Review by Choice Review
This splendid catalogue for an exhibition at the Tate Modern and Washington, DC's National Gallery is both a historical overview of Miro's long career and a careful--and welcome--explanation of the pointed anti-Franco political implications of the artist's work as well. Chapters by Daniel and Gale, the cocurators and coeditors of the catalogue, provide the chronological framework for Miro's artistic development; following these are provocative essays by writers that illuminate particular stylistic and iconographical aspects of the artist's work. A detailed chronology, organized in the form of a time line, details the artist's history in relation to occurrences in the art world and to contemporary historical events that pertain to the understanding of Miro's painting and sculpture. Numerous superb color illustrations bring readers close to the work. Both a coffee-table book and a brilliant intellectual explication of Miro's career, this catalogue is a model of comprehensiveness in its organization, clarity of historical and ideological presentation, and illustrative materials. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through professionals/practitioners; general readers. J. T. Paoletti emeritus, Wesleyan University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The widely lauded Catalan artist Joan Miro receives a fresh appraisal in this collection of artwork and essays compiled by Daniel and Gale, both of London's Tate Modern. Focusing on Miro as an artist deeply engaged with the political world of 20th century Spain, the collected essays provide new insights into Miro's most famous works (including The Hope of a Condemned Man I, II, III and Head of a Catalan Peasant) as well as many others strikingly reproduced herein. Loathe to engage in propaganda or social realism, reluctant to sign his name to surrealism (though Andre Breton called him "the most "surrealist" of us all"), and frustrated with the "parochialism" of the rural Catalans, whose cause he championed-Miro's engagement with politics can seem as complex and contradictory as his eruptive paintings. Through the critical writing, however, he emerges as a consistently moral force, driven by the "long-held belief that the revolution of form can, by provoking, awaken a sleeping public" and dancing a careful line between withdrawal and engagement. While the chronicling of his political relocations and Spanish history can be repetitive, what speaks loudest is the portrait of Miro as an artist as committed to liberty and social transformation as to art itself. 200 color illustrations. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
