Life in East and West Villages: From Van Gogh to Joan Miró
This year I had been to Shanghai once and NYC twice so far. It almost like if I am not working, I am in the ultra large cities. My hairstylist at NYC probably think I live a few blocks away, lol. I like the cities that you cannot see the edges.
From Feb to June, MoMA was showing Joan Miró (1893-1983). It consists of a total of 60 pieces, including very large ones like the following. You can see that Miró’s work is strongly influenced by cubism and shares a flavor of Picasso’s work. In fact, they are both Spanish painters at a similar period.
I have some interesting connections with Miró . About 15 years ago, one friend heard that I like modern art and sent me a poster of Miró’s inverted person. I was like “really? it is not Van Gogh, come on” Apparently, back then, I was only interested in Van Gogh.
Met, MoMA, Guggenheim and DC Smithsonian all have collections of Van Gogh. Typically, his work is in the same room as other impressionists like Monet or Paul Cézanne. I have been liking Van Gogh for many years, but until I grew up I started understanding why. Compared to other impressionists, Van Gogh uses very strong colors, thick almost rich texture paints and swirling strokes. From his work, you can feel he is awkward, intense and genuine. His biographies and movie indeed show that he has fires in his heart. Interestingly, Met shows very different styles of Van Gogh’s paintings created in the same year side by side. You can see that in addition to the Van Gogh style, he was trying the “dotted” strokes that were popular at the period, shown by some other paintings in the same exhibition rooms.
Over the years, my taste goes to more and more abstract. Miró ‘s work is symbolic and has a spirit of the Ancient Chinese Character (xiang xing wen zi). It almost reaches the spectrum of surrealism. Here is how Miró represents men, women, and animals, can you see them?
If you are familiar with Picasso, you probably already see the cubism in Miró’s work. The idea is to extract more and more concrete details from a painting and see at what time, a viewer is still able to recognize the objects in a painting. It is almost like that the painters create a puzzle for a viewer to solve. One approach is to extract elements of different sides of an object and put them in the same surface. The other approach is to use simplified geometric forms to represent objects. See Picasso’s work below.
I like poems. Sometimes, I feel the music I know is influencing how I write the poems. Miró also likes poems. He said “I made no distinction between painting and poetry”. It almost sounds like crazy, but I understand what he was saying here. He told the French poet Michel Leiris “you and all my writer friends have given me much help and improved my understanding of many things”.
If you are going to Québec city anytime soon, don’t miss Miró’s another great show: https://www.mnbaq.org/en/exhibition/miro-in-mallorca-a-free-spirit-1269 (thanks Yun for the info)