Art and the city: Joan Miró

One year ago while studying in Leuven, Belgium, I made a huge mistake: I was traveling around Europe all the time, visited 8 other Belgian cities, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and endless list of museums, exhibitions and interesting spots. BUT! Staying in Leuven for 5 months, I never managed to visit Stella Artois brewery and M-Museum that were located in the same city.

As it usually happens, we don’t appreciate something found very close to us, no matter how gorgeous it may appear to be. Do you think all people from St. Petersburg visited the Hermitage? Or born Viennese went to the State Opera? Or Zagreb people went to Dubrovnik? The answer is quick and ready: no. Thinking that it can be done any weekend, we keep going abroad truly enjoying foreign treasures and forgetting about our own.

That’s why a couple of weeks ago I decided it’s high time I discovered Zagreb, which appeared to have much more to offer than expected and surprised me in a very good way. The first spot on the list to share is Joan Miró exhibition in Zagreb.

Miró - The caress of a bird

It almost happened to me: ‘Come on, it’s there for almost 4 month, I’ll have the chance to visit it’. And I never did before yesterday when I was just passing by and dropped. It’s not the first time I see the works of Miró (my first experience was pretty spontaneous, when being attracted by the name of Salvador Dali, I went to visit ‘Dada and Surrealism’ exhibition in Budapest 3 months ago), but as he’s is the representative of these two movement in the history of art, the question which appears most often in the heads of ordinary people is ‘Really? I can do the same and get millions of euros for my doodles.’ Not true. I can’t call myself an art expert, but every time I find myself in the museum of old masters or contemporary art, I become a little bit closer to this controversial, at times paradoxical, world of art.

Let me say I never understood Matisse, Gauguin or Van Gogh. Why? Take a look at Correggio’s ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ or Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The garden of earthly delights’! This is art! Dare to create something similar! It’s not ‘White center’ by Rothko sold for 72.84mln USD that only art critics understand.

And then I went to the Hermitage. Here’s Van Gogh. Yes, I always believed he couldn’t paint and everything except for ‘The starry night’ is ugly, now I saw it with my own eyes. And here is Gauguin with his irritating primitivism and Tahitian women. Ick! And then you walk into the hall with French art of XV-XVIII centuries and find only darkish-boring-all-similar huge canvases depicting royal families that leave no emotion in your heart. Ironically enough, right? This is how I understood that Van Gogh and Gauguin created their own style that stands out, makes their works special and innovative, or simply put – different. Now, as soon as you see another Tahitian girl, be sure: that’s Gauguin. 

Gauguin - Nave nave moe

Or take Matisse. A lion’s share of his works was bought by a Russian millionaire and collector Sergei Shchukin, and people kept repeating that ‘One mad man paints, another buys’. But even Shchukin was shocked when first time saw ‘The dance’ and ‘Music’ which are now most famous canvases of the father of fauvism. I saw them both. I came to the hall where only two of them were placed, and time stopped for me. The whole world became only me, the room and 2 unbelievably powerful, eccentric, all-consuming enormous canvases, and their red, green and blue colors hypnotized. You can sit there for 30 minutes and will never be bored by contemplating a simple plot. Isn’t this the power of art?

Miró also belongs to the class of almost-never-understood artists. For me he reminds a little bit of Picasso (a person might have one eye somewhere near the knee) and Wassily Kandinsky with whom I found similarities in colors and lines. Unless you read the title of his painting or sculpture, you’ll never get the meaning. What would you say about a chair with a kind of red nose on its seat and a blue flat pancake with another red element somehow attached to the top of the chair’s back? Surprise – surprise: ‘Seated woman with a child’.

Miró - Seated woman with a child

At this point you start to reevaluate your own vision of art. Is the era of art over, and over long ago in 16^th century with the end of Renaissance when artists learned to paint for half of their lives and eventually created masterpieces that even we, 500 years after, admire? Or maximum in 17^th century with Jacque-Louis David. Can abstractionism, suprematism and pop-art be considered to be art in a classical meaning at all?

Taking a short walk along 2 halls of Miró’s works: paintings and sculptures, and still being skeptical about whether I understood at least anything, I went to watch a documentary movie shot in the workshop of the artist. This is what I saw: he took a fresh cabbage, wrapped it up in a newspaper, covered with clay and white plaster, waited for a while, hammered the whole thing, took out the cabbage, painted it again... Madness? Maybe. But what I saw in the movie as well is that Miró had his own vision. It wasn’t about doing random things with objects around: his assistants could spend one hour placing a part of sculpture on different height and angles to please the taste and vision of the master.

 It seemed like this man lived in his own world, at the same time knowing what he was doing and how everything should be. And probably, being able to persuade other people that your works are art, true art, with its meaning, beauty and a bit of madness, is another inevitable part, not accessible to students of art schools who paint beautifully but nothing else except for the sea and the beach? And after all, Gauguin and El Greco were also too progressive for their time but became recognized only posthumously. It seems there is no right answer to the question what art is and where the limit is, right?

All in all, if you happen to be in Zagreb till February 8, take your time and drop to The Art Pavilion because art can’t be studied from books or photos, it must be contemplated and absorbed live, and you’re the one to shape your opinion about it.

Kisses and hugs, Juliya.