures are not thought through. In going from two to three dimensions, a cutout taken from a painting is not enough. There is more to sculpture than a blob of clay with a fork in it. Miro was too successful for his own good. In making sculpture he went out of his league.

In her catalogue essay for the MoMA show, Carolyn Lanchner, the show's curator, belabors the idea that Miro was cold-blooded and calculating, as his abstract pictures show. Nobody disagrees. But when Miro was doing the portraits, landscapes, and still fifes in his early realistic manner, he was deeply involved and original. Only when he turned to abstraction did his paintings become predictable and repetitive. His later use of French vocabulary was acquired; it's touching but not convincing. I like the work before it becomes abstract and French-speaking. It's like Robert Motherwell using "Je t'aime" when he barely spoke French.

The taste for the naive, art brut, and the art of the insane was in part created by the interest of certain writers of the '20s and '30s in primitive art and aboriginal art. The hard-up literary intelligentsia are intrigued by success, and have a fascination with the market; but then and now, they respond condescendingly to art. Obviously, the literary endorse only what they can perceive. They want to be part of the art scene and influence the market by becoming arbiters of taste; the trouble is they have no eyes. They like illustrative art and faux naive art.

Instead of counting on the literary world, the art community today should join hands with the scientific community. In viewing the Miro show at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, one should not lose sight of two earlier exhibitions, the Picasso and Henri Matisse retrospectives. The three shows complete one another; they are perfectly good historical shows. But they are stuck in the past, and are limited in appeal to us today. The museums should see that the field they have not explored is the inward vista, by which I mean an interest in and a contribution to the behavioral sciences. Their ambition should be to equip us better to understand why we do what we do.

Rosalind E. Krauss Michel, Bataille, et Moi, and I

In 1927 Miro made a picture of himself strolling at night in Paris, accompanied by Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille. Or, if "making a picture" is something of a misstatement of how they appear in this painting, he inscribed the following words on a loose, umber wash: "Musique," in the upper left; "Seine" in the middle; and then, along the lower right--presumably at the spot where the riverbank would be--the three walkers: "Michel, Bataille, et moi." Yet if Miro thus indelibly inscribed the name of Bataille into his art, no writer on that art--up until the present exhibition at MoMA--has ever done likewise. This includes myself, though I was given ample opportunity to do so when, in 1972, I wrote on this and similar pictures for an exhibition of Miro's work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum called "Magnetic Fields." In the intervening years, of course, I have written extensively on the relation between Bataille and other members of the Surrealist group, particularly Alberto Giacometti, and beyond that on the revisionary impact Bataille's thinking (particularly with reference to his concept of the informe) might have on our view of various areas of Modernist practice. But never did I imagine Miro might be implicated in such a revision.

Carolyn Lanchner, the curator of the present exhibition, points out that in 1930 Miro filled a large notebook with images of a big toe, this following Bataille's 1929 article "Le Gros Orteil," published in Documents. Having invoked this consonance in subject matter, however, Lanchner goes on to say that the two men's interests in the big toe "were--to borrow a children's locution--'the same but different.'" This difference she sees turning, on the one hand, on Bataille's conception of the toe as the part of the human body that resists the idealizing, "humanizing" values that are read into the rest of the body's upright posture, and thus--although she doesn't use the term--of the toe's "base materialism"; and on the other hand, on Miro's concern with the toe as "emblematic of our common humanity, male or female--the support that connects the terrestrial and the celestial. One widely quoted remark," she adds, "makes his view quite clear: 'You must always plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump up in the air.'" It is this idea of Miro's relation to the ethereal, of his connection to the azure of the empyrean (given his repetitively blue backgrounds), of his notion of a dream space as necessarily immaterial, that has blocked any serious reading of Miro's work in the light of Bataille's.

Yet Miro probably drew more "dirty pictures" than almost any painter one can think of, at least up until the very recent past. Vulvas litter his canvases of the '20s, triumphant penises urinate fulsomely, the imagery of copulation is endless, smokers stroll with enormous erections that visually rhyme with their tiny pipes, semen turns to pollen, breast milk fills the sky, and there is an endless genital metaphoric play as hairy labia become mouths that in turn become spiders that in turn become radiant suns that in turn become eyes that in turn become ova.

