Miró’s Studio, exhibition review: This fusion of the innovative and the timeless befits Miró’s character

The studio of the great Modernist painter Joan Miró has been recreated in St James’s — but what does it tell us about his art?
Space travel: the re-creation of Miró’s studio in St James’s
Justin Tallis/ AFP/Getty Images
Ben Luke21 January 2016

It took the great Catalan artist Joan Miró a long time to have the studio he wanted. From his early days in Barcelona through several years in Paris in the company of the Surrealists, Picasso and others, he flitted about from studio to hotel to apartment, never really putting down roots. The only consistent hub for his art was the family home at Mont-roig del Camp in the Catalan countryside, where he would return each summer.

Indeed, in 1938, living in exile from Spain because of the civil war and about to be uprooted again by the Second World War, he wrote: “My dream, once I am able to settle down somewhere, is to have a very large studio, not so much for reasons of brightness, northern light, and so on, which I don’t care about, but in order to have enough room to hold my canvases, because the more I work the more I want to work.”

He spoke of experimenting with sculpture, poetry and print-making so that he could “bring myself closer, through painting, to the human masses I have never stopped thinking about”.

He had to wait a while. Only in 1956 was that dream studio realised. But what a studio it is: designed by another Catalan genius, the architect Josep Lluís Sert, it stands outside Palma in Mallorca, with an undulating vaulted roof and a concrete structure dominated by the clean, tough lines and reductiveness of Modernism, and brightly coloured glass inspired by the primary hues that dominate Miró’s painting.

Yet it’s also infused with the Mediterranean traditions of whitewashed walls, stone and ceramic. This fusion of the innovative and the timeless befits Miró’s character.

Working home: the artist in his actual Mallorca studio, in 1978 Jean Marie del Moral
Jean Marie del Moral

The 60th anniversary of the birth of the studio has prompted Mayoral, a gallery based in Barcelona, to rent a space in St James’s and recreate the Sert studio. The real thing has been preserved as Miró left it when he died aged 90 in 1983, just as he wished, with unfinished works remaining in the space — he didn’t want these incomplete paintings to go to a museum because in the studio “these works are alive”, he said.

This, together with photographs and documents in Barcelona and Mallorca, has given the gallerists Jordi and Eduard Mayoral, working with Elvira Cámara, director of the Miró Foundation in Mallorca, and the artist’s grandson Joan Punyet Miró, plenty of material to research for their reconstructive project.

The result is undeniably rich in detail, all of it recreated rather than borrowed from the foundation. Facsimiles of the pages cut from magazines and newspapers that Miró kept — from a shot of a fashion model, a photo of an eye and an image of Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel torn from a newspaper, to a postcard of a painting by the Italian quattrocento painter Baldassare Estense — are pinned to the wall just as they were by the painter. Meanwhile, a hanging evokes the studio’s vast wall of sandstone boulders.

Everywhere are the painter’s tools: clusters of paint tubes, watercolour palettes and brushes, together with the cups he would fill with paint and prop brushes in. They sit on the tables and trolleys that punctuated the organised chaos of the studio. A sun face made of palm leaves hangs over the space, just as it did in Mallorca, and the tiled floor is also evoked, complete with splashes and drips of paint based on those visible in photographs.

Rustic furniture sits on a canvas sheet, Miró’s improvised rug, in the middle of the room, and shelves nearby hold sundry items he bought or picked up on his daily country or beach walks, such as stones or shells — the flotsam and jetsam that washed up in his imagination.

He arranged them in his studio as a cabinet of curiosities, which he called a pinacoteca. Lots of them are folkish, such as the caganer, a diminutive defecating figure that features in Catalan nativity scenes, and some siurells, crudely fashioned earthenware figures that served as whistles.

In a video made late in Miró’s life, shown in an archival display in the gallery’s basement, he mischievously and rather movingly blows one of the whistles, his face lighting up. They meant a lot to him, and filtered into the symbolism of his work, creating an intoxicating mix of high Modernist sophistication and a raw directness born of naive traditions.

Does the show document this effect in his art? Well, yes and no. Inevitably, the major works that were created in the Sert studio, such as the great triptychs of the early Sixties, are in major collections already, and there isn’t space for them anyway. Neither are there any sculptures. But 25 unique Miró works feature (many for sale), mainly works on paper, with a few paintings.

They are not masterpieces but they are significant in that they capture the energy of the artist’s activity and the burst of creativity that followed the studio’s completion, even though Miró was in his sixties, which continued for another quarter of a century.

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Time and again, looking at these playful works on paper, card or canvas, I was reminded of a great Miró quote: “For me, a painting must give off sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem.”

Women, Birds (1978) is exemplary: a bold figure drawn in with a brush surrounded by the birds, sketched in scratchy pencil over patches of white, probably filled in with a palette knife and Miró’s fingers, with little eruptions of pure, electric colour. He was a great improviser — works feature thrown everything from splashes of paint to hand prints, lyrical lines and delicate constellation-like spatters.

His occasional forays into darker territory are reflected, too. As the great Tate Modern show in 2011 reminded us, Miró’s political convictions would occasionally rise to the surface. He was a devout anti-fascist and made works supporting the Spanish Republic against Franco’s invading army in the Spanish Civil War. He ended up living in a form of exile within Spain under Franco’s fascist dictatorship, and as late as the Sixties he had his passport removed for joining a demonstration against the dictator.

A work simply called Painting, made in 1977, seems to be a dark memory of one of his great Thirties “wild” paintings, Rope and People I, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with its ominous coiled rope intercutting two gloomy figures: the wild paintings were a grotesque response to the chaos beginning to envelop his native country.

There are problems in this reconstruction, particularly in that this is a smallish room, lit only from the street window. Sert created for Miró a vast space, lit by huge windows at the top of the walls, complete with a mezzanine which allowed Miró a bird’s-eye view over his creative world. The presence of a booth with an Apple computer in the corner somewhat bursts the illusionary bubble, too. The fake tiled floor is the tackiest part of the installation.

But importantly, this show doesn’t feel like window dressing, as has been the case in the kind of theatrical presentations that are becoming de rigueur at art fairs, which smack of a sly attempt to make up for the works’ lack of quality. There is genuine purpose in this project, in drawing attention to the studio as a laboratory, a place for experiment and play.

Many of the items accompanying the artworks, and particularly the photographs of the bric-a-brac that filled his pinacoteca, throw compelling light on Miró’s ability to seize on the modest objects around him and transform them into protagonists in his world of symbols.

Flawed though it is in places, there’s much to learn here; you do gain precious insight into the imagination that created some of the greatest art of the 20th century.

Miro’s Studio is at Mayoral at 6 Duke Street, SW1 (8133 4306; galeriamayoral.com) from tomorrow until February 12

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