THE FORTIES
The year 1941 marked a turning-point in Miró’s career. It saw his first
retrospective at MoMA in New York, which decisively cemented his
international prestige and influenced the generation of artists who were
to create American Abstract Expressionism, including Arshile Gorky,
Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock.
By this time, Miró had consolidated a painterly language of his own,
integrating the whole picture space into a single surface in which form
and content are fused. A series of drawings from this period are included
here; in these works, quintessentially Mironian forms can be seen, such
as crescent moons, circles of colour and human figures drawn with
childlike strokes, and black begins to play a very prominent role.
Miró started using black through his experience as a printmaker and he
applied it in his work as a new form of expression. It also comes from
the Chinese calligraphy Miró so much admired. This black completely
dominates three drawings dating from 1951, present in this exhibition,
in which he uses exclusively this colour to represent clearly Mironian
forms. For, as Miró himself explained, “I have exercised my tendency to
strip away, to simplify, in three areas: modeling, colors, and figuration of
the characters”.[2]
[2] Joan Miró, I Work like a Gardener, pp. 49–50.