From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The popular image of Miró may portray him as a childlike creator of whimsical doodles, but this hulking slab of a coffee table book, published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, brilliantly restores Miró’s violence and thorny intellectualism. Covering the 17-year period during which, as Bruno Racine writes, "the artist’s visual language had time enough to develop but not to become formulaic," the book takes its title from a comment the artist made about Cubism. The guitar in question stood for all that had become stereotypical about that style. But Miró’s iconoclasm, the book makes clear, extended even to his own ambitions, and to art itself. As he once remarked, his goal was to "murder painting." In the most interesting of the book’s six densely argued essays (written by assorted intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic), Rémi Labrusse explores the aesthetic of destruction that took hold in Europe after WWI, while making it clear that Miró himself never gave in to a fashionable nihilism: "Whereas Dada sought to do nothing, Miró was led to a terrible contempt for something he still actually did." In addition to the essays, the book includes an exhaustive chronology, but the real heart of the volume lies in its rich, full-color reproductions of Miró’s works. The 231 illustrations showcase mostly paintings, including such famous works as "Harlequin’s Carnival" and "The Siesta," but a few of Miró’s relief-sculptures also appear and, in keeping with the book’s focus on the raw and the formative, there are plenty of sketches and studies. Though the price is high, if you can afford it, this is the Miró book to get. The dazzling quality of the reproductions and the new interpretive frame supplied by the book’s authors allow Miró’s odd genius to blaze with greater depth, sharper edges and darker shadows than are usually seen.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
Miro's art has been seen as innocent and child-like, but one should dubt the innocence, or see the child in quite brutal Freudian terms. This study of the crucial formative period of Miro's art—from 1917 to 1934, from his first emergence in the avantgarde of Barcelona and Paris to his acclaim by the Surrealists and the generality of critics as a modern master—concentrates on the sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic processes of his early development, working either in Paris or in seclusion at his farm in Montroig in Catalonia. Almost as ascetic as Mondrian, Miro drew deep on his own inner life in perfecting his imagery, which was both controlled and spontaneous, both calculated and free, both painting and "anti-painting.' this book charts to a greater degree than any others earlier the aggressiona dn determination that Miro brought to his search for genuine expression, avoiding the "poison," as he put it, of "art," which would have turned his works into "rotting corpses." Arriving in Paris in 1920, some years the junior of the likes of Picasso and Matisse, Miro had a great deal to catch up on, and his zigzagcourses between the poles of abstraction and surrealism, his handling of cubism (from which he learned a great deal, though he set out "to smash [the Cubists'] guitar"), his response to dadism and the fermenting movements of the time, required a pugilistic determination as well as skill and artistic integrity. Indeed, his aggression was turned more frequently on his own production than on others', and it is his continuing refusal to be satisfied that marks him out as a true innovator. He was well versed in critical theory, and his correspondence with intellectuals such as Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, and Michel Leiris throws fascinating light both on his work and on the pulse of the period. This book is the English-language edition of an exhibition only at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, March–June 2004. Memorable exhibitions at the Grand Palais in 1974 and in Barcelona and New York in 1993 sought to embrace the entirety of an oeuvre that developed across more than sixty ears, but the intention here is to scrutinize and document the most important years of Miro's art, his self-questioning formation and his first and finest masterpieces. Essays on Miro and the period by William Jeffett, Rosalind E. Krauss, Remi Labrusse, Robert Lubar, and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine are accompanied by a richly documented and illustrated Chronology and more than 200 color plates.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This book is the English-language edition of an exhibition only at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, March-June 2004. Memorable exhibitions at the Grand Palais in 1974 and in Barcelona and New York in 1993 sought to embrace the entirely of an oeuvre that developed across more than sixty years, but the intention here is to scrutinize and document the most important years of Miro's art, his self-questioning formation and his first and finest masterpieces.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal