Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

  He was known to be the most reserved and silent of artists, but he did talk to me, the old friend that I had become. I did not follow him to the remote mountain village Gallifa above Barcelona, where he tackled a completely new métier, making ceramics with an old classmate from Barcelona art school days, Josep Llorens Artigas, a master potter. But he told me about it. This was in the mid-1950s. Miró would hole up for months at a time with only Artigas and his son for company, working on an eighteenth-century kiln. No electricity, no telephone. He loved it.

  “It is the unpredictability that excites me,” he told me. “The accidents in the kiln. You paint a piece red, and it comes out chocolate brown. You never know what will happen. And I was so excited by the craggy vinegar-red rocks of Gallifa, they reminded me of Montroig, my family farm, that I went out and painted right on them, for pure pleasure. I was incorporating myself with the elements.” These small-scale experiments led to vast ceramic murals and eventually large-scale sculptures such as the tower for a city plaza in Barcelona, named after him.

  When Pierre Matisse mounted an exhibition of Miró’s ceramics in his New York gallery, I was very pleased to be asked to write the catalog.

  Miró came to New York for the first time in 1947. He was on his way to paint a mural in a Cincinnati hotel, and he stayed in a borrowed studio on 119th Street. His dealer, Pierre Matisse, had arranged the commission. Miró knew Alexander Calder (whom everybody called Sandy) and his wife, Louisa, extremely well. The two men had become close friends when Calder was living in Paris, in the 1920s and 1930s, although neither could speak the other’s language.

  Miró told me about the little circus Calder had made out of wire figures, and nothing amused him more than making the figures perform for his friends. “Once he came to my family farm in Montroig with his little circus,” Miró remembered, “and he gave a performance for the farmers. Unforgettable! This huge man with the tiny figures and his incredible manual dexterity! It was very hot, and he pulled out a pair of scissors and—crac, crac, crac—he cut off the arms and legs of his clothes!” When the Calders went back to the United States, a lively correspondence took place, in a blend of Catalan and French and English.

  Calder took over showing Miró New York. High on his list was a visit to a Harlem dance hall. Sandy and Louisa were great dancers. Miró said he couldn’t dance at all. “They took me to a big place in Harlem—the Savoy Ballroom—wonderful music. Sandy told me to be very careful there, to be sure not to offend anyone by not understanding them. Louisa and Sandy danced off, leaving me alone at the table.

  “An enormous black woman, superb, came up and asked me to dance. I didn’t dare refuse, because I couldn’t explain I couldn’t understand her. So I tried.” Miró stood up and demonstrated his clasping a figure towering above him.

  “I met the composer Edgard Varèse when I was in New York,” he told me. “I knew him very well, a very great musician. He came to Catalonia, to my farm at Montroig. There is a very rough road there, several hundred meters; at that time there were very few cars. The farmers went back to their homes in carts, drawn by mules. These carts moved very slowly, and the wheels made a noise.” Miró made a long, drawn-out sound of creaking-grinding wheels on the road. “And the hooves of the mules went pam, pam, pam, pam. Varèse stopped dead and was in ecstasy. This was very fascinating to me because there are such correspondences between us. The way he took from the outside world, the sounds.”

  There had been other visits to New York, organized by Pierre Matisse, who had been Miró’s dealer since 1932. Miró liked to mention that it took until 1978 for him to receive recognition from his native land (being fervently anti-Franco, he had deliberately avoided government approval until the end of the Franco regime). However, thanks to his shrewd dealer, and texts by James Soby and James Johnson Sweeney, he was received warmly in the United States. There were two retrospective exhibitions in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1941 and 1959, and exhibitions elsewhere, and in 1959 President Eisenhower presented Miró with an award at the White House.

  Miró spoke no English, so direct contact with American artists was difficult unless they spoke French, as did Robert Motherwell. He was enormously touched when Robert Rauschenberg gave him a party in his studio. There was a glass skylight. Suddenly Rauschenberg picked up a pot of blue paint and flung it at the skylight, turning it blue. “This is for you,” he said to Miró, referring to a famous painting of Miró’s in which there is an area of blue and the notation painted by hand (in French) “This is the color of my dreams.” Miró still talked about this with emotion. “He did this for me!”

