Joan Miró

Alain Jouffroy and Joan Texidor, Miró Sculptures, Paris, 1974, no. 283, illustrated p. 193

Confronting the fantastical and inexplicable three-dimensional forms Miró created, his biographer, Jacques Dupin, has written, “Miró was the drunken sculptor who staggered but did not fall, who pursued his tight-rope dance among malicious spirits taking form, and answering to his step.  It was just a game, but a game in which all the danger lay – in this similar to the delirium of sleep, where miniscule creatures take on gigantic dimensions… And the only way we may face them is to submit them to our own personal whims or to submit to theirs: this is the rule of reciprocity of these works.  Each partner is vulnerable, each awaiting that the other affirm his existence” (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 382).

Miró experimented with a variety of media in the creation of his sculptures.  He worked in ceramic as well as the more traditional method of modeling in clay for casting in bronze.  One of his great innovations was the employment of found materials, which he either uniquely assembled in a collage fashion or cast in bronze for integration with freely modeled forms.  While the processes and materials that make up Miró’s sculptures can be described and identified, an explanation or interpretation of the specific forms continuously eludes us.  Just as Dupin views the works as independent presences that exist by their own logic, Joan Texidor notes, “The personages now achieve a more self-assured forcefulness, they have become guardian effigies.  We could, thus, justly qualify them as enormous.  And enormity is precisely the first feature to impress us.  Yet, slowly, the initial impression of their massiveness shifts toward other sensations.  Finally, we clearly sense that these enigmatic totems have once again arisen before us to question us” (quoted in ibid., p. 382).