People From Barcelona

"The material presence of the work only serves as a conveyer launching an invitation to the observer to take part of the comprehensive game of the thousand and one emotions and visions."

"The tattoo can only exist as part of the skin, as a drawing always is an incision in the material and therefore cannot be parted from it."

"In the potential of absurdity, hiding in the disparate combination of the various different subjects which in themselves are nothing but daily items equally in the exclusive representation of a normal item taken out of their usual context, is by far the most radical – in its effect comparable to a Japanese Zen koan - paradox to be witnessed, which modern art has produced, one of the most forceful impulses that generated from it."

"It is what makes conscious of the conditions and laws of observing which applied in this manner become a theme on its own. The activity of consciousness depending on the way the work itself proceeds, becomes the subject of my attention this way and it is precisely because of this voyeuristic attitude toward the own observation and experience of the subject that the conscious analytic dimension in the work shows."

"An image means nothing. It is just a door, leading to the next door. It will never happens that we will find the truth we are looking for just in an image; it will happen behind the last door that the spectator discover the truth, because of his own efforts."

"The artist may rightly venture the opinion that he does not convey ideas, does not preach, nor that he intents to convert people by using mass communication techniques.. .Better than handing out all kinds of wise advice, he could show life itself; he could awake forces lying dormant in everybody, he could launch an invitation to create direct and personal experiences."

"Starting with approaching the spot where the painting is to be done, meanwhile realising the emptiness of the mind, up to the method of 'the flying white', of the rule of the singular stroke of the brush.. ..there is a proper tradition in which the artist is fully aware of the fact that only the pure and empty spontaneity enables him to embrace without hesitating all apparitions and to truly penetrate into the roots of things."

"He mirrors [in his assemblage art like ‘Bedside Rug, 1970] the old tasks of art in a scenario of newly fashioned garbage. Despite the demonstrative humility of his choice of materials [garbage], he in no way rejects his own creative intervention. On the contrary, the gesture of the artist is all the more powerful in its contrasts with worthless materials."

"[Tàpies].. ..a painter who was to create mysteries in matter itself."

"Painting [in 'poor' matter] here is not a transcendence of its materials but their manifestation; and of course the support — canvas or whatever else it may be — that receives these stains, this dirt, this muck, is one more material among the others, and it is not superseded by their accumulation but defaced by them."

"Take a look at the simplest of objects. Let's take, for example, an old chair. It seems like nothing. But think of the universe comprised within it: the sweaty hands cutting the wood that used to be a robust tree, full of energy, in the middle of a luxuriant forest by some high mountains. The loving work that built it, the joyful anticipation of the one who bought it, the tired bodies it has helped, the pains and the joys it must have endured, whether in fancy halls or in a humble dining room in your neighbourhood. Everything, everything shares life and has its importance! Even the most worn down of chair carries inside the initial force of the sap climbing from the earth, out there in the forest, and will still be useful the day when, broken into kindling, it burns in some fireplace."

"..[the walls in the city] witnessed the martyrdom and the inhumane repression inflicted on our people."

"For in order to be born again, you must die."

"Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen."

"There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds."

"Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later--no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover or how much we learn or forget--we will return."

"A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept."

"Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind."

"There are worse prisons than words."

"Now I know I have already lost you. I have lost everything. Even so, I can't let you go forever and allow you to forget me without letting you know that I don't bear you any grudge, that I knew it from the start, I knew that I was going to lose you and that you would never see in me what I see in you. I want you to know that I loved you from the very first day and that I still love you, now more than ever, even if you don't want me to."

"Coincidences are the scars of fate."

"I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music."

"Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination."

"The plate that a peasant eats his soup out of is much more interesting to me than the ridiculously rich plates of rich people."

"The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me."

"I was very interested in the reproductions of your [ Calder's ] sculptures. I have looked at them many times [Calder sent him], and they are something completely unexpected. You are taking a path full of great possibilities. Bravo! Sculpture is of enormous interest to me right now. For the last two years [1944-46], during summer vacation, that's all I have been doing and it's very good for a painter to get away from the old story of canvas and frame every now and again."

"Decoration. Very rapidly executed, at one go, spontaneously [reflection of making a mural on the site for the terrace plaza hotel in Cincinnati]. What takes a long time in my case is the work of silent reflection; it is impossible for me to predict the duration of this preparatory period. You have to keep in mind that it is by no means a matter of just doing a large picture, and though it will not be possible to paint a true mural by attacking the wall directly, in fresco, to do so will require persistence while maintaining, as much as possible, the spirit of the great tradition of mural painting. I shall have to go to Cincinnati in advance as soon as I can, to view the architecture and its environs, because otherwise I would only create an easel painting in large format."

"[the canvas..] rubbing in with a handful of straw, with a rag, a scrubbing brush, a Majorcan brush for applying white, with the hand, etc.. .. [a drawing in a] gigantic rhythm like that of a waterfall cascading down a mountainside.. ..[works based on] pure signs begun in Varensgeville and finished in Palma.. ..[with a picture ground of] blue vitriol [a pesticide] that they use for the vines and that splashes against the walls of the farmhouse.. [Miro describes his 'attacks' on the canvas]."

