[Report] “Miró Exhibition” opens at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Approximately 100 masterpieces by the 20th century master, including the “Constellations” series, are on display.

A large-scale exhibition looking back on the 70-year creative career of Juan Miro, one of Spain's three great masters alongside Picasso and Dali, has opened at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno, Tokyo. The exhibition will run from March 1 to July 6, 2025.

*The images in this article were taken with permission at a press preview.

Juan Miro (1893-1983), a painter from Catalonia, Spain, gained fame in the 1920s as a representative Surrealist painter. He is known for his colorful and unique poetic style, which depicts motifs found in nature such as the sun, stars, and moon as symbolic symbols, but he continued to challenge himself with new forms of expression and pursue pure and universal art until his death at the age of 90. He was considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

This exhibition will bring together about 100 masterpieces, including his representative Constellations series, paintings, ceramics, sculptures, and other works from his early to later years, to comprehensively introduce Miro's entire artistic career . This project is in response to the worldwide trend of reevaluation of Miro 40 years after his death, and it will be the largest retrospective in Japan since the exhibition in 1966, which Miro cooperated with while he was still alive.

The exhibition is divided into five chapters.
The young Miro fell ill after failing to get a job as an accountant recommended by his father. While recuperating at a villa in the mountain village of Mont Roig, he resolved to pursue his long-held dream of becoming a painter. In 1912, Miro returned to art school and studied cutting-edge art trends. Chapter 1, "Young Miro: Determination to Art," features works that show how Miro adopted various styles of painting during this period as he sought his own expression, including Cubism, Fauvism, and Cezanne, who was regarded as a father figure by the avant-garde artists of the time.

Miró left behind many works that use the emotional landscapes of Montroig as a motif, including his early masterpiece House with Palm Trees (1918). Montroig, where he strengthened his artistic beliefs, was the source of all his creative endeavors throughout his life, a place where he deepened his thoughts on art, and a place where he reaffirmed his identity as a Catalan. This work is a representative example of Miró's so-called "miniaturist period," in which he abandoned the Fauvist style that had greatly influenced him until then, and began to focus on depicting fine details.

In 1920, Miro first visited Paris, the center of the arts, and was fascinated by the modernity of the city and avant-garde art. The following year, he set up a studio in Paris and commuted back and forth to Montroig. Inspired by his interactions with surrealist artists and poets in the city, he became interested in a more poetic style of expression that was far removed from concreteness. From 1925 to 1927, he produced over 100 "dream paintings," in which he added amorphous, dynamic lines to vast backgrounds that represent emptiness, using them as "symbols showing the progression of dreams." Among these is the "Painting = Poetry" series , in which he painted insubstantial words as if they were motifs, without distinguishing them from concrete objects, freeing them from their original role.

Chapter 2, "Mont Roig – Paris: From the Countryside to the City of the Avant-Garde," introduces these activities from the 1920s. The "Dream Paintings" became a hot topic in the Paris art world, and Miro became popular as a surrealist painter in both name and reality.

Miró, who was deeply influenced by 17th-century Dutch painting, painted Dutch Interior I (1928) based on Hendrik Solf's The Lute Player (1661). The exhibition also features panels displaying Solf's original work and the preparatory sketches for this work, and by comparing them, it becomes clear that Miró has eliminated three-dimensionality and perspective from Solf's naturalistic everyday scene, transforming it into a surreal world of flat colors and organic forms.

Miró went into exile in Spain when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and continued to create in solitude throughout the ensuing Second World War, avoiding the ravages of war.
Chapter 3, "Escape and Poetics: Against the Backdrop of the War Era," highlights the masterpiece "Constellation" series , which he began producing in 1940 when he fled from Paris to a village in Normandy and completed while moving between Mallorca and Mont Roig.

The Constellations series are small gouache paintings on paper instead of canvas. It is said that Miro deliberately escaped from the horrific reality, comforted himself with the vast and beautiful starry sky and music by Mozart and Bach, and used them as inspiration to show hope beyond reality. Of the 23 works in total, three will be exhibited in this exhibition : Morning Star, Woman and Bird, and Night Figures Guided by the Phosphorescent Trail of a Snail (1940). This series is also notable for the fact that Miro established a symbolic system, but since each work is scattered around the world, this is a rare opportunity to view multiple works together.