  I asked Miró when he had gone to Paris for the first time. He said, “It was in 1919. I went to a little hotel in the rue Notre Dame des Champs where Catalan intellectuals stayed. The owners were Catalans, they were magnificent. They rented me a room for a purely symbolic price.”

  He had planned to go to the Grande Chaumière, an open academy where one could draw from the model. But he told me, “I received such an enormous shock at being in Paris, I was so overwhelmed that I was completely incapable of drawing a line. The hand was as if paralyzed—it was an intellectual paralysis. I was totally unable to work for some time.”

  So he gave up. “In the morning I would go to the Louvre, and in the afternoon I would tour the galleries. I hardly spoke French then, but every language was spoken in Montmartre—it was full of foreigners.”

  I asked him if it was then that he got to know Picasso. “Oh yes, I saw Picasso right away—the day after I arrived. I hadn’t met him before, but I knew his mother very well, she was formidable. She and my mother were friends.”

  “You never met in Barcelona?” I asked.

  “He was twelve years older than I and already famous. I didn’t dare approach him. He came to Barcelona with Diaghilev and the Russian ballet company. He was in love with Olga Koklova, one of the dancers. They stayed at a hotel together, but he came home in the morning to visit his mother and to shave.

  “I used to go and see his mother, and one time she took me by the hand and said, ‘Come, come,’ and showed me the bathroom where he shaved. He had made a drawing on the mirror with his shaving brush, and it stayed there—she had kept it piously.

  “So when I was leaving for Paris, I went to see Picasso’s mother and asked if she wanted me to take anything for her. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, and gave me a big Spanish cake for him. Next day, in Paris, I went and called and said, ‘Monsieur Picasso, I bring this from your mother.’

  “He wanted to see what I did, and from the first moment he was very interested in me, he was very generous that way. But it didn’t work, the dealers; one was furious because I was staying in a shabby little room and he had to climb five flights to see me, and the place was full of cockroaches.”

  Miró said that he had always taken care of himself physically to be in good shape for work. “At home I swam winter and summer and walked a lot and did exercises. In Paris, I went to the Centre Américain to take boxing lessons. Ernest Hemingway went there too. It happened that sometimes we were in the ring together. He was huge, and I am very small. It made people smile.”

  I asked him if later he had known Klee and Kandinsky. “Klee was completely unknown in Paris when I first lived there. I used to hear about him through André Masson; in fact, Masson put me on to a German bookseller who had a large shop on the boulevard du Montparnasse where they sold German magazines. Some had reproductions of Klee. The owner used to go to Bern from time to time, and he would bring back portfolios with Klee’s drawings. He would send me a note: ‘I received some new Klees.’

  “There was an affinity right away, which grew stronger and stronger. Klee made me feel that something more profound existed beyond peinture-peinture. Unfortunately, I never got to know him, for practical reasons. He lived in Bern. I was in Paris. I never had the money to make a trip.

  “Much later there was a large Klee exhibition at the Galerie Georges Bernheim, and even much later there wa
s an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne—but it took a lot of time.

  “Kandinsky I knew very well, much later. When Kandinsky arrived in Paris. I got in touch with him right away. Before we met, I had seen small exhibitions of his, at Jeanne Bucher’s. I admired him very much. His contribution to painting was enormous. We often saw each other; we would meet and have lunch together. His work made a great impact on me, like the work of Klee. Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus with Klee, and he said that Klee talked to him often about me. That was very moving to me to hear, very important.

  “I must tell you, however, that in Paris, Kandinsky was zero. No one ever wanted to receive him. Doors were closed on him. Neither Picasso nor Braque did anything for him. Absolutely nobody wanted to have anything to do with him.

