Stefan Lüddemann writes for #32 on the discovery of a family treasure that merits special attention, and is displayed in the exhibition “Miró: Painting As Poetry” alongside the four Miró works from the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen:

Could any wooden stool hope for anything better than to be used as a motif in a painting by Joan Miró? Hardly. And could anything pleasanter happen to the painter, Miró himself, than to become aware of this object for use in a picture? By no means. And his art had ennobled the stool, endowing it with immortal life as a pictorial motif.

Pardon the excessively old-fashioned formulation. For the business with the stool can't be dismissed so easily. This stool is here once again, after being rediscovered in the attic of the Miró family. Direct contact with the real object – categorized as a painted subject, and hence shifted into the distance – astonishes. This astonishment has also been experienced by contemporary viewers when confronted with the original objects incorporated so eagerly into pictorial constructions by the Cubists: newspaper clippings, pieces of wallpaper, theater tickets.

And now to the stool. It is the link to a situation that is irretrievably lost, and is only preserved in art: the moment when a masterpiece is created. The stool was there when Miró was painting. This fact is as moving as the act of stepping into a studio that still gives the impression that a great master artist has left it only a moment earlier.

Small wonder. The stool preserves his touch. His model posed on it. Miró’s hands must have touched it when he arranged her in the desired position. The round stool with its alluring butterfly motif keeps alive something from the eroticism that must have crackled between the artist and his model.

Its message, one preserved intact despite the passage of time, is the corporeality of art and of the people who make it. This seems almost disconcerting in a time when a thoroughly preplanned Conceptual Art already belongs to history, when the notion of multiple authorship belongs to the present. With Miró’s stool, some warmth finally drifts into the refrigerated discourse of the art world. Today, items of furniture from the Boudoir have every chance of acquiring the status of the most beautiful objets trouvé of modernism.

For as a found object, this piece of furniture almost thrust itself on Miró. The stool not only supports the elegant model, but also – on another plane of reference – the image itself. What would its ascending, vertical structure be without the static repose of this fringed, miniature tower to endow it with stability? Now, the stool is there again, a silent witness to a great era of art, testifying to the obstinacy of a world of objects that assert themselves against all of the vagaries of the times. And against art as well.

Dr. Stefan Lüddemann
Cultural editor of the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung / NOZ Medien.

www.noz.de/kunst