New York City - “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937″ is the first major museum exhibition to identify the core practices and strategies Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983) used to attack and reinvigorate painting between 1927 and 1937, a vital decade within his long career. Taking as its point of departure the notorious claim Miró made in 1927—“I want to assassinate painting”—the exhibition explores 12 of Miró’s sustained series from this decade, and includes some 90 paintings, collages, objects, and drawings. The exhibition is organized by Anne Umland, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, and will be on view in The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery, from November 2, 2008, through January 12, 2009.
Explains Ms. Umland, “This exhibition takes a close-up, in-depth look at a decade’s worth of Miró’s work, created during a period of economic and political turmoil, illuminating the way his drive to assassinate painting led him to reinvigorate, reinvent, and radicalize his art. The resulting body of work is at times willfully ugly, and at others savagely beautiful. It brings together both beloved masterpieces and largely unfamiliar works, transforming our understanding of Miró’s legacy for our own twenty-first century times.”
In 1941, The Museum of Modern Art organized the first full retrospective of Miró’s work to be mounted anywhere in the world, followed by major exhibitions in 1959 and 1973, and a landmark retrospective, presented on the centennial of his birth, in 1993. Fifteen years later, Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937 offers a fresh look at the artist’s work through a tightly focused presentation of a single transformative decade.
By assembling in unprecedented depth the interrelated series of works of this decade, this exhibition repeatedly poses the question of what painting meant to Miró and what he proposed as its opposite, and in the process reveals the artist’s paradoxical nature: an artist of aggression and resistance who never ceased to be a painter, a creator of forms. Acidic color, grotesque disfigurement, purposeful stylistic heterogeneity, and the use of collage and readymade materials are among the tactics that Joan Miró used to take apart and reconstruct painting and his own art.
The body of work Miró produced between 1927 and 1937 is symptomatic of the troubling malaise and creeping sense of doom that emerged in Europe as the so-called Roaring Twenties came to an end, and as the political tensions that would, by 1939, lead to World War II became increasingly apparent. The compressed time period examined by the exhibition reveals the extensive range of Miró’s experimentation during these years and the many different types of art making he pursued in order to produce a body of work that defiantly refuses to add up. The persistent tension he maintained between abstraction and figuration, the radical and the traditional, formal mastery and aesthetic “murder,” is among his radical achievements.
The exhibition’s principal goal is to illuminate the particular and changing character of Miró’s challenge to painting during these years, a period of his work that is generally under-recognized and not well understood. This exhibition reunites works from long-separated series, including over 20 works never before seen in the United States. The Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, have each contributed a number of important loans to the exhibition, among them the Pompidou’s remarkable Portrait of a Dancer (1928), which has never been shown in the United States and which, for the first time since leaving Miró’s studio, will be reunited in this exhibition with the two other extant works from the artist’s series of Spanish Dancer collages.
The exhibition is organized to follow Miró’s practice of conceiving and executing his works in distinct series, adopting the artist’s own groupings and, in the case of those works that he dated by day, month, and year, reflecting the sequence of presentation that he determined. The installation is structured around 12 series created between 1927 and 1937, while working in Paris, Montroig (a rural village on the coast of Catalonia), and Barcelona. It begins with a 1927 group of works on unprimed canvas and concludes with 1937’s singular, hallucinatory painting, Still Life with Old Shoe, a work that establishes a historical endpoint for this decade-long period of experimentation. The tight chronological framework affords the opportunity to present individual series of works in sustained depth.
Constructions and Objects, 1930–32: Working in Montroig between August and November 1930, Miró created as many as 12 relief constructions, although only the two on view in this gallery are known to have survived. The following year he began to make small objects, including the six presented in this gallery, that frequently combine found materials with painted figures and passages of glued sand, juxtaposing real-world objects with imaginative images to create a richly volatile mix of painting and assemblage. Miró and the Surrealists pointedly referred to many of the three-dimensional works he made between 1931 and 1932 as objects, not sculptures, to underscore their distance from aesthetic conventions and norms. Wood panels and blocks recur frequently, both as defiant references to the tradition of painting on wood and as surfaces onto which objects are nailed or stapled.
