THE PUREST DREAMER IN PARIS

By ROBERT HUGHES

Miro, in Spanish, means ''he saw'' -- an absurdly good name for a painter. Joan Miro died 10 years ago, and 1993 marks the centenary of his birth. It has been celebrated by a number of exhibitions in Spain, where the centerpiece was a large retrospective in Barcelona. This week an even bigger Miro show goes on public view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: 291 paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics, put together by art historian Carolyn Lanchner. Miro got his first retrospective, at MOMA, more than half a century ago, and now he is getting the treatment reserved for the heaviest guns of 20th century art: Picasso in 1980, Matisse last year. If the show doesn't carry you along to the very last picture with its current of narrative expectation, as Matisse's did, it's hardly an occasion for blame. Miro was a marvelous artist -- some of the time. But he was also a painter with definite limitations, which began to show when, fairly late in his career, he started working on what one thinks of as an American scale. It is hard to bring to mind any of those big late canvases -- a blue field with a few dots on it and a squiggle or two -- that one would willingly swap for one of his fiercely impacted little canvases from the 1920s, like Petri dishes swarming with bizarre and emblematic microorganisms. Wisely, Lanchner has concentrated on the best years of Miro's career, from 1915 to about 1960, and skipped the enormous output of prints and the flood of repetitious paintings he turned out in the last quarter-century of his life in his role as a sacred cash cow for the Galerie Maeght in Paris. Late Miro is dull fodder, except episodically; its high points are rare and generally have to do with civic decor, of which the big sculpture raised in the '80s in the Parc de l'Escorxador in Barcelona is probably the best. But this takes nothing away from the brilliance, even the genius, of his earlier work -- especially in the '20s and '30s, when he was in Paris and making the finest paintings associated with the Surrealist movement. Miro always used to be referred to as ''the great Spanish artist,'' which is technically true but culturally wrong. He was a Catalan artist, and the difference -- as anyone who knows Catalans will know -- mattered greatly to him. Catalunya, that triangle in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula whose capital is Barcelona, has always prided itself on its differences from the rest of Spain. They begin with language, for Catalan is no mere dialect of Castilian Spanish but a distinct language, closer to Provencal and Italian. They pervade the region's history, politics, folklore and sense of itself, from the 11th century down to the present day. Catalans like to think of their culture as both older than most of Spain's (Barcelona was a great medieval city when Madrid was mud huts) and newer as well -- the roof on which the rain of north European avant-gardes fell before its patter reached the rest of Spain. If there's one artist who exemplifies this, it's Miro, in whose work the archaic and local got fused to the new and unpredictable, with scarcely a cushion between the two. Miro's ''internationalism'' was largely the result of fame and an art-distribution system that became pan-European and then, after World War II, transatlantic. But the real stem of his imagination was intensely provincial, rooted in the Catalan compost; it was shaped, it is true, by the influence of Cubism and then by his immersion in the Surrealist avant-garde during the '20s, but drew its tenacious fantasy from sources as deep as those of his great Catalan predecessor, the architect Antoni Gaudi. Miro's work is Catalan and French -- rather as that of border-crossing troubadours in the 15th century had been. It constitutes one of the great oeuvres of modernist painting, and it probably would not do so if he had not been exposed to the challenge of Paris and the stimulus of Surrealism. But it was also part of a specifically Catalan cultural renaissance that had been gathering speed since the 1870s, and was only driven underground by Franco. Miro was born and raised in Barcelona. But his parents had a farm near Tarragona, at Montroig, and although he wasn't by any definition a country boy, he did spend a good part of his youth there from 1911 on, starting with recovery from an attack of typhoid fever coupled with a mild nervous breakdown. It is tempting to relate the extraordinary sharpness of focus, the dreamlike distinctness of Miro's early rural images to the fevered impressionability of a convalescent mind. The countryside in general, and Montroig in particular, would always exercise a peculiar fascination for Miro. The farm was the symbol of what Catalans call enyoranca -- a sort of global, unappeasable nostalgia, a longing for the past and for one's roots. Miro was set on going to Paris, knowing perfectly well -- as any young painter did at the end of World War I -- that the French avant-garde set a standard against which his own burgeoning inventiveness could be tested. But it is significant that when he finally got there in 1921, he took with him a handful of dried grass from Montroig as a talisman of memory, to help him with the big painting he rightly considered his first masterpiece: The Farm. Frontal as a nursery ark, bathed in the raking dreamlight of early morning and constructed with the geometrical clarity of a Renaissance townscape, this was Miro's summation of memory. As its first owner, Ernest Hemingway, wrote, ''It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.'' It was Miro's power of recall as much as anything else that caused the Surrealists to adopt him. His art seemed to open a direct line to the repossession of childhood through unedited memory. His own habits consorted oddly with the Surrealists'. He was shy, abstemious, almost obsessively neat and faithful to his wife. But he was the purest dreamer in Paris, and they needed