International Art News

Joan Miro - Self-Portrait, 1937-1938-February 23, 1960, oil and pencil on canvas, Collection of Emilio Fernández, on loan to the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Until August 12, 2012 – National Gallery of Art
When you hear the name Joan Miró (1893-1983), what springs to mind? Playful shapes in red, blue, and black, floating free of gravity? Stick figures, naked and distorted? Cursive letters moving across barely brushed canvases? Suns, stars, and flowers? Fields of color?

But there is another Miró – not Miró the childlike inventor, the daring Surrealist, the poet of few words, or the lyrical abstractionist (although they are all here), but rather Miró the artist of his times. In his 90 years, he lived through two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise and fall of Francisco Franco, the dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975. Through it all, he remained deeply tied to his homeland of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, a region with a distinct culture and proud spirit.

Joan Miro - Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, A.E. Gallatin Collection, 1952

This exhibition traces the arc of Miró’s career while drawing out his political and cultural commitments. The first two rooms explore his early work, rooted in Catalonia and then transformed in the 1920s under the influence of Paris and the surrealists. A large middle section is devoted to the terrible years of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its repressive aftermath, when Miró developed his mature vocabulary. The last two rooms cover the final decade of Franco’s rule, when Miró turned to making monumental paintings, both calm and explosive.

The story that unfolds is a complex one. Was Miró an activist, a fantasist, or both? Did his art emerge despite or because of difficult times? Miró always kept a figurative “ladder of escape” – one of his favorite images – with him, and he would scale it to flee from harsh conditions into the freedom of his imagination. Yet his ladder was firmly planted on the ground, and he often climbed down to decry oppression. These two impulses, however different, were resolved in Miró’s powerfully simple definition of an artist as “one who, amidst the silence of others, uses his voice to say something.”

This exhibition was organized by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

George Segal, Three People on Four Benches, 1980. Bronze and steel. Martin Z. Margulies Collection. Image © The George and Helen Segal Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

March 31 – September 9, 2012 – Tampa Museum of Art
Many leading artists of the 20th century went to great lengths to replace the representational with the abstract. But some artists found it difficult to rid their works of all traces of the real, and in particular, the figure. Masterworks of 20th Century Sculpture from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection allows a thoughtful consideration of the tension between the abstract and the representational that dominated 20th century aesthetic concerns.

An abiding fascination with the figure unites the works in the exhibition. While many modern artists abandoned the figure as inspiration, these seven artists made use of the figure (human and otherwise), even as the final work sometimes barely resembles the figure in reality. In the straightforward works by Willem de Kooning (Seated Woman on Bench), George Segal (Three People on Four Benches), Louise Nevelson (Dancing Woman), Manuel Neri (Untitled), and Deborah Butterfield (Jerusalem Horse), the form remains readily identifiable. With works by Joan Miro (Oiseau) and Isamu Noguchi (Figure and Judith), however, the work is more abstracted, but the referent is still the figure.

In this exhibition, our third partnership with the Martin Z. Margulies Collection in Miami, the Museum has selected key works from the latter half of the 20th century that pay tribute to the fascination with the natural form. The Margulies Collection is known for its extensive sculpture collection that contains some of the best examples of post-World War II movements in Europe and the United States.

Museum Hours

Salvador Dalí - Frontispiz für André Breton und Paul Éluard, L'immaculée Conception, 1930-Radierung Sammlung - Gilbert Kaplan, New York, Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama/VBK, Wien 2011

From November 30, 2011 to January 15, 2012 – Albertina
In parallel to the Magritte exhibition the Kaplan Collection will be presented, uniting outstanding Graphic Art by the Surrealists Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and many more important exponents of this art movement. These artists share a common devotion to the unreal and the fantastic. The Graphic Art presented in this exhibition will impressively illustrate how close the real and the unreal lie together in Surrealistic Art and will tempt the viewer to let his imagination  run free.

“Surrealism was a revolutionary idea in the arts in the early 1900s and 1920s, and is still a powerful influence on contemporary art,” according to McMullen Museum Curator Alston Conley. “These prints trace the development of the main figures in the surrealist movement from 1919 to 1971.”

Marcel Duchamp-H.O.O.Q., 1964 - Bleistift auf Reproduktion - Sammlung Gilbert Kaplan, New York, Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama/VBK, Wien 2011

The exhibition features over 100 prints by the foremost artists of the Surrealist movement. Works by Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Hans Bellmer, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray will be among those included in the exhibition.

Museum Hours