It is, of course, this very process of metaphor--or what Bataille would call "transposition"--that seems to wall these pictures off from Bataille's base materialism. For if Bataille spoke of the fetishist's loving the shoe more than any art lover could love a painting, if he asked us to consider staring wide-eyed before the erotic sight of the big toe, this was because he thought of this experience as "without transposition." His concept of the fetish was more tribal than Freudian; it contained a picture of being compelled to worship a stone or an effigy not as a substitute, but as the real thing.

And yet, as Roland Barthes has shown, Bataille's own pornographic novel, The Story of the Eye, is itself an extraordinary cycle of metaphor in which "the story" is built up of chains of substitutions either along the shape of the object (eye--testicles--egg--sun) or along its contents (tears--sperm--urine--yolk--rain). And these chains not only produce the action of the novel, they generate its imagery as well, as in the phrase "the urinary liquification of the sky."

In order to argue that Miro's metaphoric chains should be thought of in the same universe as Bataille's, one would have to reconceive the meaning of those sumptuous washes that constitute the grounds of his paintings of 1924-27. One would have to stop thinking of them as avatars of something like Color Field painting--immaterial vehicles for the occasional ideogram--and start thinking of them in terms suggested by Leiris in 1929 when he spoke of these works as "not so much painted as dirtied," and saw the grounds as ruined walls awaiting the attack of the graffitist. And indeed, this reorientation would be a matter of retrieving Miro's own conception of their function. When Bataille himself wrote a short note on Miro in 'Documents in 1930, he quoted the statement Miro made fairly widely in the late '20s to the effect that he wanted "to annihilate painting." And this annihilation seemed in Miro's own view to be tied precisely to the withdrawal of "paint" from his works, such that he wrote to Leiris in 1924, "This is hardly painting, but I don't give a damn." Miro's "magnetic fields" retain all the centrality to his work that I saw them having in 1972, and indeed MoMA's exhibition is the first presentation of the full sweep of Miro's art to give this group of pictures pride of place. The question still remains, however, of how to look at this crucial series. And I am now wondering whether their implications are less a matter of Andre Breton's conception of the poetic image than of Bataille's reconstitution of metaphor. Rosalind Krauss is a professor of art history at Columbia University, New York. Her most recent book, The Optical Unconscious, was published this spring by MIT Press.

Robert Rosenblum A Personal Chronology

1941 As a precocious kid in New York, I was always prowling around the museums, whose then enlightened policy of free admission was a boon to democratic principles of education. One day I stumbled across a double feature on West 53rd Street that, for complete, mind-boggling transport, turned out to rival Dracula and Frankenstein, a more familiar double bill of the period. The sign on the facade advertised MIRO/DALI, an exotic duo of four-letter names ending in vowels; and if I remember correctly; the latter name was in Victorian lettering, to indicate, I guess, a kind of old-fashioned spookiness in contrast to the modern lettering for Miro.

I entered, and was swept away by the two bizarre Wonderlands inside. Dali, of course, was a snap; what kid or grown-up wouldn't gasp before his demonic wizardry? But Miro was something else, and even then I recognized that those wiggling blobs, with their flat kindergarten colors and goony faces, represented something closer to Modern art than Dali's illusionistic horror films. I instantly fell in love with Miro's tropical-bird palette, creepy humanoids, and hard-edged but pulsating shapes, which suggested the sexy throb of biology. I bought a color reproduction of MoMA's Composition, 1933, tacked it on my bedroom wall, and remained riveted by the upright red form--could it possibly be a penis?--startlingly silhouetted against the green-brown murk of a dream. Miro made such a dent on this teenager that decades later, leafing through my high school notebooks, I discovered that during classes I had been making weird marginal doodles of Miro-spawned creatures; like an amoeba run amok, my own meandering line was sprouting strange heads, limbs, and sex organs. 1950 As an art-history student on a Fulbright to Paris, I decided to spend the Christmas holidays in Barcelona. I was agape at Antoni Gaudi's troglodytic architecture, which in my mind began to form a strange regional cluster with the phantasmagoric Spanish pair who had traumatized me at MoMA in 1941; and I was excited to acquire, as an academically useful souvenir, a book on Miro by A. Cirici-Pellicer, published the year before. Miro's ancestral ghost, I began to realize, could be found up in the Park Guell; and Dali, for sure, would have been happy to live among the malleable stone waves of the Casa Mila. (Later, I learned that Dali had written an article in Minotaure on the terror and edibility of Gaudi's architecture.) Suspecting that nobody at home had ever heard of Gaudi, I wrote an uninformed and gushy essay about him (eventually submitted to, but rejected by, The Magazine of Art), my first effort to touch what proved to be Catalan soil.

