cover image Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape

Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape

Edited by Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale. Thames & Hudson, $60 (240p) ISBN 978-0-500-09367-2

The widely lauded Catalan artist Joan Mir%C3%B3 receives a fresh appraisal in this collection of artwork and essays compiled by Daniel and Gale, both of London's Tate Modern. Focusing on Mir%C3%B3 as an artist deeply engaged with the political world of 20th century Spain, the collected essays provide new insights into Mir%C3%B3's most famous works (including The Hope of a Condemned Man I, II, III and Head of a Catalan Peasant) as well as many others strikingly reproduced herein. Loathe to engage in propaganda or social realism, reluctant to sign his name to surrealism (though Andr%C3%A9 Breton called him "the most "surrealist" of us all"), and frustrated with the "parochialism" of the rural Catalans, whose cause he championed%E2%80%94Mir%C3%B3's engagement with politics can seem as complex and contradictory as his eruptive paintings. Through the critical writing, however, he emerges as a consistently moral force, driven by the "long-held belief that the revolution of form can, by provoking, awaken a sleeping public" and dancing a careful line between withdrawal and engagement. While the chronicling of his political relocations and Spanish history can be repetitive, what speaks loudest is the portrait of Mir%C3%B3 as an artist as committed to liberty and social transformation as to art itself. 200 color illustrations. (Apr.)