Joan Miró: “Yes, it took me just a moment to draw this line with the brush. But it took me months, perhaps even years of reflection to form the idea” Joan Miró

Joan Miró

In the Mind of Great Artists

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“Yes, it took me just a moment to draw this line with the brush. But it took me months, perhaps even years of reflection to form the idea.”
Joan Miró

 

Joan Miró challenged the preconception that simplicity is easy or that it takes less time.

Moreover, Joan Miró also commented that “he felt the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means.” And then he reinforced this thought, even inverting the previous preconception: if fewer means are used (let us think of abstraction) to achieve the same intensity, the task is more difficult and more talent is required.

For this very reason, a work that a great artist makes in a moment does not really take them a moment, but their entire career up to that moment.

There was an incredible trial in the 19th century provoked by a Whistler painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874). During the session, the artist replied calmly that the painting criticized (and for which he had been defamed) had taken him half a day’s work. Then the opposing lawyer attacked: “Do you intend to charge two hundred guineas for half a day’s work? And the painter, famous for the sharpness of his wit, replied with a phrase that would remain in history and should be used more often to defend the work of artists: “Not for half a day’s work, but for the experience of a lifetime.”

Already in the 20th century, in Miró’s time, the Bauhaus (where Kandinsky and Klee taught, a time when abstraction entered its period of glory) imposed the concept “less is more.”

Less is more. What is certain is that it is not easier.

Abstraction until attaining the purest forms is a search for the essence, for the elemental. The abstraction that represents a thing, when it attains its essence, is usually much more expressive than the image of the thing itself. And the abstraction that does not refer to any particular thing, the purest abstraction, usually has the power to represent the complexity of a state of mind, or the very essence of the universe, its order, its chaos, and its harmonies.

The attention to detail, meticulousness, and precision have been interpreted as a show of talent and virtuosity. But being able to eliminate the details and leave only the essential, that which best and most forcefully expresses emotion, feelings, or the spirit of things, requires as much or more talent.

Art happens when an artist creates a world and develops a language to communicate it. And even if that language has a few lines and the minimum number of elements, we know that a world is not created in an instant.

 

Image: The Gold of the Azure (1967)

 

Recommended links:

Abstract Art.

Miró and the Constellations.

In the mind of Joan Miró.

Surrealism.

Psychic automatism.

Woman, Bird, Star (In Honor of Pablo Picasso). 1966-1973, Joan Miró.

The Exquisite Corpse Game.

The “Avant-garde” Movements.

You can also find more material using the search engine.

 

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