Joan Miro and his Constellations

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

In 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war, Miró and his family moved to Varengeville on the Normandy coast, a few miles from Dieppe. Georges Braque was a neighbor. The village was subject to a blackout, and that fact prompted Miro's most luminous and affecting series of paintings, "The Constellations." He explained their genesis in a letter to a friend -- "I had always enjoyed looking out of the windows at night and seeing the sky and the stars and the moon, but now we weren't allowed to do this any more, so I painted the windows blue and I took my brushes and paint, and that was the beginning of the 'Constellations.'" 

Painted on paper, the pictures create the most vibrant expression of Miró's inner universe, with its by now recognizable system of codes and symbols. 

On May 20th, with the advance of the German forces, he managed to get his wife and daughter on the last train for Paris, from where they miraculously found room on a train leaving for Spain. Miró had time to take nothing with him, except a roll of the starry paintings. 

The family got passage to Palma, Mallorca, where Miro had spent his childhood summers with his grandparents, and where, on August first, he resumed work after more than two months of escape. 

"The Constellations," which Miro completed in Barcelona, were among the first artistic documents to reach America after the war, and were exhibited in New York in 1945. 

Andre Breton, who saw them, talked of how at a "time of extreme perturbation" Miro had escaped into a realm of "the purest, the least changeable..."

Joan Miro on his "Constellations" series...

Joan Miro: Big-Time Modern Art

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Along With "Plastics"...."Networks"

Joan Miro's Constellations Paintings -- Networks?

From:

http://madamepickwickartblog.com/2011/01/miro-constellations-looking-for-signs-from-above/

For a while Joan Miro practiced pure automatism as advocated by the Surrealists.

Soon, however, a horde of neatly described if unidentifiable monsters invaded his stage. In the early thirties, geometrical abstraction reached its high water mark, and Miro was influenced by the painters Mondrian, Leger and Arp -- his forms became less anecdotal, his compositions more severe. Even so, he remained himself.

In 1936, the specter of civil war rose over Spain. Again Miro was affected -- his fantastic scenes became anguished, oppressive -- the dreams turned into nightmare.

When the Second World War broke out, Miro then left a collapsed France. Miro sought shelter amidst the stars -- or rather behind them. In the cacophony of a demented world, his “Constellations” captured an echo of the music of the spheres.

Artist Carroll Dunham has written, "Beginning around 1924 Miro gradually cut himself free from most of the things that had previously given painting its 'look.' From our present cultural perspective we have trouble really feeling the radicality and depth of some early Modernism, which can look fussy and illustrational to us.

But it's important to see how radical this work was--nothing like it had appeared before. Miro's break and subsequent blossoming obviously didn't occur in a vacuum, but they have a special quality. He was close in spirit to the prehistoric artists of Altamira and Lascaux; the impulses in the work seem 'human' rather than 'Modern"'or 'European.' There is a wonderful comfort with playfulness and sexuality in the work. He achieved a scale and an openness several generations ahead of the conventional wisdom in painting, and he integrated language into his imagery through the collapse of writing and drawing into one activity. The implications of all this are still being explored."