Making Of: “Miró: Painting as Poetry”

A review of the symposium in Hamburg

At least initially, Valerie Hortolani’s journey to northern Germany was ill starred: two days earlier, the wind- and hailstorm Ela raged above Düsseldorf, forcing the research trainee from the Kunstsammlung to transfer from train to plane at the last minute in order to arrive in Hamburg on time. The purpose of her trip was the symposium “Miró: Painting As Poetry,” held at the Bucerius Kunst Forum, which is currently organizing an exhibition bearing the same name, and dealing with the influence of poetry on Joan Miró’s art, jointly with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (it opens in 2015).

For #32, Valerie Hortolani reports on the symposium, providing an overview of the topics presented and the current state of the research.

Joan Miró – “A Painter among Poets”

The exhibition project was initiated by the English curator Michael Peppiatt, who forms a organizational triumvirate together with Ortrud Westheider and Marion Ackermann, the directors of the participating institutions. Peppiatt presents Miró as a “painter among poets,” who was acquainted with numerous writers in the Paris of the 1920s, among them Paul Éluard, Henry Miller, and Tristan Tzara, who – according to his own testimony – exercised a far greater influence on him than did the artists he encountered there. Poetry shaped his ideas so decisively that Miró no longer regarded his images simply as paintings, and regarded himself instead as a “painter-poet” who fused the two media on his canvases. As Peppiatt emphasizes, it can hardly be accidental that Miró’s characteristic visual language, his “painterly poetry,” composed of words, images, and symbols, was shaped precisely during this period, and that his oeuvre as a whole is interpretable as a continuous exchange with literature and poetry. 

On the Reading List: “All of Freud” Present in Hamburg as well was Joan Punyet Miró, Joan Miró’s grandson, who administers his grandfather’s estate in Palma de Mallorca, and is closely associated with exhibition planning. In a stimulating lecture, Punyet Miró offered insights about his grandfather’s private library, which contains more than 1700 volumes, ranging from classics of world literature all the way to subversive and avant-garde poetry. Punyet Miró sketched a lively portrait of his grandfather's personality, one revealed in particular through his book collecting. Miró the bibliophile seems to have read incessantly – in his everyday routine, the study of literature assumed a fixed position alongside studio work. In handwritten reading lists, he ceaselessly compiled titles and authors, and planned, for example, to read “all of Freud” (it is not known however whether he actually succeeded). He was fond of marking passages in books that were especially significant to him, another source of evidence concerning his thought.

Miró’s Poetic Language-Art

On the basis of detailed analyses of a number of Miró’s paintings and drawings, the literary scholar Laetitia Rimpau from Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt shows how the artist drew on the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, as well as the language experiments of the Dadaists, in order to establish his own, poetic language-art. The vowels a, e, i, o, u, for example, served him as pictorial signs which he integrated directly into his pictures, and which are readable in direct relation to Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles,” in which vowel sounds are invested with specific meanings. Rimpau argues emphatically for reading Miró’s work not in relation to Surrealist painting, an established approach, and instead traces it back to early modernist poetry. Miró’s statement that poets inspired him more than painters, then, is to be taken quite literally – especially since this influence is decipherable directly from the works themselves.

Miró versus Magritte

In her contribution, Ortrud Westheider was also able to show that the impact of the Surrealists on Miró was actually less significant than his influence on the painters grouped around André Breton. In particular, it has been documented that the “Peinture-Poèmes” series, where Miró’s own lines of poetry are legible directly on the canvases alongside those of his writer friends, were enormously significant for René Magritte. Miró’s paintings, which feature sonorous titles such as “Étoiles en des sexes d’escargot” (Stars in the Snails’ Sexes, 1925) or “Le signe de la mort” (The Sign of Death, 1927), served as a stimulus to Magritte’s painterly search for multivalent word-image connections. As genuine “autopictologies,” these pictures reflect their own processes of production in ways that is driven to extremes in Magritte’s celebrated “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is Not a Pipe, 1929).

A Less Known Facet: Miró's Book Designs

In the final lecture, Marion Ackermann discussed Miró’s book designs, an important albeit little-known aspect of his achievement. In collaboration with the most important authors and art book publishers of his time, Miró produced more than 260 volumes, some of which number among the most beautiful artist’s books of the twentieth century. Highly experimental and innovative in technical terms, Miró’s images not only illustrate the poetical texts; his contribution takes the form of wholly unconstrained artistic interpretations based on his readings of the texts. On the pages of his books, typography and graphic design influence one another reciprocally – at times, the arrangement of the type prescribes the placement of the images, at others, the text is dominated by Miró’s astronomic and vegetal forms. Ackermann showed how in his books, Miró himself becomes a kind of pictorial author, and how his books represent the fulfillment of his call for the amalgamation of image and poem.

The symposium concluded on a somewhat wistful note, if by no means a resigned one, with the question of the end of the epoch of the great artist’s book – and Miró’s book designs are marvelous exemplars of the genre’s heyday. In the late 20th century, with the arrival of postmodernism and the innovations of computer technology, the medium of the book and its modes of dissemination were called into question in fundamental ways. Proliferating today are new, increasingly sculptural book objects that are concerned less with the joint production of elaborate editions involving author, artist, and publisher, and instead represent fully autonomous productions from the artist’s own hand.

That the book has survived despite all of these gloomy prognoses is attested not least of all by the exhibition catalogue, whose design planning also stood on the agenda during our stay in Hamburg.    

The symposium “Miró: Painting as Poetry” took place in Hamburg on June 12, 2014.

Author Valerie Hortolani has occupied a research traineeship at the Kunstsammlung since mid-April. Although Surrealism has long been a key interest for her as an art historian, she is currently devoting herself intensively to the work of Joan Miró for the first time. She finds the above reinterpretation of this deceptively familiar artist particularly enthralling. For her and the other participating scholars, the symposium was an ideal forum for exchanging ideas about this artist’s multifaceted preoccupation with literature.

For the numerous attendees who participated, the symposium was also a welcome opportunity to whet their appetites for the exhibition itself. The show will be on view in Hamburg from January 31 to May 25, 2015, and from June 13 to September 27, 2015 at the K20/Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.

http://www.buceriuskunstforum.de/