Miro - The Ladder of Escape at Tate Modern

Miro - The Ladder of Escape at Tate Modern

12 April, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tate Modern overemphasises the political aspect in the works of Joan Miro. With mixed results.

It's a funny one, this one. On the one hand Tate Modern's big new retrospective of Joan Miro – the artist's first in London for nearly 50 years – is a sensibly put together exploration of the many and varied developments that took place across a career lasting 70-odd years. On the other hand, as is the way with many big institutions these days (and particularly the Tate), the curators seem to feel the need to impose some kind of revisionist angle, as if they're worried that an exhibition of works by a popular and influential artist isn't sufficiently 'important' without the assertion of some bold new claim.

The problem with this approach is that for those who are encountering Miro's work for the first time – and Tate's senior curators would do well to remember that that's probably the majority of visitors – this presents a skewed and unrepresentative introduction. Brian Sewell described the Gauguin show here as “yet another example of curators talking to curators instead of to a public willing and anxious to learn”, and the same could be said of The Ladder of Escape.

The schtick this time is how politicised Miro's art was. Yes, he lived at a time of great political turmoil, but so did everybody else in early twentieth century Europe, and apart from about four works (two of which were commissioned by those with a clear agenda) the attempts to draw out a wider political significance seem forced, and in places utterly laughable. Oddly, this overarching narrative is imposed upon a chronological hang that actually works perfectly adequately without it. 

Things kick off well with a brief look at some of Miro's very early works. The Cubist and Fauvist influences are slightly old hat, but his unusually detailed, almost fussy, depictions of rural Catalonian life are alive with meaning, potential, life and colour. The Farm (1921-2) and Vegetable Garden and Donkey (1918) depict scenes of hot energy, swirling with a lightly handled symbolism. With unusual shifts in scale and perspective, and some bizarre cross-sections, it's clear that Miro's visual language has yet to fully evolve, but in the clash of realism and symbolism, something unique emerges – something that for me disappears as Surrealism exerts its all-consuming influence.

Throughout his life Miro had a strong image of himself as Catalonian, and Room 2 seeks to explore how the celebration of locally specific, rustic simplicity is itself a political act. This may be true, in context, but it doesn't add much to the content of these works, or our appreciation of them. Room 3 revisits the earlier pastoral years through the new lens of Surrealism; Room 4 consists of collages (in which the presence of newspapers means that this is Political Art) and some oils on copper, notable for their strikingly vivid colours;

Things get silly in Rooms 5 and 6. Yes, the context is turbulent, but are the clutch of oils on masonite really “furious”, as the spiel suggests? Fast, loose, and bold – maybe. But furious? It's hard to agree. But it's not as bad as the assertion that a painting of flying birds “comes to stand for impending aerial bombardment”, because of a newspaper fragment found among Miro's possessions. One wonders what on earth could have been written on it to result in such extravagant interpretations.

What's annoying about all this is that Miro's works are quite opaque. Sparse but dense, they remind me of medieval religious allegories. This means that it's easy to read whatever you like into and onto them. Really they need meanings to be sensitively and carefully drawn out, not simply imposed from the top down. It means that the artist's formal experimentation and his personal systems of meaning are rather skated over. It also means that the humour in these works – of which there is plenty – is crushed. The result is that the show – despite all the latent potential in these works – becomes boring.

But then, finally, it bursts into life. First, there's the perfect balance and simple elegance of Drop of Water on the Rose-Coloured Snow (1968); then some beautifully composed, calmly contemplative triptychs, expertly hung in a pair of hexagonal adjoining rooms; but it's just after these that, for the first time, Miro hits me. In the late 1960s he took to setting fire to his canvasses, and the results are extraordinary, and brilliantly exhibited here. Here is rage: uncontrolled and unfettered by the artist's obsessively minimal mark-making. Here, finally, is an elemental force that surpasses the communicative ability of Miro's self-constructed language systems. Here, at last, is grandeur, and a power that comes from the artist's loss of power. Sadly, from here, it peters out.

There's an interesting moment back in Room 1 where Miro likens his work to calligraphy: he talks of the “calligraphy of a tree or a rooftop, leaf by leaf...” Calligraphy of course, like anything else, can be co-opted for political ends (as it was under Mao for example) but as an art form it is not in itself political, and it's of no great help to anyone to try to read it as such. Likewise here. There's so much that could be drawn out of these works, but it's left locked up and hidden away, by Tate's perverse curatorial strategy. This is both a very good and a very bad show. But above all it's a missed opportunity.

Miro is at Tate Modern until 11th September 2011.

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Tom Jeffreys