How to Read a Miró

The painting above was made by one of Parlazo’s Spanish tutors, on a wet afternoon, with a pot of acrylics and a sheet of cartridge paper. Look at it for a moment before you read on. A yellow sun with a black scribble at its heart. A red crescent. A blue sky put down fast with a wide brush, the strokes left showing. In the middle, a great red seed of a thing bristling with stalks, each one tipped with a dot of yellow or orange. Off to the right, a small creature with a single red eye. At the bottom, two mountains, one purple and one yellow, and a pair of thin black figures with their arms in the air.

Anyone who has stood in a gallery in Barcelona or Palma will recognise the accent. It is Joan Miró’s. And if your reaction to Miró has ever been I have no idea what I am looking at, this post is for you, because Miró is not difficult. He is a vocabulary. Learn the words and you can read him.

A Catalan, first and always

Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, the son of a goldsmith and watchmaker. His father wanted a businessman and briefly got one, until illness and a family farm in Mont-roig del Camp, a village on the Tarragona coast, put an end to the idea. The farm never left him. He went back to it every summer of his life, and one of his early masterpieces, The Farm, is a portrait of the place painted with an almost fanatical care for every hen, every bucket, every crack in the whitewash. Ernest Hemingway bought it and is said to have declared he would not swap it for any other painting in the world.

Then Paris, in 1920, and the Surrealists, and something came loose. The detail fell away. What remained was the shapes.

The vocabulary

Miró once said he wanted to assassinate painting. He meant, roughly, that he was finished with pictures that looked like things. He wanted signs. Over the next sixty years he settled on a surprisingly small set of them and used them again and again, the way a poet works with the same few hundred words.

The star: five or six strokes crossing at a point, never a neat pentagram. There are two in our tutor’s painting, one inside the sun and one floating free on the right. The sun and the moon, which between them appear in dozens of his titles. The bird, anything from a full silhouette to a single curved line with a dot on the end. The eye, staring out of a creature or out of nowhere at all. The woman, usually a few sweeps of the brush. And the thin black line that wanders through the picture joining everything up, like a path, or a thread, or the route a fly takes across a room.

Then the colours, and there are really only five: red, yellow, blue, green and black, laid flat and clean and almost never mixed. Every colour in the painting above can be named with the words a child learns first. That is not a limitation. That is the point.

The night sky in wartime

The best place to see the whole vocabulary at once is the series he called the Constellations. He began them in 1940 in a village in Normandy as the German army came into France, and finished them in Palma de Mallorca after fleeing south. Twenty-three small works on paper, each one crowded with stars, birds, eyes and figures drifting across a washed sky. They are among the most joyful things made anywhere in Europe during the war, and he made them while the news was as bad as news has ever been. Miró did not paint what was happening. He painted the sky above it.