Connected Signs – Joan Miró and Oswaldo Vigas
by Katja Weitering
“For me, art is like life, and life is not pure, life has many nooks. Art is like that: one gets along a little path that goes over another, and you have to go that way. That is a risk. I like taking risks, that is why I do not believe in anything that is pure. Purity is an alienation. The search for purity is a trap, a trap that leads to nothing, and art is not nothing. Art is everything. I believe in an art that gets into everything, in an art that transcends. Therefore, art cannot be pure, it most be contaminated as life is.” – Oswaldo Vigas in El vendedor de orquídeas, 2016
“…on this table I lay down my brushes. The more stains it will make, the more it/they will excite me… One day those dark spots will suddenly be something: a shock. Shocks are necessary in life, quite essential in fact.” - Joan Miró in Georges Raillard, Conversaciones con Miró, 1993.
At first glance, a comparison between Joan Miró (1893-1983) and Oswaldo Vigas does not seem obvious. As far as we can tell, the two artists have never personally met. When Vigas was born in Venezuela, Miró already found himself in the eye of the storm unleashed by Surrealism in Paris and beyond.
Upon closer examination, however, a striking artistic affinity emerges, demonstrated, for example, by a number of recently rediscovered collages that Vigas made upon his arrival in Paris in 1952. Vigas is often readily positioned in relation to Pablo Picasso. In the case of Picasso, it was a matter of admiration and mutual respect, rather than a distinct artistic affinity. The connection between Miró and Vigas has not been explored before, and may shed new light on both oeuvres. In this essay, lines are drawn through time and space and across continents. These lines form connections between the artworks and practices of a Catalan and a Latin-American artist.
Miró and Vigas both considered it their duty to connect the ancient sources of their specific cultures with the modern, through a radically new art. In order to achieve that higher goal, they both, completely independently from one another, developed an original, figurative-abstract imagery. To do this, the boundaries of painting had to be explored and repositioned. In the end, both Miró and Vigas managed to free themselves from this matter. Not the limitations of paint and canvas, but rather the endless possibilities of the medium and the technique formed the leading principle. These artists can be considered outstanding examples of ‘myth-making’ artists, contemporary alchemists who transmuted the rough material at their disposal into an attempt to find a universal elixir. In that approach of their artistic calling lies their artistic affinity.
A free imagination
Paris plays a crucial role in the artistic development of both Miró and Vigas. It is the place where the quest for a free imagination – unhindered by technical or aesthetic restraints – really takes off.
Pre-1940 Paris was marked by a number of small artists’ circles: the representatives of the Dada movement, the strict geometric abstract artists, and the abstract surrealists who let their works come into being through écriture automatique. Miró, born in 1893 in Barcelona, was one of the key figures. His connection to Paris traces back to 1920, the year in which Miró, together with Catalan artist E.C. Ricart, visited the studio of Picasso.[1] In 1921 he travelled to Paris again for his first solo exhibition at Licorne Gallery. There, Miró met André Masson, Tristan Tzara and the French writer and poet Antonin Artaud. From 1922 onwards he lived and worked at the Rue Blomet, the legendary meeting place for surrealists. For young Miró, the contacts with poets and writers opened up a world of poetic dream images, and stimulated the development of his painting toward a highly imaginative style.
In these years, Miró reached an all-decisive breakthrough in his work. In an extremely short period of time, the transition of the year 1923 to 1924, he changed a realist style for an abstract-figurative style consisting of signs. Jaques Dupin speaks of a transition from: “ (…) object to sign, from figurative space to imaginary space, from descriptive realism to a visionary, fantastic art.”[2] La terre labourée (1923-1924) is a magnificent example of that new style. All forms, phenomena and elements, from animal to nature, sun and water, were reduced to mysterious signs. The ear and the eye are surrealist elements that Miró added to the landscape.
For Miró, 30 years old at the time, this radical transformation opened up an endless and poetic universe that he kept exploring until his death. Women, celestial bodies and birds predominate this universe.
It is remarkable that Miró had his breakthrough not in Paris but in the countryside, in the family home at Mont-Roig. The experiences and impressions gathered in the metropolis reached maturity in the familiar and silent surroundings of his native soil. The value Miró attached to his Catalan identity is particularly great. We can see a similar commitment in Vigas, who, upon returning to his home country Venezuela in 1964, arrived at a further liberation of the materials of his painting. The influence of nature, the Latin-American cultural heritage but also the social-political reality in his part of the world make their presence felt in Vigas’ artwork.[3] Just as in Miró’s work, the sign plays a major role. The paintings are populated by recurring mysterious female figures, birds, plant-like forms and moons. Take for example the work Ofrenda (1977). The representation seems to refer to an age-old ritual of the sacrifice, but the form is contemporary.
