Joan Miró. Women, Birds, Stars (23 September 2014 - 1 February 2015) constituted an epilogue to SSM’s exhibition trilogy focusing on the great masters of Spain, following Picasso in Istanbul as the first, and Salvador Dali: A Surrealist in Istanbul being the second. The exhibition was realized with the sponsorship of Sabancı Holding, in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona; the family collection Successió Miró in Mallorca; and Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, again in Barcelona. A selection of 125 works by the Catalan artist were featured in the exhibition, including paintings, prints, and sculptures, as well as pieces produced in different techniques, such as carpets, tapestries, and ceramics, selected predominantly in accordance with the artist’s recurrent themes of women, birds, and stars. A group of works from this exhibition, focusing on Miró’s mature period, is now on display online through digitalSSM to demonstrate Miró’s artistic vocabulary including women, birds, stars, moon, eyes, and ladders.

Joan Miró. Women, Birds, Stars

The exhibition catalogue for Joan Miró. Women, Birds, Stars aimed to present a map to better grasp Miró’s artistic vocabulary of symbols. Articles in the catalog, which shed light on the artist’s inspirations as well as interactions with his contemporaries, are now digitally accessible as part of the online exhibition. The artist’s grandson Joan Punyet Miró delves into the development of Miró’s art through his relationship with the Mediterranean region in the article titled ‘Joan Miró and the Mediterranean Atmosphere.’ Jordi J. Clavero, who also produced the concept of the exhibition, explores how symbols function in Miró’s language. Ferit Edgü’s article on Miró’s connection to poetry serves as an introduction to texts on the artist written by figures such as Jacques Prévert, Paul Éluard, and André Breton.

Joan Miró: Maddenin Ruhu - Joan Punyet Miró 

Miró'nun özel hikayesi: Bir Merdivenden Çıkan Çıplak Kadın - Ali Akay 

Secret of Artworks. Art Conservation Talks - Dr. Ashok Roy 

Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars

Monet’s Garden

Legendary Istanbul - From Byzantion to Istanbul: 8000 Years of A Capital

ZERO. Countdown to the Future

Detailed Review

The Giantess

Constellations

Sunrise

The Escape Ladder

During the 1940s, Miró expressed himself through a vocabulary of poetic signs. In subsequent years, these signs made regular appearances in most of his compositions. Miró’s works offer a cosmological vision. They present abbreviated versions of the symbolic union of the terrestrial and celestial worlds. In this vision, the sun, the moon, and the stars are inevitably present, as are black and compact figures often only partially realized and identified by eyes or hair. Other elements appear in a sporadic manner, such as different combinations of black dots and lines, or ladders formed by two vertical lines segmented by horizontal ones. Coloured dots also abound, together with short brushstrokes, splashes, and all kinds of expressive and gestural marks with which Miró alludes to the stars or constellations.

A Secret Language Emerges

Birds

Bird in the Night

Cave Birds II

Birds in a Landscape

Birds constitute one of the most prevalent figures in Miró's works, and they are an important topic in his talks regarding his art. While recounting how these figures 'appeared almost in spite of [him]' the artist had said 'Perhaps the bird comes from the fact that I like space a lot and birds make one think of space. And I put it in front of the night; I situate it in relation to the ground. Birds fly into space – they can carry us away, off the ground into higher things, into the world of fantasy and imagination that is not earthbound.' In other words, these figures, which accompanied Miró throughout his artistic career, symbolized the union of the earthly world with the celestial one in their changing shapes. Miro also expressed his interest in birds in playful work titles, such as The bird’s song to the dew of the moon, A drop of dew falling off the wing of a bird awakens Rosalie asleep in the shadow of a spider web, Flight of a bird over the plain, Women encircled by the flight of a bird, and The caress of a bird.

A World of Signs: Birds

Woman, Bird III

Woman and Bird IV

Woman, Birds

Woman and Bird

Woman, Bird, Star

Woman and Birds in the Night

Miró’s vocabulary of forms does not arise suddenly, but is the result of a slow maturation. In his later works, the continuation of the process is closely tied to using a plurality of techniques. In 1956, after settling into his studio in Palma de Mallorca, Miró dedicated himself above all to etching, lithography, and ceramics. When, some five years later, he returned once again to painting, his work was much freer and gestural, with very expressive effects such as drips that stretch over the canvas, handprints, or splashes of colour. Despite the apparent spontaneity of these works, however, Miró was very much in control of their execution. In a way, his signs were now relegated to the background. Miró experimented with materials and sought to obtain surprising results. Not only were his paintings subject to such concerns, but also his graphics, sculptures, ceramics, and textiles. Aside from those differences that necessarily stem from processes and techniques, there is an absolute harmony uniting all the areas of his work.

A Vocabulary of Forms: Women

Climbing

The Moon’s Eye

The Troubadour

Ode to Joan Miró

Gaudi XVII

From the 1930’s onwards, Joan Miró produced many prints. Those that are displayed at the exhibition are mainly lithographs and etchings, with or without aquatint and drypoint. To make a lithograph, the artist draws an image on a limestone slab with a greasy, oil-based soft tool such as a pen, pencil, or brush. The slab is then moistened and ink is applied to it. Because water and oil do not mix, the ink adheres only to the greasy image and not to the wet areas of the stone. Paper is then placed on the slab, and the drawn image is transferred to it by printing. To make an etching or a drypoint, rather than drawing on a stone slab, the artist engraves an image on a metal plate with a sharp tool. The plate of an etching is covered with wax, an acid-resistant substance. The engraved areas of the metal are then treated with corrosive acid that further exposes the incisions. The plate of a drypoint is not covered by wax, and this process does not call for a further acid bath. In both cases, paper is placed on the metal plate, and the incised image is transferred to it by printing. Aquatint is a technique often combined with etching, that requires for the metal plate to be prepared with a different acid-resistant substance, namely resin granules. This technique allows the creation of rich tonal effects in the print.

