Borràs, Maria Lluïsa

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

JOAN M I R Ó  
MIRÓ'S PRINTS 
FOR MIRO, PRINTMAKING WAS A TECHNIQUE, LIKE 
PAINTING OR SCULPTURE, RULED BY LAWS O F  ITS OWN. 
FROM CHISEL TO DRY-POINT, FROM ETCHING TO 
AQUATINT, FROM SOFT VARNISH TO CARVING, THE ARTIST 
EXPERIMENTED EXHAUSTIVELY, INVENTING VARIATIONS 
AND TECHNIQUES WHICH HE OFTEN COMBINED, IN A 
PROCESS THAT WENT FROM THE FIG-URATIVE ART O F  THE 
THIRTIES TO PURE ABSTRACTION. 
MARlA L L U ~ S A  B O R R A S  A R T  C R I T I C  
print can have al1 the beauty 
and dignity of a good painting," 
wrote Joan Miró, and indeed, 
printmaking was an important aspect of 
his art and made up a large part of his 
production, as a technique governed by 
laws of its own, just like painting and 
sculpture. When he first took up print- 
making, Miró was thirty-seven years old 
and had already made a name for him- 
self as a painter with a language very 
much his own. It was like starting from 
scratch and travelling a long road 
from engraving at the service of figur- 
ative art to that which explores the few 
but sufficient formal resources, to cap- 
ture the renovatory ideas of the art of this 
century. From chisel to dry-point, from 
etching to aquatint, from soft varnish to 
carving, the artist experimented exhaus- 
tively, at the same time inventing varia- 
tions and techniques which he often 
combined, in a process that went from 
the figurative art of the thirties to pure 
abstraction; from the etching Dafnis i 
Cloe (1933), with its painstaking tech- 
nique, to the resounding explosion of 
1963, when he produced aquatints like 
Lluna i vent, Fons marí and L'ocell del 
paradís, colour lithographs of great 
energy and power he called Dansa (bar- 
barous, nuptial fire-dancing), or else 
combinations of etching and aquatint in 
JOAN M I R Ó  
AUTORETRA T. 1 938 
such remarkable pieces as La cabellera 
de Berenice or L'ocell del foc. (In 1928, 
Miró had made eight "pochoirs", or 
stencils, to illustrate a story by Lise 
Hirst, I l  était une petite pie. Six years 
later, in 1934, he returned to the "po- 
choir" procedure for the special number 
of the magazine D'ací i d'alla, and again 
in the poster Aidez I'Espagne. 
Miró's graphics speak as eloquently as 
any of his work of his constant, bitter 
struggle against the facile. His mastery 
of the technique, rather than sinking 
into routine, opened new roads to crea- 
tion for him, as we can see in this long 
period of thirty years marked through- 
out by the constant search for methods 
and processes that would make it possi- 
ble to work faster while at the same 
time satisfying his wish for spontaneity 
and freshness. 
Of Miró's constant searching we have 
ample evidence in a letter he wrote in 
1968 to the excellent master engraver 
Henri Goetz, the inventor of the car- 
borundum technique: "1 have been 
spending a few days with Dutrou in Saint 
Paul, and we experimented with the 
new process you showed him. The re- 
sults are exciting and very beautiful. 
The artist can express himself more 
richly and freely, achieving a beautiful 
texture and a stronger line. If you have 
no objection, 1 would like to make use 
of your procedure". 
Some months later he wrote again: 
"These days 1 have been working with 
Dutrou in Saint Paul and 1 realise more 
and more the richness and the new hori- 
zons your process brings to engraving. 
Never before had materials of such 
power been obtained. 1 can express myself 
with a single outpouring of my spirit, 
without any hindrance and without 
being obstructed or slowed down by an 
outworn technique with which 1 risk 
deforming the free expression, the pu- 
rity and freshness of the final result". 
The work of the skilled engraver and 
stamper, which are fundamental to 
printmaking, became for Joan Miró an 
excellent source of human contact. He 
always kept himself to a limited group 
of trusted artisans with whom he 
worked in an air of profound friendship, 
first in Paris, in Louis Marcoussis's 
workshop, and also for many years in 
the charismatic Lacouriere workshop. 
