Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern | reviews, news & interviews
Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern
Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern
The Catalan artist lurched from style to style - and the results weren't always pretty
Tuesday, 19 April 2011

'Dog Barking at the Moon': Miró used recurring motifs in his work, including the ladder, the dog and the moon
I used to love Joan Miró. Those cute biomorphic forms; those elegantly elusive doodles; those engagingly befuddled, cartoonish faces, each staring forlornly out of the cosmic soup of Miró’s playful imagination; and, of course, those bright, jazzy colours. But I used to love all that in the way that I loved Millais’s Ophelia floating in her deathbed weedy pond, or in the same way that I was taken in by Dalí's “disturbing” melting clocks. You see, it was just one big teenage crush, and, like all heady teenage crushes, I got over it. And when the infatuation faded, I realised there just wasn’t enough there to sustain a properly grown-up, meaningful relationship.
I used to love Joan Miró. Those cute biomorphic forms; those elegantly elusive doodles; those engagingly befuddled, cartoonish faces, each staring forlornly out of the cosmic soup of Miró’s playful imagination; and, of course, those bright, jazzy colours. But I used to love all that in the way that I loved Millais’s Ophelia floating in her deathbed weedy pond, or in the same way that I was taken in by Dalí's “disturbing” melting clocks. You see, it was just one big teenage crush, and, like all heady teenage crushes, I got over it. And when the infatuation faded, I realised there just wasn’t enough there to sustain a properly grown-up, meaningful relationship.
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