paul

Since going to the Miró exhibition recently, I've been reminded of Remedios Varo.  In 2000, I discovered this marvelous Surrealist in an exhibition devoted to her at Chicago's Mexican Fine Arts Museum. Called The Magic or Remedios Varo , the exhibition had been organized by Washington's National Museum of Women in the Arts and shown there. At the moment of this writing there is an exhibition at Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderne de Mexico, entitled Remedios Varo: 50 Keys.   It includes 50 works of art and a single sculpture. Certainly Frida Kahlo is much better known, but I find Varo, who knew both Kahlo and Diego Rivera, more evocative and interesting as an artist. Varo also uses a female subject as her chief descriptive vehicle, but she is less self-absorbed than Kahlo and more concerned with the larger world. Varo was a Surrealist born in Spain in 1908, but exiled to Mexico after 1941. Like Gaudi , Miró and Dalí, she was Catalan, originally from Angles, near Girona...

Joan Miró, Nocturne , 1935, is a small oil on copper from the Cleveland Museum of Art.  A jumping man, crescent moon and spiral suggest the artist ability to leap above problems of life. "We Catalans believe you must always plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump into the air" In 1948, Joan Miró used these words to describe the Catalan mentality.  Like Salvador Dali and Antoni Gaudí , giants of modern art and architecture, Miro came from Catalonia, the area of Spain on the Mediterranean Sea near the French border.  Catalans had a language and cultural identify different from the rest of Spain. Washington's National Gallery, which hosts a Miro exhibition until August 12, completes the quote on a wall label:   "The that I came down to earth from time to time makes it possible for me to jump higher." Joan Miró: Ladders of Escape is the appropriate name for this exhibition which captures the flying spirit of this Surrealist artist.  From...