Joan Punyet Miró: What he liked most about New York City was the activity.
He said that it was like a punch in the face. He was so happy in New York City.
He always want to come back.
He loved New York City.
It was electric.
Shocking.
Catchy.
Everything.
You name it.
Anne Umland: It got very quiet.
Joan: I like how you got the first room, first gallery with all these paintings are just...
so, so profound.
Purples and greens and blacks and yellows.
Anne: Right so it's sort of observed reality but then hyper reality, right?
Because those colors.
Joan: So it's a collage.
Anne: So it's a collage!
Joan: A painting collage.
Anne: Yes, exactly!
So it starts as early as 1917.
Joan: The rabbit, the rooster, the pot, the red pepper, the onion
and the depiction of the cloth is just something alive.
The life force that I'm getting from the earth to really give me this
kind of great food and then make me be able to just go to Paris
reinforcing my energy and my identity as a Catalan international.
Anne: It's sort of an interior space, but then it's green like the earth,
like the grass, like the fields rising up is another way that
it's both a room space and a landscape space.
Anne: You pick a picture now.
What should we look at next?
Joan: Well, well.
I like this one.
Anne: Oh yeah?
Joan: Or should we go to Birth of the World?
Anne: Oh. Let's look at this one! Just for a minute. Oh, shall we just?
Joan: He was really going through a great, extraordinary metamorphosis.
Going into the world of dreams, of perceptions or visions at night.
Anne: Right.
Joan: The fish is just reduced to one skeleton.
The fish is sticking his red tongue out to catch a mosquito
Anne: [laughter]
and then the hunter comes down to have his rabbit grilled here
and then this amazing eye is watching upon everything as if he was like a god,
a presence, a spooky eye looking upon everything, you know?
Anne: What did Miró say?
He said it's the eye of the picture that looks at us.
Anne: He would talk about the things he would do to try to achieve a heightened state of awareness
akin to meditation right just to get to that space, that place where the world drops away
right and the imagination enters in and it's really about letting your subjective self,
which we can't avoid, color your perceptions of the external world.
Joan: Miró was able to go to the most spooky, dark, and hidden corner of his subconscious mind
to cut out or to get out all the images to put them on canvases.
Anne: How do you think he dreamed up doing a background like that,
because really it doesn't exist before this.
Joan: Absolutely, very simple.
You are able to catch the moment just before you fall asleep,
Anne: Uh huh.
Joan: you have these kind of blurry images that are just chaotic
and you have these kind of different lights that move around
Anne: Mhm.
Joan: So those are the visions that Miró was catching.
When you close your eyelids and you are about to fall in REM number one.
Anne: He said well this red dot and the yellow line descending from it for him represented
a star.
Joan: The female sex and the penis and then here this kind of espermatozoidal figure.
Joan: And then you have to have the courage to attack huge canvases and just do it!
René Gaffé, the guy from Brussels he bought it, he took it away because it was too radical.
This painting could not be shown anyway because they would have said...
Anne: ...everybody laughed at him.
Joan: Absolutely!
Anne: And they still— you know if you go on our Instagram site there are still some
comments about Birth of the World that "my kid could do that."
Joan: This is a real monster.
The teeth are like Dracula about to suck your blood away
and this very psychedelic, wide open monster full of tragedy and despair recalls the battlefield
of seeing people being killed by shotguns.
Anne: And didn't he always say too he thought with his art it had a moral and ethical purpose?
Joan: Yes.
Anne: And that was to communicate a vision of hope.
Joan: Yes.
Anne: Or of a space beyond the squalid world that people were living through at those moments.
So it's the pessimist who yet believes in the transcendent power of the work that he's
making or that's why he makes it because he wants to believe that.
Joan: Look right here!
That's the Miró sculpture.
Isn't that big?
It's called the Moonbird.
Amazing sculpture, man.
So that is a very...
...special way to portray a bird, to make it very biomorphic because it could be a chameleon,
it could be a bull.
He developed these huge sizes to be able to have direct connections with the people on the streets
and be part of this city where he was so happy. New York.
Having the chance to visit Miró is...it's a blessing.
Anne: I think that's firstly the way to look at it, right?
We are all works in progress until it ends.