1959-60 Preparing for the publication of my first book, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, I learned to put Miro into sharper focus, especially in nationalist terms. Writing about The Tilled Field, 1923-24, I was drawn to the painting's three flags, and wondered about the one that wasn't French or Spanish, the one with four red and five yellow alternating stripes. Could it be Catalan? I naively called the Spanish embassy and asked if my guess was right, upon which I was brusquely told that Catalonia was part of Spain and had no flag of its own. Soon after, though, a South American I met told me that yes, it was the Catalan flag, a legendary emblem created by four fingers dipped in the blood of a medieval Catalan hero and then smeared on a golden shield. This may have been what alerted me to the frequent red-yellow chord in Miro's art (as in Picasso's), a symbol of Spain and/or Catalonia which even turns up in the sperm cell that, in Maternity, 1924, wriggles across the stick-figure mother toward an egglike breast, or in the lone, ballooning sperm that, in The Birth of the World, 1925, fertilizes the cosmic chaos. The universe Miro created, I began to recognize, would often bear the colors of Iberia--as does the airline of the same name (which now sports a Miro logo). And I noticed, too, how ignorant about things Spanish and Catalan even MoMA had been back in 1941, when for its catalogues the final accent was insistently omitted from both Miro's and Dali's names, leaving them sagging as Miro and Dali. 1967 Invited to the Kinsey Institute for a symposium on erotic art, I prepared a paper on Picasso's work of the Surrealist years, and soon discovered that Miro played an essential role in the story. Miro's ubiquitous genitalia, desperate copulations, and burgeoning, metamorphic maternities all had to be seen as part of an ongoing dialogue with his more famous compatriot. The sexual charge I had intuited as a teenager in 1941 unexpectedly resurfaced, this time in analytic, professorial discourse.

1972 Rosalind Krauss and Margit Rowell's "Magnetic Fields" show at the Guggenheim proved once more how new art changes old art, or how, in this case, the Color Field painting of the late '50s and '60s could give birth to an unfamiliar Miro. Restricted to the '20s and '60s, the selection of Miros made me see the early decade as producing many small-size Robert Motherwells, Helen Frankenthalers, and Jules Olitskis avant la lettre and the later decade as a time when the artist, in part prompted by his visit to New York for his 1959 retrospective at MoMA, expanded his intensely Mediterranean skies and seas of color to dimensions that could rival those of his juniors' work in America. 1980 Asked to give a lecture to accompany Sidra Stich's innovative exhibition "Miro: The Development of a Sign Language," at Washington University, I pulled together, in a broad sweep, "Miro, Picasso, and the Spanish Grotesque." This freewheeling theme gave me a chance to wallow in a vast sea of Iberian ancestors, from paleolithic paintings at La Pileta and Altamira to Catalan Romanesque frescoes, from Philip II's passion for Bosch to the subhuman inventions of Goya, and then, inevitably, on to the Spanish Civil War. After Franco's death in 1975, Spain seemed reborn, and Miro looked more Spanish or, rather, more Catalan than ever.

