Miró speaks in Paris

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n the Grand Palais in Paris, the largest Miró exhibition ever held in the French capital can be seen. It is an exceptional exhibition, much better, more complete, than the great retrospective of the painter that was presented in 1974, while the artist was still alive, in the same exhibition center.

"Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves" -this is the color of my dreams- is the title of the subtle painting-poem from the Metropolitan in New York that also gives title to this exhibition of the painter's plastic evolution through more than 150 works representative of his career: drawings, paintings and engravings, sculptures and ceramics.

In this great exhibition in Paris there is a canvas as emblematic as The Farm, from the National Gallery of Washington. In this painting, one can see the extreme meticulousness with which the artist worked. Miró painted in great detail even the smallest leaf of the humblest weed. Wasn't this how the painters of Gothic altarpieces also worked? The passionate romantic Walt Whitman believed it: "The smallest sprout shows that there is really no death."

Among other works, Miró's early Self-Portrait (1919), Mont-roig, the church and the village, the Nu debout (1918) from the St. Louis Art Museum (Missouri), or the Paysan catalan à la guitarre (1924) from the Thyssen in Madrid can also be admired at the Grand Palais in Paris. Or the Dutch Interior (II) from MOMA in New York. Or, from Philadelphia, the emblematic Le chien aboyant à la lune (1926), which should be clearly related to Goya's Dog Half-Submerged from the Prado Museum.

Miró's work grows with time. As a good poet that he was, he thinks in images and expresses himself with images. Contemplating his works, one could say that they bring him closer to the anti-figurative impulse of music. Miró's painting soon ceases to be a literary painting, with anecdote, and becomes a painting that concentrates on the force of emotion. It ceases to be a more or less epic painting to become a lyrical painting.

Miró's most characteristic plastic art is aerial, volatile: musical. Eugenio d'Ors distinguished between the art of "forms that weigh" and the art of "forms that fly." Miró's works should be classified among those of the latter trend. His art is related to poetry and music, an art of atmospheres and silences that are projected in harmony from the deepest part of his humanity.

With Miró, especially with Miró, but also with other great artists like Matisse, modern painting becomes musical. When Miró finds himself most is by exploring his dreams, as surrealists do. "Surrealism has allowed me to far surpass plastic research: it has led me to the heart of poetry, to the heart of joy: joy of discovering what I do, after having done it."

At the Grand Palais, one can also see an interview with Miró, who, shy as he was, and not much given to speaking, overacts and stutters. "What do dreams represent for you?" -they ask him. "I never dream. When I am awake, I always dream." The paradox is not a boutade and should be related to J.V. Foix's "It is when I sleep that I see clearly," the poet with whom Miró has so many connections.

Miró expresses himself through images and not through concepts. His is a visual thinking (to use Herbert Read's expression), a visual thought. This is the way of thinking of the primitive and of the child (the child Miró was accompanied him all his life). It is a thought that primarily uses images to identify things and analogy to advance in the knowledge of reality. And this confers a high symbolic capacity to his pre-logical language.

Betty Edwards, from the University of California, in her essay Drawing on the Artist Within insists that there are two ways of thinking: verbal and non-verbal. Miró, of course, thought non-verbally. Like a magician who felt connected to a harmony superior to him, he synthesized his particular creative process into art that endures. Now the works speak for him, in Paris, with the voice of his silence.