Roots of Miro

By comparing Spanish artist Joan Miro's finished paintings and sculptures with more than 1200 of his sketches and preparatory studies, Gimferrer places Miro's art in a surprising new perspective. Marvelously illustrated with 285 radiant color plates and 1276 in black-and-white, this intensive analysis of Miro's creative process explains how he would first isolate some element from the teeming outside world, then incorporate a graphic sign into it, thus setting in motion a transfigurative process in which objects, signs and symbols underwent a constant metamorphosis. In placing Miro's preliminary drawings alongside the pictures to which they gave rise, Spanish poet and art critic Gimferrer illuminates the inner alchemy by which Miro discovered his major motifs and set them loose in a free-floating pictorial universe. (Oct.)