  “Although I must say that André Breton, at the meetings at the Café Cyrano, Place Blanche, used to say, ‘You must buy these wonderful things.’ They were very cheap, but none of us had any money.”

  In 1960, Miró began a completely new adventure. Giving up the seduction of his early paintings, he worked on a series of very large paintings—serene and weightless—of limitless space, using the simplest possible means. He explained, “It took me a great deal of time to do them. Not to paint them, but to meditate them. It took an immense effort, a great interior tension, to arrive at the necessary simplicity. The preliminary stage was an intellectual one. Like before the celebration of a religious rite, yes, like taking religious orders. Do you know how Japanese archers prepare themselves for a competition? They begin by putting themselves into a certain state: expiration, inhalation, expiration—it is the same thing for me. I knew that I risked everything, one weakness, one error, and the whole thing would collapse.

  “I began by drawing in charcoal, with great precision. I always start very early in the morning. In the afternoon, I look at what I have done already. All the rest of the day, I prepare myself. Finally, I start to paint: first the background, all blue, but it is not a question of simply putting on the paint, like a housepainter. All the movements of the brush, the wrist, the elbow, the respiration of a hand, also come into play. To work on the background puts me in the necessary state of mind to continue with the rest. This combat has exhausted me. I have not painted anything since. Those canvases are the fulfillment of everything I have tried to do.”

  Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. In the visitors’ book for his exhibition at the Grand Palais, a disgruntled visitor had written, “This man should have his hands cut off.” Miró was delighted, not offended. “That proves that it got through to him! It encouraged me to go on working.”

  In the summer of 1979 there was an exhibition of Miró’s work from the last decade at the Maeght Foundation near Saint-Paul-de-Vence. I went to join him there and found him sitting in the shade of a large olive tree in the courtyard. A French television crew was filming him with some of the actors of a Catalan folk group called the Claca. He had designed costumes for them, sometimes painting directly on the white costumes they were wearing, sometimes delicately adding a star, sometimes sloshing whole bucketfuls of paint at them. The costumes transformed the actors into animated Miró sculptures.

  Contrasting with these pneumatic multicolored apparitions was the artist himself: small, impeccable in his white suit, face as shiny and rosy as a ripe nectarine. We went into Maeght’s house to talk. Miró sat down next to me, instead of opposite me, explaining that his left ear had gone partly deaf. This and a slowed-down gait were the only reminders he was eighty-six.

  I told him I was thinking that it was twenty-five years ago that we first worked together. “Worked together”—his term, not mine. He has the skilled artisan’s respect for work seriously done. After the kind of conversation-interview we have had together over the years, he has invariably said, with satisfaction, “Nous avons bien travaillé”—“We have worked well.”

  I said how much I liked the background of the many drawings in the exhibition: the crumpled paper, the odd notations not from his hand, the strange surfaces. “I pick up anything,” he said. “If I see a paper left on the ground that says something to me, I pick it up. Now, when I go back to Spain, there will be packages to open. Often I will keep the wrapping to use for drawings. Sometimes my wife, Pilar, comes back from the market with food wrapped in paper with stains—I take it for drawing. She is upset by this, but I can find a use for it.”

  I asked him if an object interested him in itself or simply served to make him think of something else.

  “It can happen that a real object can prompt an idea, for a sculpture, for instance. It may start me off.”

  But for your drawings or paintings, unlike when you began, it’s not the real world that interests you?

  “No, not real objects. But if I see this”—he pointed to a space between the boards of the table in front of us—“or I see a shadow, or a crack in the wall, it can give me an idea. For example, this black spot here, or that little mark there.” He touched them lovingly as he talked. “Spots excite me. Maybe I can get an idea for a large sculpture, or a drawing. The grain of the wood, that little eye, I am drawn to it—pam—it’s like an electric current running through me.”

  I asked if he generally used a drawing as a point of departure for a painting.

  “Sometimes I start with a drawing. I used to more often than now, now, more often an accident of the canvas or paper starts me off. An idea can be guided by the material. Sometimes I start with paintbrushes that are dirty. I wipe them across a new canvas [gestures of brushing them back and forth vigorously].

