Painted Poems; As the Pompidou makes clear, Joan Miro waged war on art--and won.(Biography)

Byline: Dana Thomas

"I am sure that we, the young people who had the good fortune to be born after Picasso... have a goal of capital importance," Spanish artist Joan Miro wrote to his friend the poet Roland Tual in 1922. "We are living in a blessed time that will bear fruit... [and] demands a great sense of individual responsibility." Miro took this mission so seriously that he ended up changing how art was made. "Joan Miro (1917-1934): The Birth of the World," a powerful show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (through June 28), examines this ripening period of the contemporary artist's work. Nearly 240 works, including paintings, collages and drawings, trace Miro's evolution from hungry art student experimenting in the various post-World War I movements to internationally renowned inventor of a distinct new voice: that of the painter-poet, who combined the shifting tools of the trade with the basic vocabulary of human nature to create poignant modern elegies on canvas.

Born into a family of artisans in Barcelona in 1893, Miro took his first drawing classes at 7. Throughout his childhood in the Catalan village of Montroig, he filled notebooks with detailed sketches and eventually enrolled in the same Barcelona art school that Picasso had attended a decade earlier. Later he studied with Francesc D'A. Gali, a respected modern-art teacher. Miro's early paintings show his deep appreciation of contemporary art, particularly cubism. But he was already frustrated. "Here in Barcelona we have a lack of courage," the 24-year-old Miro wrote to a friend. "When the art critics face an outdated academy professor, they melt before him and finish by praising him."

Determined not to follow suit, Miro spent the next decade waging war on painting. Like Picasso, Miro started with a vague realism and then slowly abandoned it until he found a pure style detached from everyday expectations. The opening section of the Pompidou show displays his early, most realistic paintings--including "The Kitchen Garden with Donkey," "SelfPortrait" and "The Table (Still Life with Rabbit)"--which reference cubism in structure, fauvism in color, primitifs in motif, Cezanne in tones and van Gogh in brushstrokes. He was known to work slowly--many of the paintings have dates that span a few years--and with great attention to detail. "After a work session I fall into a chair, totally exhausted, as though I had just made love!" he once wrote to Tual.

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