We share with New Yorkers a certain noucentista vision of life; we are exaggeratedly happy, but we like to feign unease to demand a hug (from our particular love or from the psychoanalyst), we gladly walk through the central grid of the city knowing it guarantees a scientifically optimal spiritual orientation and we understand, among many other things, that culture is very good and strengthens the spirit... blah blah blah, but what's important here is to have a full box of cash. In this, and in the thirty-four times a day that I remember my beloved city (which I haven't visited for centuries, because having to leave there seems like a terrible lack of education to me and also because in this Catalonia of today, we literati are disgustingly poor) I was thinking while wandering through the exhibition Miró and the United States, a motto too deferential to the Yankees; the thing should have simply been titled like this very article.
Because this sensational exhibition (I describe it this way in an absolutely elusive manner with neutrality, since the Miró of our imperial Sert is one of the places where I am happiest on the entire planet, and what can I tell you about Manhattan...) is the primary result of the philosophical impact and the artistic saturation that soaked him in the new capital of the world after the second great war. Rereading the texts where Miró shows his enthusiasm for breaking into the maelstrom of New York implies reviewing our own vertigo before the universe of new pyramids raised in the form of skyscrapers and a society based on the existential pressing of making you believe that everything is possible. The thing has a certain irony, because we have always associated our Joan with the modesty of ancestral pottery and his imperfect little birds... and here we find him enthusiastic about the large mural projects he is commissioned for and delighted to delve into the somewhat pop joy of the moral gravediggers of Nazism.
Forgive me if today's chronicle sounds too subjective and emotional (that is, mistaken), but it has moved this humble servant to see Miró again alongside the tearful metaphysics of Barnett Newman's Pagan Void, perhaps my favorite New York artist, and also face to face with old companions like Robert Motherwell, with those exaggeratedly panty-dropping black stains of his, and the happy amoebas of Lee Krasner, which I had traced with my eyes so many times before squandering my family inheritance by having a Signature Mille Crêpes at Lady M patisserie, in the shadow of the Whitney. One could say that this orgy has no other thesis than to group an unprecedented sum of abstract enthusiasm or that it merely, somewhat uncritically, translates the effect of the American melting pot on the soul of a man who had been Frenchified until then. That would be reasonable, but often the history of art can also be summarized as falling in love with a unique place and its frenzy.
In turn, as you enthusiastically stroll through the Foundation's galleries or read the texts of the splendid exhibition catalog ---with second-rate signatures, it must be said, because the institution must be short on cash...---, you also manage to forget the artistic context of the United States during the Cold War, a time when the CIA's Cultural Cold War tried to transfer the fight against communism to the realm of abstract art and experimental music (you can read about it in the work of Frances Stonor Saunders, who explains it very well and gives you splendid anecdotes to pretend to be wise at a romantic dinner). But all this doesn't matter because, as I said at the beginning, the grace of Americans is knowing that art is always made from politics. Seen in perspective and in a time of existential boredom in the cultureta world like ours, the fact that American secret agents were interested in musicians like Milton Babbitt and John Cage or painters like Pollock and Rothko brings a warm smile of imperial nostalgia.
When I missed Barcelona, I often went up to the fifth floor of the MoMA to see Miró's splendid Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), with its beautiful carob tree from Mont-roig, the hunter transformed into a figurative-surrealist triangle of an ear, an eye, and a pipe... and the word Sarda, which many people associated with our national dance... but which was actually a grilled sardine, a paradigm of blessed life in the Mediterranean. As I left the exhibition, I reflected on this sordid thing of longing, because we ---even though we still live infatuated with America--- cannot help but be moved by that Catalan thing of the working class. Because we are only this, Americans without the strength of an army, people who take refuge in nature because they do not want to accept the predation of the city. Miró must have thought about all this while walking through my city. I often think that I will never go back there... and it is one of the few moments when my eyes waver to become water.