1988 Miro's Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926, was, of course, essential for my little book on the dog in Modern art. On investigating the preparatory drawings I realized that Miro had in mind not only folkloric proverbs and the nightmare world of Goya, but comic strips a la Krazy Kat. A precocious Pop artist? 1990 On arriving in Barcelona from New York one morning, I stepped sleepily into the Hotel Majestic, on what used to be called the Paseo de Gracia but is now Catalanized as the Passeig de Gracia, and was jolted awake by a landscape painting in the lobby by Modesto (now Catalanized as Modest) Urgell, Miro's first teacher. I remembered seeing one of Urgell's tonalist paintings, with its long, low horizon and eerie emptiness, reproduced in James Thrall Soby's catalogue for the 1959 MoMA exhibition, as well as reading there about Urgell's effect on Miro's own haunted landscapes. My curiosity about how much of Miro's work was steeped not only in Gaudi but in other turn-of-the-century Barcelona art was further whetted by the big show of Catalan Modernism then being held at the Museu d'Art Modern, as it is now called. Yet more vistas on the master. 1993 I see the giant retrospectives in Barcelona, at the Fundacio Joan Miro, and in New York, at MoMA, the fourth Miro show I have seen within its walls; and Artforum asks me to write this piece. Now almost any glance at Miro produces, in response, a flood of art history--the Beatus manuscripts that inspired him, as they did Picasso; Josep Maria Jujol's Pere Manyach showroom of 1911 in Barcelona, which John Richardson has astutely pinpointed as a local preview of the master's mature style; the nocturnal monsters of Goya's "Caprichos" and "Disparates," whose grotesque hybrids of human anatomy with that of birds, beasts, and chairs must have sparked Miro's imagination; the handprints from prehistoric caves that would be resurrected, millennia later, by Miro, as by Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns, to invent a new kind of artist's signature; the constellation of recent Miro scholars--Carolyn Lanchner, Robert Lubar, David Lomas, Anne Umland--who have added a bounty of essential data and ideas I am breathlessly trying to catch up with. The associations go on and on. And I feel nostalgic for 1941, when I first looked at this genius and could see nothing but the total enchantment of painted fairy tales that cut deep into the eye, the flesh, and the bone.

Molly Nesbit His Lash

Seeing-as: hair.

Miro's line was thick in the early years, especially if he was painting away from Paris. Shouldn't be called simply line. Was itself a figure.

Its connection to the ground however was tangential. It sat on it, like a feather, albeit with resilience, more like a sleeping duck: the line of ink, crayon, pencil, physically different from its neighbor paint, web-footed, hovering on flow, like scum? Aragon said that it was as if he hadn't really painted, as if the canvas below had once been the painting, making Miro's mark an alien, late-coming something-else.|1~ True enough. And yet this line maintained a direction, never forgetting that it had fallen upon painting from a somewhere-else, like a hair.

Lyrical abrasion. The Spanish dance. The tangent moves off point and in so doing opens into space. The dancer pictures have no repeated, returning syncopation, make no noise, no click of the castanets. Little tacks nail, triangles hang executed, no one steps, noose floats. Why the tuft of hair? A pit? Who needs the wig? Who wants it? This one hugs as it scratches. Scratching back toward the somewhere-else from which it thinks it came? Little black hair has no legs though. Wig floats.

Up or down?

The lash keeps falling short. To call it "Spanish" seems too literal, premature. Might as well call it straight.

Physical difference is deliberately unformulated. And so this, which is more our problem than Miro's, needs no further thought, his difference purely a touch and a separation, all dance, no cry, no pain.

Hair out of place, hair sans comb, hair on the soup, though that would change in a few years when Miro came to paste illustrated combs (among other things) onto paper and to use those studies as the deep structure for painted compositions. As if to give an old master, female logic (teeth?) to the little lines, the presences, familiar dark follicle ghosts. But to name the lines as if they really were a substance, or one of Wittgenstein's substantive, would be to misunderstand their physical drift. All difference being mobile, they were mobile too. These figures will not take the form of organized knowledge. Leave them be.

Return to outer space. He tried.

His hair was always light as well as black.

Hair found breath, his exhalation.

His hair his constellation.

Seeing-as: stars.

I know, you have to wait.

Molly Nesbit teaches art history at Vassar College. She is working on a video project with Darryl Turner and Patricia Moreno, Aerobics: Dead Men Can't Dance. 1. Louis Aragon, "La peinture au defi," 1930, Les collages, Paris: Hermann, 1980, p. 73.

Matthew Weinstein Free Hand

Pleasure

I dreamed that my hand detached itself from my body. It began to travel, feeling and affecting everything. This was a good dream.

More Pleasure

I lied about the dream: I had it while I was awake. I wanted to explain an ideal of pleasure, the pleasure of unlimited extension.

Miro

His hand clasps a fine brush and travels. It climbs into the night sky and connects the stars into new signs of the zodiac. It plunges into the ocean to pull out an expanse of blue. It enters museums to reinvent Dutch interiors, still lifes, and portraits. It roams the earth to punctuate and order the landscape. It meets human beings and reorders their fleshy, desiring exteriors into flat and legible texts. It finds pleasure and humor in all it renders; all it wants is more surfaces to dance over. Childlike, it desires body, dog, cat, rooster, tree, sky, ocean, and food with the same intensity, transforming all external reality into one textual body.

