cover image Miro

Miro

Alain Jouffroy. Universe Publishing(NY), $10.95 (117pp) ISBN 978-0-87663-513-1

In a poetic manner, this book discusses the work of Joan Miro, the Spanish painter who searched for genuine expression freed of rhetoric and trend-setting movements. Although akin to the surrealists in his approach, Miro was misunderstood by the group's theoretical leader, Breton, because of Miro's lack of intellectualizing about his work. Taking his inspiration from what he saw while walking rather than through the study of masterpieces, Miro devoted his lifetime to experimentation of forms that put him at the edge of art-making activity and led him to develop new modes of expressionsuch as automatic drawing and making collages of found objectsthat became widely accepted styles. His independence and the integrity of his work are thoroughly covered here in a text whose trajectories of thought resemble the winding flight of birds in Miro's imagery. (July)