On the other hand, from around 1928, Miro began to criticize the commercialization of art and the excessive attention given to artists, and he felt the urge to "assassinate painting." Gradually, he began to create what could be called anti-art and anti-painting styles, such as collages and objects that coexist with materials and elements unrelated to painting, such as "Untitled (Lovers of the Night)" (1934), which features toilet paper pasted onto aluminum foil, which is featured in this chapter. He continued to question the nature of traditional painting.

Miró first visited the United States in 1947 to be commissioned to paint a mural, but his reputation there had already been growing six years earlier, with a retrospective of his work being held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During his stay there, Miró was inspired by young artists, including Jackson Pollock, and after returning home he turned his attention to a wide range of creative endeavors, including etchings, lithographs, ceramics in collaboration with artisans, and sculpture.

Chapter 4, "Dream Atelier: Introspection and New Creations," traces these postwar developments in the 1950s and 1960s.

By the way, many of Miro's works have straightforward titles, but in fact, he liked to give a playful and poetic feeling to the relationship between the title and the work. A Red Dragonfly Pursuing a Snake Spiralling to a Comet (1951) is a typical example. Guided by the descriptive title, the viewer's eyes are misled on the screen just like a spiraling snake, trying to find the comet, snake, or red dragonfly. The vivid color scheme, meandering lines, and eerie depictions that encourage this curiosity are all Miro's devices. The ingenuity of the composition is astonishing.

This chapter also shows how his works, which began in 1956 after he completed his long-awaited large studio in Mallorca, became increasingly large, influenced by the giant paintings of American Abstract Expressionism. The large painting Figures before the Sun (1968) is one of the culminations of Miro's figurative language, and was inspired by the work of the Japanese painter-monk Sengai Gibon, who expressed the universe with the shapes of circles, triangles, and squares.

Miró had an interest in Japan from the early days, and during his visit to Japan in 1966, he recognized an affinity with traditional Japanese art and the ideas of Japanese artists. This work, with its confident brushstrokes evocative of calligraphy, is an important example of Miró's oriental sensibility, and it will be the first time in about 40 years that it will be exhibited outside Barcelona.

Chapter 5, "Towards the Essence of Painting," features works created in the 1970s and 1980s in his later years. Although Miro had already established himself as a world-famous master, he continued to examine his own activities even in his later years and did not hesitate to make bold and unconventional attempts.

For example, Burnt Canvas 2 (1973) is one of a series of five paintings in which paint was vigorously poured onto a white canvas, then stomped on it, cut up with a knife, and finally soaked in gasoline and set on fire. Rather than being the result of an impulsive act, the intention behind the work was to explore the beauty hidden in the materiality of the scorched canvas and paper, but this work also conveys an unfading energy and a strong rebellious spirit against art as high culture and art that has been reduced to mere property.

In his later years, Miro began to use brush strokes that reflected the movement of the body more. In his triptych Fireworks I, II, III (1974), which is similar in image to ink painting, Miro violently splashed paint and then applied brushstrokes over the paint that dripped down due to the action of gravity. This was influenced by American Abstract Expressionist painters, and he used a technique in which the creative process was guided by a new composition that was born from chance. This work is being exhibited in Japan for the first time.

Chapters 4 and 5 also explore Miro's active social, political, and cultural commitments through his poster production.

In the 1960s and 1970s, during the final days of the Franco dictatorship in Spain, Miro produced numerous posters as a way of expressing the hopes and demands of people who lacked a forum to openly voice their opinions. He also said, "An artist is someone who speaks out to convey something when others are silent," and the exhibition emphasizes Miro's stance as an artist, that is, that he did not study art throughout his life simply to speak about his own interests.

How did the painter Miro plunge into cutting-edge art throughout the 20th century and establish his own style while constantly placing himself in a state of creative tension? Come experience the process of his exploration and the appeal of his one-of-a-kind art at this exhibition.

■ Overview of the "Milo Exhibition"

*The contents of this article are current as of the time of coverage. Please check the official exhibition website for the latest information.

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