Pure Pleasure

Picasso wanted to touch every female body. In his strivings we sense his fear of losing his own desire; his sensual gluttony feels like torment. Miro was as locked into the physical as Picasso was, but he avoided torment by avoiding the sensual. He accomplished this by transcribing the physical into the linguistic. The erotic puns in Miro are not expressions of his desire for a subject, but transformations of a subject into a whimsical sign system that desensualizes all it replaces.

Narrative

Miro creates a complex narrative to describe or rather circumscribe a body. This body is broken down into recombinant abstract units punctuated and connected by dashes, lines, and dots. Biomorphism is an uninteresting term here, because it only describes what certain objects look like. We do not merely see the physical in Miro, we read it. Miro's paintings register an uncanny asexual (almost asensual) bodily pleasure.

Blue

For me the Miro retrospective peaks twice. First are the "Constellations" of 1940 and 1941, and second are Blue I, II, and III from 1961. Blue is a rationalist's color. It is the color of things that are soothing: a clear sky, a still sea. It is a color for those who find pleasure in clarity. A small blue work called Painting (Blue), from 1925, is a washy monochrome save for a tiny black and white circle floating serenely in the upper left-hand corner; this circle reads as "I," as Miro's presence in the cool blue expanse.

By 1961, Miro's vocabulary had been condensed into shorthand. Blue I, II, and III are three gigantic sweeps of the most beautiful aqueous blue. In each painting a red dash glows like a living body in an infrared scanner among pebble-shaped black stepping stones and (in I and III) a thin line resembling a long strand of black hair. The "I" is now the red, glowing dash. It is hot and bothered within a rational cosmos. It sticks out like a sore thumb. Late in life, Miro gave the body back its torment.

Matthew Weinstein is an artist who lives in New York.

Carroll Dunham The Appeal of the Head Onion Peel

In the late '70s I had a job a few blocks from the Modern, and I would go there often during my lunch hour. I was drawn more and more to Miro's The Birth of the World, 1925, which was in the permanent collection. It spoke directly to problems I was encountering in my own painting, and it became my point of access to his work.

The position of The Birth of the World in the artist's growth becomes much clearer in this exhibition. I take the title at face value, and I think the genesis to which it refers is both cosmic and personal. Beginning around 1924 Miro gradually cut himself free from most of the things that had previously given painting its "look." From our present cultural perspective we have trouble really feeling the radicality and depth of some early Modernism, which can look fussy and illustrational to us. But it's important to see how radical this work was--nothing like it had appeared before.

Miro's break and subsequent blossoming obviously didn't occur in a vacuum, but they have a special quality. He was close in spirit to the prehistoric artists of Altamira and Lascaux; the impulses in the work seem "human" rather than "Modern" or "European." There is a wonderful comfort with playfulness and sexuality in the work. He achieved a scale and an openness several generations ahead of the conventional wisdom in painting, and he integrated language into his imagery through the collapse of writing and drawing into one activity. The implications of all this are still being explored.

For me, the tapestry cartoons done in Barcelona in 1933 and 1934 represent another defining moment. He did great things before and after, but these paintings stand apart, slightly indigestible. They are grand, playful, and dark--the emotional tone is complex and the odd taste behind their formal properties is still surprising. They show us Miro's center.

His evolution after World War II is a puzzle. In an exhibition of this size one feels confronted simultaneously by the best and the worst that Modern art has to offer--sometimes it isn't even clear which is which. On the one hand he seems to have settled into the middle of a Miro industry, and much of the work has an empty, formulaic quality. But he also glimpsed something brighter, less delicate, and less polite than anything he had done earlier. I think we can still learn a lot from paintings of the early '50s like The Bird Boom-Boom Makes His Appeal to the Head Onion Peel, 1952. Later, the big "Blue" paintings from 1961 and the "Mural Paintings" from 1962 show him talking back to the younger American painters for whom he had been crucially influential twenty years before. This level of engagement seems exemplary and not at all typical of his peers.