  “I always have a great quantity of canvases in my atelier. I work many canvases at the same time. Maybe a hundred. Some I leave resting, partly worked, for years. Little by little they mature, and one day I am called by one of them. I’ve gone into the studio without a preconceived idea, and I am called to take it up again. A magnetic call, like an electric shock. I am forced to do it.

  “After that comes a second stage. I attack [he makes the noise of someone charging]. Intellectual work establishes the equilibrium. The equilibrium of forms, colors, and volumes. One line calls another, one color demands another. After that, I rest. The next day, refreshed, I judge what I have done.”

  I told him I saw a documentary film about him in which he dips his fingers into the paint and paints directly on the canvas with them.

  “Yes, I’ve worked with my fingers like this for years. Sometimes I use my whole hand [he slaps his open hand onto the tabletop, to demonstrate]. I used to work with brushes, often very fine brushes, but now I need to get my hands into the paint directly. I put my paws right into the paint, or ink when I am making lithographs. Sometimes I dip all ten fingers into the paint and play on the canvas, like a pianist!

  “Sometimes I use an old rag [he makes the gesture of rubbing paint onto a canvas with bunched fingers holding an imaginary rag]. Or I begin with a piece of paper that I crumple up—aaaaaaahhhhh—like this [an imaginary ball of paper is rubbed into an imaginary canvas].

  “And I like old brushes, uneven and flattened out, that produce ‘accidents.’ For example, when housepainters come to my place, I say to them, ‘Keep the oldest brushes you have. Don’t throw them in the garbage can, keep them for me.’ An old brush has vitality [he clacks his tongue appreciatively]! It’s a brush that has lived, that has already had a life of its own.

  “I prefer objects that have already lived. For example, if I want to make a new painting. I buy a canvas at the paint store—but what is clean won’t do. I begin to dirty it a bit; I splash it with turpentine, rub it with my paint-stained hands. I even walk on it. The naked canvas is cold, it doesn’t excite me.”

  We talked about the past and his iconic painting The Farm, which is now in the National Gallery in Washington.

  “Long ago, at the beginning, when you painted landscapes at Montroig, you worked directly from nature?”

  “Oh yes [laughs], like Cézanne! I started The Farm at Montroig, and then I went to Paris, which i
s where I finished it. I took with me to Paris, in an envelope, some grasses from my home. As the grasses dried, I had to go to the Bois de Boulogne and pick some more.”

  Did anyone understand the picture in Paris?

  “Certainly not! It was a very big picture, very hard to sell. I had no money, but I had to take a taxi to Paul Guillaume, Rosenberg. Then another to bring it back. Rosenberg said to me, ‘It’s such a big picture and people live in small apartments. Why don’t you cut it into several pieces?’”

  Then Hemingway bought it?

  “For pennies. But he liked it a lot.”

  We talked about his interest in making large-scale sculpture.

  “Besides monumental sculpture for its own sake, what interests me most of all is that it allows me to have direct contact with people. For instance, we are working on a ceramic mural—sixty meters by ten—for a German museum. It will be outside the museum, I don’t remember the name of the town, but it is an industrial city, very depressing, I am told. What interests me is if I can bring a shock of humanity to those people who are sad in that industrialized city.”

  He was hoping to come to the United States in the autumn.

  “I would like to go to Vee-she-ta [it took me a moment to translate this to Wichita]. I made a big mural for the university there, it is on the outside of the university. Every day, thousands of students go that way. So, evidently, it will fill the minds of these boys, the men of tomorrow. One of those might be president of the United States. Seeing that mosaic might have an impact.

  “That’s what interests me. It is the young people who count. Old dodoes don’t interest me at all. I work for the future. I work for the men of tomorrow. I have always worked for liberty and openness of mind. Liberty of plastic expression corresponds to liberty of expression of ideas. If my personages have become grotesque, it is because we live in a monstrous era. I am more and more revolted by the world as it is.