MIRÓ HAS BEEN AND always will be a great inspiration to me. Miró, when he planted his paint and palette, harvested a purple-green abstract landscape with iridescent forms drawn from his collective unconscious memory and projected future memories. What he did with Prades, the Village, in 1917 was more futuristic in its own time than his late work, which was less of its own time and perhaps more of a presence in an interrelated time frame of past and future.
Participating in the harvest was the picture itself, thus giving Miró’s art the quality of being organic. In viewing the MoMA show, I was amazed to see that Miró had attained a kind of perfection as early as 1919, with his self-portrait of that year. The divided and multifaceted, again organic growth of his mind’s eye, and his own image apart from his own mind, were poetic and futuristic. In considering the necessity to fuse one’s identity (the Self and one’s representation of the Self) in order to accomplish a masterpiece such as this painting, Miró chose to let the space between the real image and its reflection create the portrait.
Years later, in 1925, Miró reached a new existential plateau, in the psychological form of color. It was as if he had projected himself directly into the canvas and were working back from the painting into reality, leaving behind him an atmospheric blue field. His work continues to expand as the element of time is dropped and sensations of the ever becoming present envelop the viewer.
George Condo is an artist who lives in New York.