Three years after leaving Paris, Vigas made the following statement about the use of signs in his work:
“(…) Our continent is full of dark signs and warnings. Telluric signs, magic and exorcism are deep components of our condition. At the same time that they reveal something, these symbols place us and compromise us in a disturbing world of effervescence. Only a few South American painters have come to decipher this underworld. The intention of my painting is to reach them, interpret them and translate them into new warnings.”[4]
The marvellous real
Miró, too, was fascinated by the dark sides of the upper world and the underworld. No less than two world wars and a civil war traverse his artistic career. Even though among the general public his artwork is known as optimistic and cheerful, Miró was especially interested in the darker sides of life.
In Spain civil war broke out in 1936. Miró and his family fled the country and settled in Paris. During the war years, Miró created a highlight within his oeuvre: The Constellations, a series of twenty-three gouaches. The series consists of complex compositions; leaves showing a microcosm with insect-like creatures, half man, half animal. The influence of the Catalan light and landscape is palpable. The despair of the war is expressed, among other things, in the use of a ladder, a way to escape social and political reality. For Miró, freedom in painting and in life were inextricably linked.
After the liberation in 1945, the French capital had an unprecedented appeal to both French and international artists. Among art historians, the Nouvelle École de Paris is still the operative term to refer to the new art movements in post-war Paris. However, this expression does not do sufficient justice to the ample range and variety of artists dominating the French capital. [5] Looking back on the year 1944, Bernard Dorival called these various artists, such as Jean-René Bazaine, Lucien Lautrec, Alfred Mannessier and Edouard Pignon, who presented their artwork during the occupation, ‘the heirs of cubism, fauvism, expressionism, surrealism and concrete art.’ [6]
These were the various influences that twenty-nine-year-old Vigas came into contact with upon his arrival in Paris in 1952. Miró had already left the French capital for Spain by that time and made plans to definitively retreat to his beloved island of Mallorca. Paris functioned like a ‘pressure-cooker’ for Vigas, just as it had for Miró. Vigas’ artistic development quickly took him along various styles and toward an abstract-figurative imagery in which the sign played an essential role.
As Marek Bartelik points out in his contribution elsewhere in this publication (insert page number here), Vigas, after his arrival in Paris, was only briefly fascinated by Surrealism. This had to do not only with the abating interest in this movement, but above all with the specifically western interpretation of its founder, André Breton. In his ‘Surrealist Manifesto’, Breton defines Surrealism as follows:
“Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought…in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” [7]
The Latin-American interpretation of Surrealism is less rigid. Vigas and other Latin-American artists are not that interested in making a connection with the ‘superior reality’ of the subconscious – a definition that presupposes an intellectual exercise rather than an automatically steered action. Continuing along the lines of Alejo Carpentier, Vigas employed a more intuitive approach of Surrealism as a natural phenomenon, the presence of the magical in the everyday.
For Vigas, the notion of ‘the marvellous real’ was at the heart of his identity as a Latin-American artist. He considered it his duty to connect the ancient sources of his culture with the modern: the artist as intermediary between the present and the past.
Directly after his arrival in Paris, Vigas created a series of collages with a magical character. The series shows striking similarities with the abstract-figurative artwork that Miró had made in the twenties. The collages have recently been rediscovered in the archives of the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation.
This series by Vigas does probably not result from the direct influence of Miró. Vigas knew Miró’s work primarily from reproductions in books. Unlike the work of contemporaries such as Picasso, Miró’s work was hardly ever presented in Venezuela in the 1950s and 60s; he was, for example, not represented at the Exposicion Internacional de Pintura del Ateneo de Valencia in 1955, organised by Vigas. Just in 1959 prints by Miró were exhibited at the Sala de Mendoza in Caracas. This is remarkable because the Catalan artist had a lot of exhibitions in those years, and was, for example, active in the United States.
Once in Paris, oddly enough, the paths of the two artists did not cross. Documents in the archives of the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation demonstrate that Vigas became acquainted with the art of Miró through various exhibitions, at the Maeght Gallery, amongst others. In 1962, he visited Miró’s retrospective exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. They were also both represented in a number of group exhibitions, including The 1955 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Art.
