Miro

In this superb critical-biographical study marking the centenary of Miro's birth, French art critic Dupin, who was a friend of the Catalan painter, peers behind the ``elaborately cultivated delirium'' of his playfully exuberant canvases to find pessimism, mystery, anxiety and foreboding. Miro's meticulously detailed ``enchanted realism'' (1918-1920) scarcely foretold his sudden plunge into the realm of fantasy. Surreal, automatist dreamscapes gave way to the ``savage paintings'' of 1934-1938, full of monsters, tortured flesh and screams, which prefigured humanity's descent into bestiality. His pure, pullulating Constellations series, made in a tiny Normandy village just before the outbreak of WW II, is a refuge from a world gone mad. Miro's fertile imagination constantly renewed itself over the next four decades as he explored a vast repertory of forms and signs. This substantial revision and enlargement of a 1962 monograph includes valuable new chapters on Miro's sculpture, ceramics, prints, tapestries, murals and poetry. (Apr.)