"[to] think, in a certain way, of the power and severity of Romanesque paintings.. .Go to the beach and make graphic signs in the sand, draw by pissing on the dry ground, design in space by recording the songs of the birds, the sounds of water and wind.. ..and the chant of insects."

"How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling.."

"to try also, inasmuch as possible, to go beyond easel painting, which in my opinion has a narrow goal, and to bring myself closer, through painting, to the human masses I have never stopped thinking about."

"Picasso was wild about it and said it was one of the best things I have ever made. [on Miro's exhibition in Paris, 1938 where he showed a big frieze, made for a children's room; commissioned by art-dealer Pierre Matisse in New York]"

"And then, as you can see, I give greater and greater importance to the materials I use in my work [c. 1936]. A rich and vigorous material seems necessary to me in order to give the viewer that smack in the face that must happen before reflection intervenes. In this way, poetry is expressed through a plastic medium, and it speaks its own language."

"Have you ever heard of anything more stupid than 'abstraction-abstraction'? and they ask me into their deserted house [probably Miro meant the group 'Abstraction-Création', founded by a. o. Jean Arp and André Breton; both coined Miro's art in 1931 as 'mobile' and 'stabile'] as if the marks I put on a canvas did not correspond to a concrete representation of my mind, did not possess a profound reality, were not a part of the real itself."

"Childhood and magic are married in this poem inscribed in infinity, like traces on walls or cracks in venerable walls, superimposed posters lacerated by wind, rain and poetry; calligraphy and ideograph intermerge in this equation.. ..in this sign."

"I have thought a lot about the question of titles. I must confess that I find any for works that take off from an arbitrary starting point and end with something real.. ..[Miro allowed Pierre Matisse to make titles, based on the] real things.. ..[if they do] not evoke some tendency or other, something I want to avoid completely [very probably Miro meant here: the Surrealists ]. [advising Pierre Matisse; who showed then several modern European painters in New York]."

"We see ourselves confronted with pure abstraction. Small problems and highly obscure subjects are, if you will, always grand in intention, and the layman would casually and quite undisparagingly trample on them if they were to serve as carpet motifs."

"..something as sensational as [a] heavy weight prize fight.. ..a rain of swings, uppercuts, and straight right and lefts to the stomach and everywhere throughout the entire event – a round lasting about twenty minutes. [remark on a ballet Miro planned to, c. 1930]"

"..wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvellous. [Miró admonished art-critic w:Georges Duthuit ]"

"Down with the Mediterranean!"

"Let's transplant the primitive soul to the ultramodern New York, inject his soul with the noise of the subway, of the 'el', and may his brain become a long street of buildings 224 stories high. [Barcelona - Dada, 1917]"

"To gain freedom is to gain simplicity."

"Thirty five years ago.. ..Sandy [Alexander Calder, and his wife] Louisa came to see me at Montroig, where I conceived the farm [Montroig in Spain, where Miro had a farm in the 1930s], where the trees, the mountains, the sky, the house, the vineyards, have remained the same. There where the mules have always eaten carobs, and where we have the same warming red wine. Well then, one day I invited all my neighbours, the farmers and workmen of the district to see the Circus that Calder had brought. Everyone was transfixed and totally overwhelmed by it."

"I begin my work under the effect of shock, which I can sense and which gets me on the run from reality.. .In any case, I need a starting point, even if it’s just a speck of dust or a gleam of light."

"Quote of Miró on a visit of Calder who brought with him the small mechanical circus made from wire: a letter by Miro, 17 March 1964 / Correspondence 61; as cited in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 33"

"When I first saw Calder's art very long ago [c. 1928 in Paris, Miro saw Calder performing his mechanical 'Circus' for the Paris' art scene, all puppets made from metal wire and wood] I thought it was good, but not art."

"Your face had become dark, and, upon the day's awakening, your ashes will disperse themselves throughout the garden."

"In the current struggle I see the antiquated forces of fascism on one side, and on the other, those of the people, whose immense creative resources will give Spain a drive that will amaze the world."

"Miro came of age as an artist just at the time World War 1. ended. With the end of the war came the end of all the new pre-war art conceptions. A young painter could not start as a Cubist or a Futurist, and Dada was the only manifestation at the moment. Miro began by painting farm scenes from the countryside of Barcelona, his native land.. .A few years later he came to Paris [circa 1914] and found himself among the Dadaists who were, at that time, transmuting into Surrealism. In spite of this contact Miró kept aloof from any direct influence and showed a series of canvases in which form submitted to strong colouring expressed a new two-dimensional cosmogony, in no way related to abstraction."

"..I've been touched, in the work of Miró and Pollock, by a Surrealist – by Surrealist I mean 'associative' – quality. It's what comes through in association after your eye has experienced the surface as a great picture; it is incidental but can be enriching."