We cannot be certain to what extent the 1952 collages were directly inspired by Miró, but the affinity is striking. Abstract forms were applied to a flat surface in primary, contrasting colours. The mysterious, half-human, half-animal forms are strongly reminiscent of the signs by the Catalan artist. It is not so much the formal resemblance in technique, form and expressiveness that make these collages so interesting; rather, they testify to the unspoken affinity between two artists of different generations and different continents. What we do know is that in the seventies, Vigas directly referred to his affinity with Miró, with the Homenaje a Miró series.[8]
Myth-making artists
Elsewhere in this publication (insert page number), Alvaro Medina states that in Venezuela, Vigas was the most outspoken and brave one in following the path already set in by Constantin Brâncusi, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró and Henry Moore. With this ‘path’, Alvaro refers to the appreciation for and appropriation of non-western expressions by especially modern European artists. But what did this path imply, precisely? And can we also look at it from a different angle? Could we observe the artwork and artistic practice of Miró from a different perspective, by connecting him with a younger generation of Latin-American painters, represented in this case by Vigas?
Seen in this light, the following statement by Vigas may help:
“These artists that I named Paul Klee and Miró, the most important, were in the secret long before any other painter of our continent could think of abandoning the anecdotal in favor of the imperishable intrinsic that is in the soul of the American myth, which is not an exclusive attribute to him, since in the rational substratum all men are alike and the art they produce, putting aside the racial or geographical differences, always touches the same mental mechanisms, which are similar in all the villages.” [9]
It is in this Latin-American interpretation of the surreal, of the myths and the soul, that Vigas and Miró link up with each other seamlessly. In spite of the fact that Breton calls Miró ‘the most surreal of us all’, Miró never officially joined the Surrealists. He took a radically autonomous position, aimed at developing an imagery consisting of recurring signs that relate to the magical. Miró developed a completely original universe that was deeply rooted in his direct surroundings, – Catalan nature and culture. Vigas, from his specifically Latin-American perspective, took a similar autonomous position.
Both artists can be considered ‘myth-making’ artists. They transformed the scale and meaning of elements in order to summon a different dimension. People take on animal manifestations, and recurring symbols such as the woman, the bird, celestial bodies and the snake, for example, refer to an upper world or an underworld. Miró and Vigas draw from similar sources, such as prehistory, folk art, and popular culture.
Both artists considered working from the material and the elements that were on hand as the pre-eminent way to arrive at a form of expression that was as original as possible. It is striking that later in life, both Miró and Vigas started to explore various other disciplines, such as ceramics, sculpture and textile. In the seventies, Miró, who was in his eighties by then, started to paint on large canvases made of raw jute. Both for Vigas and for Miró, experimentation was not an end in itself. Working in different disciplines was done primarily in service of the end result.
Fifty years passed between the previously mentioned work La terre labourée and Paysage animé from 1973. The later painting is clearly connected to the magical art developed by young Miró in the twenties. In fact, it is a radicalisation of that work.
Vigas, too, continued to fall back on certain themes throughout his life, witness for example América, la madre (1987). It is inspired by a theme that Vigas had adopted for his work as a young man in 1953 in Paris. The forms delineated by black lines form an inseparable part of a bigger magical whole. The archetypes appear familiar to us and can be traced back to earlier works such as Las tres gracias (1948), El alacrán (1952) and the Brujas series.
Vigas was 64 years old when he made this study. The powerful mother figure represents the soul of the Latin-American world. She is connected with everything around her, from child to cosmos. In that same year, Vigas created a series of important sculptures in both bronze and raw clay, harking back to meanings and symbols that also characterized his early work. In Divinidad lunar (1987) for example, the sublunary and heavenly realm blend in an elegant archetypal figure. The figure is adorned with a sickle’s form that can be directly associated with Miró’s familiar crescent moon. We see similar archetypal figures in Vigas’ paintings from the fifties, such as Bruja nocturna (1951), in which an archetypal human figure is flanked by a crescent moon. Vigas’ paintings from the 1990s and the 2000s also feature familiar signs. Works such as Diablesco (1999) and Doncella (2007), both large in size, show us an elderly Vigas whose work still prominently features the woman figure and the dark, magical sides of life.
The connection between Miró and Vigas has never before been extensively explored. More knowledge of the artistic affinity between the Catalan master and Vigas, who was thirty years his junior, can place both bodies of work in a broader perspective, across time, space and continents.