him. Miro had none of the Surrealists' political interests; the closest thing to a political painting he ever produced was a highly abstracted comic figure of a horse-policeman, with one red hand, presumably imbrued with blood, which may refer to Catalan street violence in the '20s. And his premonition of civil war was expressed in a single gloomy still life with an old shoe and a murderous-looking fork. Like most art that is genuinely inventive, as distinct from passingly novel, Miro's images grew from the past and drew on it for their strength. His sinuous and elastic line took part of its character from Art Nouveau calligraphy, the pervasive civic style of Barcelona in his boyhood. His use of huge feet or hands as autonomous symbols of the body comes to mind at once when you see the exaggerated limbs of the Catalan Romanesque frescoes he loved and often consulted. (At one point his work narrowed its angle even further and focused on the nail of the big toe, which then got conflated with the crescent moon: a small step for mankind, but a big one for a foot.) Time and again, looking at carved Romanesque capitals and tympana in Catalan churches, from Ripoll in the north to Tarragona in the south, you catch yourself breathing his name. His bestiary of images, wild and swarming and drawn with a line as exact as a knife's cut, comes from multiple sources. One, obviously, was Hieronymus Bosch. Another was the decorative art of Islamic Spain, with its precise yet often hallucinatory stylization of animal and vegetable shapes; the first sign of its incursion into Miro's work is the 1918 Standing Nude, whose sturdy body, pleated with Cubist (or at any rate, cubified) wrinkles, poses against a drapery covered with arabesques and birds. And then there were the mosaic inventions of the Catalan artist Josep Maria Jujol, who was working for Gaudi when Miro was a teenager, and whose wandering line and isolated words set in tile clearly stayed in Miro's mind when he was doing his poem-pictures. Miro's work thereafter would stay populated with images of specifically Catalan identity. ''Hard at work and full of enthusiasm,'' he reported to a friend from Montroig in 1923. ''Monstrous animals and angelic animals. Trees with eyes and ears All the pictorial problems resolved. We must explore all the golden sparks of our souls.'' The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), 1923-24, is full of such sparks, starting with the figure of the hunter himself, with his floppy cap -- the traditional barretina, which is to Catalunya roughly what Stetsons are to Texas -- and his heart, burning with neat little flames of patriotic ardor, somewhat resembling an anarchist's grenade about to go off. The letters that spell out SARD in Miro's loopy calligraphy refer, of course, to the traditional dance known as a sardana. Much barer works followed: the astonishing series of a dozen or so large landscapes that Miro produced in Montroig in 1926 and 1927, which include Dog Barking at the Moon, Animated Landscape and Landscape with Rabbit and Flower. It is as hard to account for the spell of the last of these as it is to evade it. It is quintessential Miro -- a field divided roughly in half by a rambling horizon line, the earth featureless and red, the sky equally featureless (except for the ceremonious care with which the paint has been deposited) and blue. In the sky hangs a thing like a bladder, with a thin black line dangling to Earth: the ''flower.'' The ''rabbit,'' a sort of yellow Shmoo, regards it from below. There is nothing else. It ought to be ridiculous, but it is profoundly haunting, full of an indefinable melancholy provoked by what Miro identified as the main motif of his work: ''tiny forms in vast empty spaces.'' And you are always struck by the sheer amount of work that he lavished upon those tiny forms. The bugs and dogs, even the genital hairs, of Miro's imagination live because of the graphic care expended on them: his solicitude makes them vibrant, his consciousness becomes theirs. Miro claimed that his landscapes ''have nothing whatever to do with outer reality. Nevertheless they are more Montroig than if they had been painted from nature.'' His work was to have an immense influence on abstract painting -- What would American artists in the '40s, from Arshile Gorky onward, have done without him? -- and yet it never lost its sense of wonder at the world or ceased to anchor itself in sharp little signs and pictographs denoting the specific. Its utter conviction is furthered by Miro's resort to painstaking, almost old-masterly construction and technical effects: in the mid-'30s he produced a series of tiny oils on copper, such as Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement, 1935, in which grotesqueness and scatology collide with an enameler's decorative sense. The climax of Miro's talent for oscillating between the general and the particular was his series of 23 modestly sized paintings known, collectively, as the Constellations, most of which he painted in Mallorca, after fleeing from occupied France, in 1940-41. MOMA has managed to assemble all of them -- a real feat of curatorial borrowing power. The recurrent shapes in these are two black forms -- the circle and a bow tie, or diabolo -- which overlap and dance in deep space in swarms, with uncanny and magical precision, alternating with other signs from his repertoire: eye, face, star, vagina, hairs, moon, bird. They are defined and linked by a wonderfully stringent and rhythmic play of black lines. These virtually define Miro's vision of cosmic unity, and they are a pictorial feat of the highest order. You can imagine Miro's Gothic ancestors nodding in approval at such miniatures. Their concentrated energy seems to have carried the artist along for another decade. But though he painted many a good picture afterward, he was never to repeat this sustained burst of inspiration. See the Constellations now: it will be a very long time, if ever, before they are all lined up again.