Between the Eyes

"Painting or poetry is made as we make love," says Painter Joan Miro, "a total embrace, prudence thrown to the wind, nothing held back. . . ."

That sounds fine, but it is not much help in understanding Miro's pictures. Last week the bouncy little Spaniard opened a new show in Manhattan which was as bright and baffling--and as childlike--as ever. Miro's wildly swooping lines looked as if they had been cast like lassoes into vast space. Tangled up in them were stars, teeth, mustachios, moons, flying eyes, arrows and balloons. Sometimes the random objects coalesced into grinning heads and figures; sometimes not.

Miro, in the U.S. for the first time, had left his farm in Tarragona, Spain, to paint a 30-foot mural for a Cincinnati restaurant (which will also display a teetering "mobile" by Sculptor Alexander Calder). Manhattan exhilarates Miro, and he expects it to give his art more oomph.

Most people can see the oomph, but not much else. Those who think they see more than that rank Miro among the top half-dozen living painters. The New York Sun's Critic Henry McBride--a longtime Miro enthusiast--last week said that Miro now "occupies the position of favorite with those-connoisseurs who insist that they really are connoisseurs." But, he conceded, "those somewhat stuffy people who do not respond to abstract art will fear that the connoisseurs are trying to put something over on them, and they will resent it."

Anyone but the incorrigibly stuffy would certainly find Miro a delight to the eye, even if some would shy at calling his work great. Miro himself, who should know, does not consider his art abstract, as the critics think. "As a matter of fact," he insists, "I am attaching more and more importance to the subject matter of my work. To me it seems vital that a rich and robust theme should be present to give the spectator an immediate blow between the eyes. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.