Saturday, November 22, 2008

Modern pursuits

Went to MoMA today (to see the movie "Sita sings the blues," which was a somewhat perplexing delight) and peeked into the exhibition "Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927- 1937." A remarkable decade's work, where we saw Miró turning painting upside down and inside out, exposing canvas, pasting on bits of sandpaper and cutting holes in paper, destroying the boundary between collage and painting, working on every new kind of surface with every material to hand, all of it by turns angry and playful - like the loopy poursuit of the blue abeille by the feathery oiseau above. (The whole exhibition's available online.) One particularly enjoyable thing was seeing Miró's process in 1933 paintings which started as collages of newspaper clippings, and then ... Miró yo!