The politics and playfulness of the Catalan Disney, Miró

Clement Greenberg referred to him as the Catalan Disney, while André Breton described him as an artistic case of “arrested development”. All squiggles and blobs, bright colours and linear glyphs, Joan Miró has gone down in art history as the purveyor of childlike whimsy. 

The curators of his retrospective at Tate Modern, however, have taken a revisionist line, stressing that his abstractions were actually as rooted in the political as they were the playful. I think this is overstating the case somewhat: for the vast majority of his career (from the moment he excitedly quit Barcelona for Paris in 1920, to the final canvases he painted on his peaceful Mallorca retreat in the 1980s), politics didn’t matter much to Miró.    

What’s undeniable, though, is that during the years of the Spanish civil war, he was indeed an artist politicised. We’re all familiar with Picasso’s iconic response to that conflict, Guernica, but the Tate exhibition — Miró’s first major show in the UK for 50 years — should supply further proof that the Spanish civil war inspired greater art than any other 20th-century event.

Sadly The Reaper, Miró’s vast mural for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, is now lost. (It debuted there, in what must have been a quite stunning show, alongside Guernica, and the sculptures La Montserrat by Julio Gonzalez and The Spanish People have a Path that leads to a Star by Alberto Sanchez Perez.) 

But Miró’s canvas Still Life With Old Shoe (1937) is still worth Tate’s admission fee alone. An incandescent still-life scene emerging in acidic colours out of apocalyptic darkness, it represents the destruction of humble, everyday Spain by Franco’s forces of the night. A fork, an apple, a bottle of wine and loaf of bread all sit on a table — as does the shoe of a hardy Catalan peasant — but this is a still-life like no other. Forget the bodegones of his Spanish forebears, Velázquez, Zurbarán et al. Miró’s is a distorted, nightmarish vision, where the fork hovers menacingly above the flesh of the apple, about to plunge in violently. 

Joan Miró, Still Life with Old Shoe (1937). Photograph Museum of Modern Art, New York © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2011

“When the civil war came along,” said Miró in later life, “it thrust itself deep within my soul”. Thrust itself deep, indeed, like a fork into an apple. Miró would work like a man possessed on Still Life With Old Shoe, pretty much non-stop for the first five months of 1937. He came to consider it “my Guernica”.

The Republican side in the Spanish civil war might well be considered the last great romantic cause, and it’s intriguing how virtually all the best art that came out of the conflict was Republican in sentiment. In part, I suppose that’s because the great artists of the age happened to be Catalan (Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Gonzalez) and their home region, in turn, happened to be an absolute hot-bed of anti-Francoism. Perhaps it’s also partly because totalitarians seldom tolerate imagery that’s aesthetically progressive. It may even be relevant that the political art with longevity tends to be on what history deems the ideologically “correct” side of a given conflict (in this case, Republican), tending — however obliquely — to champion those we deem the oppressed.

Whatever the reasons, the alignment of Spanish artists during the civil war was so one-sided it’s often said that, just as the Nationalists co-opted the Church as a force and focus of unity for the Right, so the Republicans co-opted Art to do something similar for the Left. Art thus acted as a totem through which the Republicans fostered a consciousness of togetherness, in much the same way as Catholicism acted as a totem for Franco. 

In truth, things were probably never quite as straightforward as this. The Andalusian, José Caballero, for instance, was a notable exception: an artist of some distinction who not only supported fascism but actually worked for Franco as a peddler of propagandist images. Dalí’s political affiliations, in turn, were hardly clear-cut either — he was roundly criticised for the inclusion of Hitler and swastikas in his paintings, and André Breton expelled him from the Surrealist movement for his ostensibly fascist leanings. 

But all this, perhaps, is the subject of another exhibition. For now, let’s just enjoy the Mirós.  

Alastair Smart is the Arts Editor for The Sunday Telegraph