"Modernist genius is often best encountered in commercial galleries, with their intimate viewing conditions and lack of institutional authority and entrance fees. So it is with Joan Miró: Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Stars, the thrilling inaugural show revisiting this Catalan artist's radical early years at Luxembourg + Co. Formerly half of Luxembourg & Dayan in the East 70s, the gallery's new quarters are in the fabled Fuller Building, the great Art Deco landmark at 57th Street and Madison Avenue. At its former street address, 41 East 57th Street, it once housed several of New York's leading galleries; its current address is the more pedestrian 595 Madison Avenue. Go figure.
The show examines Miró's break with traditional painting and adult restraint, after his liberating exposure to French modernism in general and Surrealism in particular. He reduced his medium to exuberant automatist drawing on monochrome fields of color. His biomorphic forms were often simply outlined, as in The Kiss (1924), where you can locate the point of contact and maybe a few blue sparks (or hairs, or petals), but not much more. Some forms are slightly filled in, as in the more legible Painting (The Lovers - Adam and Eve), from 1925. Standouts include two large works, both titled Painting (1936), where Miró improvised on the raw, glowing side of Masonite, mingling black shapes and outlines with daubs of color. They are presaged by two 1924 works sparely drawn in pencil on cigar- box tops painted white. The fissured white suggests both refined earth and floating ethers - a lunar landscape for Miró's weightless mysterious creatures."