Still Life with Old Shoe, 1937: Miró left Barcelona for Paris sometime before October 28, 1936. With the civil war in Spain advancing without a foreseeable end, he decided to remain in the French capital; his wife and daughter joined him in December. They would not return to Spain for four years. On January 12, 1937, Miró announced his intent to do “something absolutely different,” and abruptly returned to working from life—from the observation of an external model, of real objects arranged in space. The result was the incandescent, hallucinatory painting Still Life with Old Shoe, which marks a historical endpoint to the decade-long period presented in this exhibition. The painting is both a still life and a landscape, in which the irregular back edge of the tabletop can also be read as an undulating horizon line. Scale and perspective have been adjusted, so that the worn old shoe dwarfs the surrounding objects. The color is highly saturated and dissonant, and the objects seem to glow from within.
René Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, who was a tailor and textile merchant, and Régina (née Bertinchamps), a milliner until her marriage. Little is known about Magritte’s early life, but he began lessons in drawing in 1910. On 12 March 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Léopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. She was later discovered a mile or so down the nearby river, dead. According to a legend, 13-year-old Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water, but recent research has discredited this story, which may have originated with the family nurse. Supposedly, when his mother was found, her dress was covering her face, an image that has been suggested as the source of several of Magritte’s paintings in 1927–1928 of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants. Magritte’s earliest paintings, which date from about 1915, were Impressionistic in style. From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, under Constant Montald, but found the instruction uninspiring.
Pablo Picasso was trained in the strict rules of academic painting at a very early age, first by his father, José Ruiz-Blasco, a teacher at the fine art school in Málaga and director of the Malaga Museum, and then as a student (1893-1899) at the fine arts school of La Corùna, at La Lonja (Barcelona), and then at the San Fernando Academy (Madrid). Drawings from the antique, statuary and architectonics, copies of paintings by the great Spanish masters and the study of the history of European art formed the core of this training, rooted in the humanist pictorial tradition which reminds us that Picasso was born in the 19th century (1881). Academic drawings, history paintings, genre scenes, epic or religious compositions, sombre effects, large, pretentious canvases, competitions, official painting and art galleries were the daily labour, the references and prospects of his formative years. 
Confronting past and present, going beyond changes in style and formal innovations, the exhibition presents, in a cross between thematic and chronological approaches, guided by Picasso’s painting alone: El Greco, Vélasquez, Goya, Zurbaran, Ribera, Melendez, Poussin, Le Nain, Dubois, Chardin, David, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Courbet, Lautrec, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Douanier Rousseau, Titien, Cranach, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Spanish, French, Italian, or German, these artists are the multifaceted framework of a narrow motif in which painting learns from painting. 
Born in Falkirk in 1931, Blackadder studied at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art. Her early work was shaped by her acquaintance with the Scottish painters William Gillies, William MacTaggart and Anne Redpath, whom she met through her studies. Blackadder’s outstanding technical ability was visible from the outset and she thrived in an environment which focused on the primacy of drawing and observation. The exhibition will begin with early drawings of the Italian landscape and its architecture, shown alongside portraits from the period. This will include one of Blackadder herself completed when she was just twenty. These striking works still appear fresh over fifty years later, demonstrating her innate ability with paint and line. From the 1960s onwards, the motif of still-life became key to her development. Like other individual artistic voices of her generation, such as David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin, Blackadder quickly saw the possibilities offered by the vibrant colour and dynamism of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. Her subsequent works injected new life into the Edinburgh School tradition of finding subject matter in the surrounding world. Dazzling canvases, such as Flowers and a Red Table, will fill the central room of the exhibition, revealing the energising effect these developments have had on her art.
The display will also include the artist’s Japanese-inspired prints, which combine materials such as gold leaf with more conventional printing methods to create exquisite and precious works. The exhibition will conclude with recent and new painting, drawing and printmaking by an artist who continues to work tirelessly. Endlessly inspired by the world around her, she brings the same energy to her art now as she did at the outset of what has become a long and pre-eminent career.
An artist of his
Included in the exhibition are important paintings shown in his first solo exhibition at the Stendahl Gallery, and his first museum exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1945, which the L.A. Times called an exhibition of “…dynamic power…a striking transfer of feeling into form.” Following that museum exhibition, Burkhardt was both critically celebrated and “censored,” as his works proved controversial in the years leading up to the McCarthy Era, when modern artists in L.A. were seen as Communist threats. Particularly controversial were his anti-war paintings and Hollywood studio strike paintings, including his “indictment” of then, Screen Actor Guild head, Ronald Reagan. “Less incendiary” subjects also proved controversial, such as his Crucifixion Series – condemned for his use of red color and abstract style, regarded as subversive; examples of which are included in the exhibition. Works of the 1950s onward were hugely influential to young artists emerging onto the scene.