BERN.- Between 28 January and 7 May 2023 the Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting an extensive exhibition to the little-known late work of the Catalan artist Joan Miró. The expressive large-format works show a surprisingly raw side of his works, even for lovers of Miró’s, and are distinguished by a constant search for new expressive forms.

Joan Miró is known for his colourful surrealist dream worlds created in the 1920s and 1930s. He began to question traditional painting early on. Particu- larly after his long-awaited move into his own large studio in Palma in 1956, the Catalan artist extended his concept of painting in a hitherto unfamiliar direction. He revised the whole of his previous œuvre, reworked early pieces or returned to works that had been left incomplete. This moment of self- criticism and a new beginning forms the starting point for the exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee.

The exhibition features 73 works, mostly from the late 1960s, the 1970s and the early 1980s. Most come from the holdings of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona as well as the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Mallorca, and are being shown in Switzerland for the first time.




‘We need to follow what this young man is doing.’ Joan Miró and Paul Klee In 1956 – at the age of 63 and 20 years after he first expressed the wish – Joan Miró was able to fulfil his dream of having a big studio of his own, and moved to Palma with his family. By that time his life and work had been marked by many changes: until the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in 1936 Miró spent about four months each year in Paris and the rest of his time in Spain, in Barcelona or Mont-roig, where his family had a country house. While he nurtured his contacts with the art scene in Paris, he was able to work focused and without distraction in Spain. In Paris he met many artists and poets from the Surrealist movement, and made friends with André Masson, who had his studio next door. It was Masson who drew Miró’s attention to the work of Paul Klee.

‘Klee was the pivotal encounter of my life. Under his influence my painting freed itself from all earthly bonds. Klee made it clear to me that a patch, a spiral, even a dot can be every bit as much an object of painting as a face, a landscape or a monument,’ Joan Miró said of Paul Klee, who was fourteen years his elder. The Swiss artist is also said to have expressed positive views about the Catalan’s work to his Bauhaus colleague Wassily Kandinsky, with the words ‘we need to follow what this young man is doing’. Even though the two never met in person, the encounter with Paul Klee’s work made a lasting impression on Joan Miró. Both artists, for example, engaged with children’s drawings and prehistoric art, and this is apparent in the reduced formal language of their own works.

The outbreak of the Spanish civil war forced the Miró family to stay in France between 1936 and 1940. After the invasion of German troops in 1940 they re- turned to fascist Spain where Miró worked in a modest studio in Barcelona as well as the country house in Mont-roig until the end of the Second World War. In spite of these many upheavals, Miró’s work was enormously fruitful during those years.
Miró’s late work: reduction and concentration.

In his new studio in Palma, Miró was finally able to bring together all his box- es of earlier works. When he began unpacking and reordering them, he was able to review his paintings, drawings, drafts and sketchbooks: ‘In the new studio I had enough space for the first time. I was able to unpack crates of works that went back years and years. I had not seen these things since leaving Paris […] before the war. […] When I finally unpacked them in Mallorca, I went through a process of self-examination.’

After this critical ‘self-examination’, Miró came to see conventional easel painting as restrictive and sought new forms of expression. He wanted to distance himself from his earlier Surrealist-influenced works, which had already been commercialised by postcards and prints, and develop a simpler, univer- sal pictorial language. His art was to be accessible and comprehensible to everyone. For example, rather than using the brush he ‘painted’ with fire, scissors and a wet broom – an act of destruction that produced new creative results, the ‘toiles brûlées’. He extended his technique to include tapestries and the so-called ‘sobreteixims’, in which he combined tapestry, collage and painting. He worked with textiles, or overpainted classical paintings he bought at the flea market with impulsive brushstrokes and simple poetic signs such as circles, stars and crescent moons.

Trips to the USA and Japan confirmed him in his new artistic endeavours. He was interested in and inspired by the large formats and gestural method of the artists of Abstract Expressionism in the USA, as well as the calligraphy, emptiness and concentration in Japanese culture. He produced large-format paintings and playful ceramic and bronze sculptures reminiscent of Pop Art, whose undiminished artistic topicality remains impressive even today.