The sculpture became both more and less interesting after the war. He found a way to be more direct, leaving behind his rather generic surrealist juxtapositions of the '30s. Miro clearly had a gift for working with clay; there's something good in the sculpture when it functions as an objectified analogue for the presences in his paintings. A lot of this work, however, raises disturbing questions about how many kinds of things an artist really needs to do.

The prints and illustrated books are a different case. Aspects of Miro's sensibility that don't hold up well elsewhere gain another life when the scale and process are more intimate, or the purpose is more overtly illustrative. The offhandedness and graphic emptiness that make much of the work feel thin are only advantages here.

I would like to have seen more of the very late work. Though I doubt that a revision of the critical consensus here will ever be in order to the extent that it was for Picasso's late paintings, I can't escape the feeling that Miro is being protected, and that he doesn't need it. The "Untitled" canvases of 1970-80, in the last room of the exhibition, are jarring in their bluntness and apparent lack of structure. Some emotional and pictorial bottom line was being approached, I think, and I want a fuller look.

I came away from the show feeling gratitude to Miro. His journey greatly expanded our freedom, and I feel sure that at some future point people will look back at this century--so mechanical, so "mass-produced"--and learn deep truths about us through his work. All the cliches about alienation and the "monsters of the id" can be found there, but they come side by side with a sweetness we have a hard time embracing these days.

George Condo Harvest

Miro has been and always will be a great inspiration to me. Miro, when he planted his paint and palette, harvested a purple-green abstract landscape with iridescent forms drawn from his collective unconscious memory and projected future memories. What he did with Prades, the Village, in 1917 was more futuristic in its own time than his late work, which was less of its own time and perhaps more of a presence in an interrelated time frame of past and future. Participating in the harvest was the picture itself, thus giving Miro's art the quality of being organic. In viewing the MoMA show, I was amazed to see that Miro had attained a kind of perfection as early as 1919, with his self-portrait of that year. The divided and multifaceted, again organic growth of his mind's eye, and his own image apart from his own mind, were poetic and futuristic. In considering the necessity to fuse one's identity (the Self and one's representation of the Self) in order to accomplish a masterpiece such as this painting, Miro chose to let the space between the real image and its reflection create the portrait.

Years later, in 1925, Miro reached a new existential plateau, in the psychological form of color. It was as if he had projected himself directly into the canvas and were working back from the painting into reality, leaving behind him an atmospheric blue field. His work continues to expand as the element of time is dropped and sensations of the ever becoming present envelop the viewer. George Condo is an artist who lives in New York.

Milan Kunc Child's Play

Miro, a faithful soldier of Modernism, was a lucky man: he lived at a time when freedom and chance were revered. At his best, in his great pieces of 1919-23--Self-Portrait, Nude with Mirror, The Farm--he went beyond naive charm into the hyperreal, the psychedelic. His strength was marrying ornament and narrative content; his weakness was that like so many others he ultimately fell back into Modernism's kindergarten.

Milan Kunc is an artist who lives in New York.

Translated from the German by Joachim Neugrnschel.

Dan Cameron Teen Idol

I owe my love of Modern art to Miro above any other artist. Thinking about him today, I'm whisked back to the moment in my adolescence when it seemed to me that his work basically existed to lead me away from teenage angst and toward a belief in the human spirit. It still astonishes me that to a frustrated small-town kid for whom the hills of Catalonia might as well have been as distant as the moon, Miro equaled Art.

Today, Miro's centenary exhibition at MoMA marks the first time I've encountered so many Modern masterpieces as old friends. But I'm also startled at the extraordinary amount of invention packed into every inch of his early paintings--those from 1918 to 1923. To me, the exhibition suggests that no artist of Miro's time came as close as he did to shunning the theoretical side of art altogether. It wasn't that he lacked the ability to translate his goals into words; he simply preferred to concentrate on describing the parameters of human consciousness by inventing images. As opposed to the more worldly, sophisticated art of Picasso, Miro's work is grounded in the view that painting is a universal language, consistent whether we are considering the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira or the surface extravagances of Post-Impressionism. It seems inconceivable that an artist could hold such a viewpoint today.

Once embarked on his journey, however, Miro never looked back. In showing the growth of his psychic territory from the realm of private myths to an explosion of symbols of creativity, the MoMA show may teach us that if one is to sustain seventy years of uninterrupted creativity, one is more or less committed to being a teenager all one's life.

Dan Cameron is a writer who lives in New York.