Joan Miró’s “The Table: Still Life With Rabbit” caught Picasso’s eye.Alamy Before there were Colorforms, there was Joan Miró. Few artists before, during or after left such a colorful legacy, let alone a work built around a stuffed parrot.
That last, a taxidermied bird the artist perched above a derby hat with a plastic fish in its brim, is the star of “Object.” It’s one of many dada-esque delights in the Museum of Modern Art’s new show, “Joan Miró: Birth of the World.”
Hailed as a poet-painter, the Spanish artist created his own shorthand. Birds, stars and women float through his works again and again. Make of them what you will, says curator Anne Umland: “We can read any one of them in multiple ways. The fun is seeing in it what you want to see.”
A stuffed parrot is the focal point of Miró’s 1936 piece “Object.”The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Matisse. © 2019 Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, ParisMiró’s own eyes seem to watch you from the gallery entrance, where there’s a blown-up, black-and-white portrait of him taken by Man Ray, one of the many artists — and poets and writers — he palled around with in 1920s Paris. One of his biggest admirers was Ernest Hemingway, who was so smitten with Miró’s painting “The Farm,” that he either boxed for or borrowed 5,000 francs to buy it.
Alas, “The Farm” isn’t part of this show: The museum that owns it apparently didn’t care to loan it. But you can see “The Table: Still Life with Rabbit,” in which the hare looks scared — and no wonder, since he’s lying next to a dead fish. This was the painting, Miró once said, that made Picasso take notice.
Much of his work looks so playful: a person reduced to a big foot and a red eye; a skinny bird that looks like a cocktail stirrer; a frilly collar so big, it seems to swallow the man wearing it. Yet Miró — who died in 1983, at age 90 — saw more than his share of tragedy. He survived the Spanish Civil War and World War II, leaving France one step ahead of the Germans. Some, including one of his grandsons, believe Miró was Jewish, but Umland isn’t one of them.
“He called himself a proud international Catalan,” she says. However he saw himself, he’s given us a world of joy.
“Joan Miró: Birth of the World” at the Museum of Modern Art, 18 W. 54th St.; MoMA.org
