Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Chatsworth

by Nicholas Watkins

After the pioneering exhibitions of Joan Miró’s sculpture, Miró Bronzes at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1972, the twenty-six Miró bronzes shown at the Waddington Galleries, London, in 1981, The Touch of Dreams, Ceramics and Bronzes 1949–1980 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in 1985 and the South Bank Centre’s Joan Miró Sculpture touring in 1990, the claim that the Miró exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (to 6th January 2013)1 is ‘the first time in the UK that such a major body of sculpture has been curated’ is a little exaggerated, although perhaps true by volume. It does, however, give us the opportunity to take stock of his achievement at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Since Miró’s death on Christmas Day 1983, his seemingly grandiose post-War ambition to animate the quotidian through a popular public art has succeeded: indeed, it is difficult to view his sculpture outside his inadvertent provision of a modern image for a democratic, post-Franco Spain, the Catalan renaissance and the merchandising of Mal­lorca as a sun-soaked holiday destination. We are now faced with a neutered, heliocentric Miró of wavy lines and concentric solar rings, ‘kiddy’ colours, swelling forms and organic protuberances, all horns but no real cohones. The introduction to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s exhibition booklet has adopted this line and piously offers us ‘a rare opportunity to appreciate the work of a man committed to democracy’.

The excited chant of a group of well-primed children arriving at the Sculpture Park, ‘Where are the naughty men?’, gave a surprisingly accurate idea of what was in store. For Miró, public sculpture brought together several themes: the transformation of folk art and found objects into cult deities, what he christened ‘phantasmagorical monsters’; his perpetuation of the central Surrealist propo­sition to change life and transform the world through the universal recognition of desire; and, not to be forgotten, his deeply irreverent, often sardonic and cruel, post-Dada instinct to destroy, demythologise and undermine. 

Sex, fecundity and brute power are pre­vailing themes throughout the exhibition. The main lawn and formal terrace in front of the Underground Gallery are populated with a pantheon of fertility gods and goddesses. The androgynous, preposterous, quite terrifying Personnage (an ubiquitous title) of 1970 (Fig.49) ferociously confronts the world as both creator and destroyer, absurd little penis projecting in front, ‘split open’ behind to reveal a vacated womb. Maternité of 1973 looks like a primitive marine organism, all womb, topped with bristling reproductive pseudopodia and a startled proboscis head. 

There is absolutely nothing cosy or con­sensual about Miró’s deities. They are indeed monstrous. His bleak understanding of human nature as nature was that of a highly sophis­ticated, superannuated farm boy: life, orchestrated between copulation, birth and death, was brief, predatory and hostile. To equate his position too literally, as have some commentators, as solely anti-fascist is a mistake. Of course his swaggering, tottering tyrants, Jarry­esque Ubus updated as Merma, attacked Franco, but they could equally be any hectoring, bug-eyed leader grown accustomed to power. Miró’s message, if anything, was a generalised perception of modern urban man’s decadence, defined as a detachment from the realities of life. ‘Remember’, he wrote, ‘that in primitive, non-decadent races, the sex organ was a magic sign of which man was proud, far from feeling the shame that today’s decadent races feel’. A recuperation of this self-awareness was what his art was partly about.

The rooms of the Underground Gallery are beautifully arranged to show the evolution of Miró’s ideas, beginning with his enlargement of the small bronze maquettes for Oiseau solaire and Oiseau lunaire of 1946 into the monumental versions of 1966, through to a fas­cinating selection and display of his source material and studies in the Project Space at the end. In a way this should be seen first. Such was Miró’s complete transformation of found objects through scale, media and colour that I would never have otherwise noticed that Personnage (Fig.49) originated in the balancing of a pebble on an almond, that Femme mon­ument of 1970 began life as a hole-worn bar of soap, and that the immense Personnage gothique, oiseau éclair of 1976 (Fig.52), appropriately placed to straddle the view from the summit of the Park’s Bothy Garden, started from a donkey saddle.

Collage suited Miró. Endlessly inventive, playful and iconoclastic, in his hands the process generated an anarchic energy in the bringing together of divergent elements and diverse realities. Olfactory puns were part of his arsenal. His humour was earthy, frequently scatological. Cast in bronze and coloured, the collaged elements gained a unity, a new anatomy, their own quirky identity. The crusty green stick figure, L’Oiseau au plumage rougeâtre annonce l’apparition de la femme éblouissante de beauté of 1972 (Fig.50), cast a cabbage for the buttocks, a cobbler’s lathe for the hand, a bizarre missing link between man and nature, and is tellingly sited in nearby undergrowth. The exhibition reveals how Miró, ever alive to the expressive possibilities of surface, employed different foundries: Susse for smooth finishes, the Bonavicini Foundry in Verona for more traditional dark and black patinas, the Parellada Foundry in Barcelona for a more ‘untreated’ look and rougher textures. What I had not quite appreciated before was the extent to which he responded to developments in contemporary art and popular culture. The brightly coloured Jeune fille s’évadant of 1967, wittily constructed out of four disjointed elements – dumb-blond yellow head, ‘turned on’ by a cast of a real tap (which is an exhibit in the Project Space), tiny rectangular blue torso with miniscule white breasts, and a pair of gyrating, bright red mannequin legs – parodies a Pop art icon.

The exhibition presents us with a tougher, nastier Miró for the recession years of the twenty-first century: an iconoclastic artist, ever mindful of human violence and insta­bility. He has been given back his cohones.

The choice of Anthony Caro for the first solo exhibition of an artist to be held at Chatsworth, Derbyshire (to 1st July),2 comes as a surprise. Earlier in his career Caro felt that his work would be lost if placed in the landscape. He was only able to break free of Henry Moore’s influence by adopting a radically different, quasi-industrial way of working inspired by David Smith and, like a contemporary Post-Painterly Abstractionist, he intuitively balanced brightly coloured elements in a push–pull hermetic space. His decision to take on the palatial setting of Chatsworth was a concomitant of his real­isation that he had the freedom to group his sculptures around the most obviously man-made area, the Pond Lake, where they could either interact with the landscape and with each other, or hold their own through sil­houette and sheer scale. His sculptures are brilliantly sited to exploit the lie of the land. Goodwood steps of 1994 (Fig.51) is strung out at the end of the lake like giant architectural sluice gates controlling the view through to the magisterial pedimented façade of the house and its reflection in the water. The highly original Scorched flats (1974), with its overlapping rectangles, picks up on the emphatic shape of the lake. The rusted and varnished steel of both sculptures further separates them from the grass, but the bottle-green Sculpture seven of 1961 is sensibly tucked away out of immediate sight. What emerges from this exhibition is a recognition of the theatricality of Caro’s constructions, his courage in insisting that sculpture be taken on its own terms. However, when it comes to the staged framing of the landscape on a vast scale through massive architecturally balanced elements, even Caro’s most ambitious sculptures can but make us more aware of the achievements of Capability Brown and his successors at Chatsworth.

1    Catalogue: Miró: Sculptor. With contributions by Clare Lilley and Helen Phely. 47 pp. incl. several col. ills. (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, 2012), £5. ISBN 978–1–871480–98–6.
2    Catalogue: Caro at Chatsworth. With contributions by Stephen Feeke and Martina Droth. 40 pp. incl. 23 col. ills. (New Art Centre, Chatsworth, 2012), £10. ISBN 978–0–9558440–1–0.