Educational Media Reviews Online

Narrated by actor Ed Harris, this short documentary tie-in to the National Gallery of Art’s 2012 exhibition is a superb survey of Joan Miro’s life and art. It reveals the personal and historical events that shaped him; it proves how his “desire to escape into pure creativity” produced a body of visionary surrealistic work, and it describes the process and poetry, imagery, motifs, and symbolism of his paintings, prints, engravings, and sculptures.

Born in Barcelona, the capitol of Catalonia, in 1893, Miro’s father urged him to pursue a business career. Following an emotional breakdown at eighteen, Juan went to his family’s country home in Mont-roig. It was there that he turned to art with a passion and a calling. He was inspired by nature and its light, and he said what interested him were things like “the calligraphy of a tree.” “The Farm,” a realistic but dreamlike work, was an early masterpiece. He was intrigued by the Cubist fragmentation he saw in the work of Robert Delauney and Pablo Picasso, a lifelong friend, and then in Paris, Miro was inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger. Surrealists saw Miro’s work and claimed him as one of their own—Andre Breton famously said, “Miro is the most Surrealist of us all.”

Dispirited by Franco’s fascism, Miro and his wife and daughter spent time in Normandy. There, he wrote to his dealer, Pierre Matisse, “I have reached a high degree of poetry, a product of the light.” Eventually moving to Majorca, he vowed to “assassinate painting,” where he began to make collages using wood, nails, metal coil, feathers, pins, and rope. The “anguished expression of the violence emerged in his work, " for example, “His birds were read as aircraft.” In his later years, Jackson Pollock’s drippings inspired Miro.

Comprised of passages of Miro’s own words, documentary footage, interviews with University of Barcelona art historians, still photographs of Miro's work, and a beautifully written and spoken narrative, the film etches Miro’s artistic arc. Like the ladders that often appear in Miro’s work, the “Ladders that reach from the terrestrial to the celestial,” this film is a ladder into Miro’s luminous legacy.