Later on, with Hayter, in New York, he 
reached the height of technical perfec- 
tion. After 1948, when Aimée Maeght, 
his dealer, became his main publisher, 
Miró produced a large quantity of 
graphic work: lithographs in Paris, in the 
Mourlot Freres workshop, and after 
1964 in the Adrien Maeght workshop 
with Robert Dutrou and René Le 
Moigne. In Barcelona, he worked first 
with Enric Tormo (Barcelona series), 
and after 1968 with Jaume Soto of the 
Polígrafa workshops. During the seven- 
ties he also worked with José Torralba 
and Joan Barbara. 
One aspect that should not be forgotten 
is printmaking's quality as a multiple 
GRAN PERSONATGE NEGRE. 1 938 
work, the possibility it gives the artist to 
obtain various originals from a single 
plate, something which makes it acces- 
sible to a larger number of people (it has 
even been called, not without a certain 
measure of demagogy, "the democratic 
art"). Joan Miró was also well aware of 
this, and once said to Goetz, "from the 
social and human point of view, the 
print -even if produced in a limited 
edition- can reach further than a paint- 
ing, which will always be religiously 
guarded in the museum". 
The artist was initiated to the world of 
printmaking thanks to the poets, since 
it was Tristan Tzara who introduced 
him to Louis Marcoussis when he sug- 
gested to him that he illustrate his poem 
"L'arbre des voyageurs". It was 1930 
and Miró made three prints in the Dada 
spirit, using the lithographic technique 
for the first time. These were also the 
years of the Rue Blomet, when the 
workshop of his neighbour, Masson, 
was port of cal1 for Antonin Artaud, 
Paul Eluard, Max Jacob, Michel Leiris, 
Georges Limbour, André Malraux and, 
in general, al1 the Surrealists. 
Soon afterwards, he made his first 
etchings for Georges Hugnet's poem, "En- 
fances", at Marcoussis's workshop. In 
1933, commissioned by Yvon Zervos, 
editor of Cahiers d'Art, he made the 
etching Dafnis i Cloe, mentioned 
earlier. Miró devoted himself fully to 
printmaking. Péret's Au paradis des fan- 
1 'ANTIT~TE DE TZARA, 1 947 
tornes also dates from 1933, as do Alice 
Paalen's Sablier couché and Casse-nuit 
and he collaborated in the album, titled 
by Paul Eluard, Solidarité, a protest 
against the Fascist powers in which 
Kandinsky, Hayter, Masson, Picasso 
and Tanguy also joined. 
By the end of the thirties he had earned 
a name for himself as one of the most 
important of the poets' collaborators, 
since rather than simply illustrate a 
given poem, what he did was to create 
the atmosphere, surreal and full of 
myths, revealing deep-seated impulses. 
In short, during these years Miró formu- 
lated a poetry of his own. 
The period from 1937 to 1938 was to be 
enormously productive, as if print- 
making were the ideal medium to ex- 
press an atmosphere of anguish, of ter- 
ror -the panic of war- with the defor- 
mation of bodies and objects; but he 
also did this in the painting Natura 
morta del sabatot. To create this at- 
mosphere he used the dry-point (El des- 
vetllament del gegant, La geganta or 
else the beautiful Serie negra i verme- 
Ila). 1938 is the year of L'autoretrat, the 
last work he did at the workshop of 
Marcoussis, who died soon afterwards. 
Miró covered, or rather transformed his 
features in a sort of network of flames 
and stars, of birds and sexual organs, of 
suns and moons, in a process of disinte- 
gration of his face, and also, perhaps, as 
a kind of premonition of his later cons- 
tellations. Various tnals and versions of 
this self-portrait have survived on al1 
sorts of paper as well as on parchment 
and in one case even on canvas. On 
signing it he wrote the name of Mar- 
coussis next to his own, in recognition 
of his friend's teaching and perfect co- 
llaboration. 
Black appears in al1 its intensity and 
solidity in the series Barcelona and 
drives Joan Miró to explore in depth in 
other lithographs the qualities of black 
as a colour. At Mourlot Freres he pro- 
duced the striking Gran personatge ne- 
gre and the Personatge sobre fons negre. 
Afterwards he continued to work with 
black in the series of etchings he did 
with Lacouriere, in which he looks for 
the effects of black obtainable through 
"morsure directe". From the sixties, 
we have yet another testimony of his 
interest in black, the supreme colour, 
in his use of the carborundum process 
which Henri Goetz had introduced 
him to. 