A Dialogue With Printing: Stars

Tapestry

Sobreteixim 13

Most of the works included in this section were inspired by objects Miró had been collecting. In these works, the object loses its practical function; by relating it to others, the artist gives it a new significance. Shortly after acquiring the studio in Palma de Mallorca, Miró bought Son Boter, a nearby house that dated back to late 18th century. Gradually, Son Boter became filled with diverse objects, which Miró had found and saved, until he discovered relationships between them and decided to put them together. Later, with the intention of preserving the results and rendering them durable, the assembled objects were cast in bronze by the lost wax process, which allows for the addition of incisions before the molten metal is poured into the mould. At the end of the 1960s, he introduced colour. The titles of the sculptures refer to a familiar language: women, birds, night, day, or escape. Thus the sculpture makes reference to the same iconography of signs that had been developed in the paintings, but here Miró substituted objects as the equivalents of those signs. It is noteworthy that Miró’s interest in objects was not limited to sculpture, however. Transformed into monotypes, they also appear in his prints, and are present, too, in his Sobreteixims, either as support (sackcloth) or incorporated into their surfaces.

Works Inspired by Object

Dog Woman

Girl Escaping

Personage

Miró’s ‘assemblage sculptures’ are made of found objects, which were put together and later cast in bronze. This type of sculpture combines an earlier twentieth century revolutionary technique, the juxtaposition of found objects, with the most traditional bronze casting technique. Miró started making these sculptures in the 1960s, after he had settled in his large studio in Palma de Mallorca. Several models were made, based on these assemblages, in order to enlarge the size of the original pieces and create the mould in which lost-wax bronze casting would take place. Once cast in bronze, the found objects lost not only their original function but also their individual characteristics of colour and texture. They became part of a more homogeneous bronze sculpture with independent patina effects. Later in the 1960s, Miró painted the bronze objects, giving them yet another new identity, and adding a painterly dimension to the sculptures. Once cast in bronze, coloured or not, the assemblage of found objects is no longer a unique piece. Instead it is cast and multiplied as many times as desired. This is what differentiates Miró’s later sculptures from the earlier found-object pieces of the 1930s and 1940s.

Assemblage Sculptures

Sert Studio

‘My dream, once I am able to settle down somewhere, is to have a 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 many canvases, because the more I work, the more I want to work.’ This quote from Miró in 1938 is an eloquent statement of his desire to have a studio of his own. His dream did not begin to be realized until 1954, when Miró decided to move from Barcelona to Palma de Mallorca and asked his friend the architect Josep Lluís Sert to design his studio. Miró and Sert met in 1932, and from then on had a fruitful and lasting personal and professional connection, which was reinforced by their common traits, particularly their urge to integrate art and architecture and their interest in teamwork. In 1937, Sert designed the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic for the Paris World’s Fair, a building that was charged with political meaning, for which Miró painted a large-format oil mural, The Reaper (Catalan Peasant in Revolt). However, the end of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship forced Sert into exile in the United States, where he would later be appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Sert and Miró kept working on the studio, exchanging some of their ideas about the project’s conception in their correspondence. Under these circumstances, Miró’s brother-in-law Enric Juncosa supervised the building of the studio in Mallorca. In the fall of 1956, construction of the studio designed by Sert was completed. Miró was enthralled by the final result. Miró received the Guggenheim International Award for his two murals in the Paris UNESCO building in 1958 and this monetary prize allowed the artist to purchase a building in close proximity to his studio with the intention of turning it into a studio. The building in question was a typical, two-storey Mallorca farmhouse dating back to the 18th century, called Son Boter after its previous owner, Llorenç Boter, the merchant. Miró shared this happy news with his friend Sert in a letter dated October 9, 1959: ‘I just purchased Son Boter, the magnificent house that is just behind ours. Aside from being a good investment, it protects me against potentially annoying neighbors. It will also be a good place for me to make monumental canvases and sculptures, freeing up my current studio space.’ He gradually took over the space with charcoal drawings on the walls, giving life to figures and characters related to his sculptures, and with drippings and splashes of paint on the floor. His graffiti enriched this example of traditional Mallorcan architecture, merging tradition and modernity, and forming a unique reflection of the artist’s expression. The Siena-red room on the upper floor of Son Boter with oil paintings of his mother Dolors Ferra, father Miguel Miró and photographs of his two close friends Joan Prats and Pablo Picasso hung on its walls, was a place of quietude, rest and seclusion for Miró. When he rested, Miró was surrounded by pictures of his loved ones. ‘This is where I rest,’ he used to say, ‘It’s just the way it was: the color, the built-in shelves. Here are Prats, Pablo, and my parents.’ Years later, the Son Boter estate also housed engraving and lithograph workshops where Miró worked on his prints without leaving his studio spaces.

Joan Miró before an early state of The Harbor/, 1944. Photograph: Joaquim Gomis. © Hereus de Joaquim Gomis. Successió Miró / Adagp, Paris

Periods, Works

Catalog

Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars