SUITE
MONTROIG/SUITE DESTINO: PHOTOGRAPHS AND COLLAGE
It
could be said that during his life Joan Miró had two official
photographers: Joaquim Gomis and Francesc Català-Roca. Both
documented his personal surroundings and his studio work routine
in great detail, and the result has been the object of many books
and exhibitions. Due to his close friendship Gomis maintained a
more intimate relationship with Miró, however, and he was
in the end the trigger for the latters astonishing experiments
with the camera. The Mironian oeuvre abounds in collages that
incorporate bits of photographic images or photographic interventions
created on photographs usually taken by Gomis. On the other hand
Miros authentic photographic vision, the creations and re-creations
made by Miró himself (always with a little help from Gomis)
have not merited a monographic presentation until now.
Gomis
was a faithful chronicler of his meetings with Miró and relates
how during the summer of 1960, strolling in the environs of the
house at Montroig, Miró asked to borrow his camera, a classic
Rolleiflex with built-in light-meter, and to make a portrait of
him. Miró had a lot of fun looking at the image inverted
on the ground-glass viewfinder and began laughingly shouting: I
see the world upside-down! I see the world upside-down! He
also demonstrated his interest in the focusing mechanism that allowed
him to go from sharpness to fuzziness. He soon learned to emphasize
an object by isolating it from its context through framing, or via
selective focus, focusing or disenfocusing on the remaining planes
of the image.
The
discovery of photography would give way to what Gomis half-jokingly
called a vice: Mirós obsession with photographing
any object that caught his attention. At the beginning this was
limited to things found by chance on his strolls, such as twisted
vines, tree bark with sinuous forms, different shells on the sandy
beach, tools belonging to the neighboring peasants
Sometimes
he also constructed compositions of objects, small assemblages
that might later become designs for sculpture. The reiteration of
different objects, like gourds, hats or light shoes for working
in the fields, expresses his great interest in both the organic
world and popular culture. There is also evidence that he experimented
with nude studies, taking a young German tourist who was summering
in Salou, Andrea Geyer, as a model; unfortunately, these images
have been lost.
Miró
shot the photos himself, but Gomis developed the film and did the
enlargements. Finally, tired of passing the camera back and forth
between them, Gomis ended up making a present of it. For a number
of years Miró would make use of that old Rolleiflex, redolent
with the affection of his friend, as if it were a sketchbook for
making rapid-fire drawings in, drawings that might later become
the embryo of pictorial or sculptural works. Seldom could Miró
restrain himself from writing, scrawling, drawing or painting (with
gouache, pastel and other media) on blowups from his negatives.
In what we call the Suite Destino (due to its being realized
on pages or with illustrations from that popular weekly) it is collage
that prevails, using images that are non-original but printed, yet
the plastic treatment is very similar.
The
participation of photography in his creative thinking is, therefore,
more than an intermediate working material or the sketch for a later
artwork. It is at this level, then, that we may locate Mirós
short but intense photographic experience. An experience we now
reclaim for the teaching of his oeuvre as a whole, since it provides
us with highly important data on the internal structure of his artistic
modus operandi, from inspiration to final execution, and
it reexamines a set of objects that in the plastic and symbolic
fields reveal the richness of the roots of the Mironian world.