After World War 11, in 1947, when he 
was in the United States to work on a 
ceramic mural for a Cincinatti hotel, he 
met up with Stanley William Hayter 
again, in New York, and immediately 
started working in his "Taller 17" in 
Harlem, where he experimented with 
textures using different kinds of soft 
varnishes, and with colour engraving 
using more than one plate, with which 
he achieved etchings of extreme techni- 
DANSA NUPCIAl. 1963 
cal complexity. The backgrounds are 
hazy and carefuily worked so as to give 
emphasis to the figures that are repre- 
sented. He worked steadily at the illus- 
trations for Tristan Tzara's "Antitete"; 
for which, in his search for relief effects, 
he made use of bits of copper arranged 
on the plate. 
He returned to Paris in 1948, and while 
preparing his exhibition at the Maeght 
gallery, introduced by Tristan Tzara, 
and working at the Mourlot Frkres 
atelier, he discovered the colour litho- 
graphy process which was to be his fa- 
vourite technique during the forties, the 
lithographic pencil becoming almost as 
useful to him as the paintbrush. During 
1952 and 1953, Miró worked a great 
deal with the "morsure directe" process 
in a series of etchings printed at the 
Lacourikre workshop in eight states in 
black, and in other, colour states using a 
single plate. Miró said he liked the thick 
dark contours of the edges obtained 
with the "morsure directe" process. 
Those of us who knew Joan Miró well 
knew that he took notes in a little note- 
book which he always carried in his top 
jacket pocket, though he avoided draw- 
ing in it unless he was quite alone. In it 
he recorded any form that came into his 
mind. Afterwards, in the workshop, he 
would choose one and think about it, 
using any piece of paper that came to 
hand to quickly draw endless sketches 
based on that first idea. Eventually it 
would become a completed composi- 
tion which he would transfer to a large 
piece of paper so as not to forget it. But 
when the moment came to attack the 
copper plate with the acid, he never 
needed to refer to anything, although he 
liked to have the sketches close at hand 
"SO as not to lose contact". 
While al1 this shows that he brought his 
ideas to fruition very gradually, at the 
crucial moment when he came face to 
face with the plate or the stone the lines 
were free and spontaneous, unplanned 
and automatic. Even though he had 
followed a deliberate and perhaps lengthy 
plan, when the moment came he would 
take a deep breath and say, "Let's go". 
From then on everything seemed to be 
driven by a force within him or by 
chance. 
"No thing is lowly, nor any hour cruel", 
wrote Salvat Papasseit soon after he 
had asked Miró (who was only a year 
older than him) for an illustration for 
the cover of his magazine Arc Voltaic 
(Arc Voltaic, No. 1, Barcelona, Februa- 
ry 19 18). Years later, as if echoing the 
words of the poet, the painter said, 
"Everywhere there is sunlight, a blade 
of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly". 
Miró always enjoyed his memories of 
junk-shops and the surprising forms of 
the rejected material he found as he 
went round Paris with Louis Marcous- 
sis in search of old copper plates. 
During the forties, he applied his in- 
terest in non-artistic mqterials directly to 
painting so as to achieve greater expres- 
siveness and at the same time empha- 
size the expressive qualities of the objet 
trouvé. As he himself admitted, "1 am 
like a beggar. When 1 walk 1 always look 
at the ground to see what 1 can find". In 
Palma, every morning, he would walk 
barefoot along the water's edge, stoop- 
ing to pick up anything lying on the 
sand that might attract his attention; 
when he got back to the workshop he 
would place the objects the waves had 
returned to the shore somewhere where 
he could look at them al1 day. 
Although Joan Miró avoided intellec- 
tual discussions, and in spite of being 
reluctant to quote from his reading, 1 
once heard him mention that John of 
the Cross had said that to obtain every- 
thing, it was necessary to have nothing: 
an idea that comes close to Salvat Pa- 
passeit's poem. The Japanese poet Ta- 
kiguchi, a very close friend of Miró's, 
introduced him to the Zen philosophy 
which so fascinated him ever since the 
days at the Rue Blomet. After his visit 
to Japan in 1966, there is a palpable 
change in his work, which, leading on 
from the search for emptiness of 1925, 
incorporated large spaces which stress 
the power of the sign that makes poetry 
out of nothing. 


Miró's Prints

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