Breton against Miró: the public humiliation that ignited the painter's fury

André Breton acted as the Pope of Surrealism with great forcefulness: he did not tolerate any of the movement's members deviating from the path of aesthetic and political radicalism he had set. And when they did, he excluded them or subjected them to public scorn, as happened to Joan Miró in 1926 with the sets and costumes for the Russian Ballet showRomeo and Juliet, created in collaboration with Max Ernst. André Breton and Louis Aragon led a group of surrealists who burst into the premiere with whistles and shouts and distributed a pamphlet titledProtest, in which they accused Miró and Ernst of having betrayed the principles of surrealism by making commercial art. "It is not admissible for thought to be at the service of money," said the authors, for whom that collaboration meant "domesticating dreams for the benefit of the international aristocracy.".

While police intervention was necessary in Paris, when the show arrived the following year at the Liceu, the reaction of the public and the critics was more positive. But for Miró, the outburst from Breton and Aragon left a deep mark: the following year he began his project of "assassinating painting," and the anger caused by the fight with Breton and Aragon was present throughout his career, as suggested by Carles Guerra and Lauriane Gricourt, director of Les Abattoirs, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Toulouse, in the great exhibition that can be visited from October 3 to March 7, 2027. "For Miró, it was a blow with which he understood that it is not enough to align yourself with an aesthetic, surrealism; rather, you must always take a step forward," states Carles Guerra. "Miró took it very seriously," he adds, "and he applied the idea of assassinating painting methodically.

But in the end, Miró ended up being more radical than Aragon, because the French poet was one of the personalities who publicly asked not to destroy the mural he had made on the windows of the Architects' Association of Catalonia. And, on the other hand, Miró's collaboration with the company La Claca in 1976on the anti-Franco Mori el Merma, seems more transgressive than the Romeo and Juliet of 50 years earlier. Like the pamphlet by Breton and Aragon, the exhibition is titled Joan Miró.Protest, and has an extraordinary budget thanks to the support of institutions and companies including the City Council of Toulouse, the Toulouse Metropolis, and the French state, through the Prefecture of the Occitanie Region.

Rethinking painting on stage

Joan Miró.Protest includes nearly 200 works, among which are about fifty unique academic female nudes, property of the Reina Sofia Museum; and thirty of the engravings from the Barcelona series, evocative of the artist's painful inner exile. The first room is the most heterogeneous: there are documents related to Romeo and Juliet, and those of another collaboration with the Russian ballets, Jeux d'enfants, in which Miró introduced object-paintings. "The theater space is also a true space for rethinking painting," says Guerra. Regarding the paintings, Guerra reviews the different strategies with which Miró begins to transgress the limits of painting, such as painting without previously preparing the canvas, on industrial materials like masonite; and making object-paintings. From here on, the route is articulated in work blocks, among which are the nudes he made at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1937, which reflect how Miró breaks with naturalism by deforming the proportions of the limbs, and, at the same time, maintains contact with reality. "He had just finished the Catalan Peasant in Revolt at the Spanish Republic Pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition, and I interpret this moment as that of a dilemma between continuing with abstraction or reinforcing figuration," explains the curator. "What does the year 1937 represent? It is the year they see the ears of the wolf of fascism –Guerra also says–. That year Walter Benjamin gave the lecture in Paris in which he spoke of the author as producer, and asked himself what they could do against fascism, and what was the style with which they could oppose it. Benjamin chose neither surrealism nor dadaism, but said that an author must allow others to also be authors, to have a voice." And, more specifically, Guerra points out that the Reaper and Guernica may have traits of socialist realism, but that both Miró and Picasso saw that that line led to "an academicism that paralyzes freedom".

The journey continues with Miró's anti-Francoism, through the Black and Red Series (1938), made in Paris in the midst of the Civil War, and Barcelona (1939-1944). Precisely, Pere Portabella interspersed images of these engravings with archive footage of the Civil War in the film Aidez l'Espagne (1969), which was released on the occasion of the Miró retrospective organized by the Architects' Association of Catalonia, Miró otro, which was a response to the official retrospective at La Capella, whose inauguration Miró did not attend so as not to be used politically. "With that film, Portabella points out that Miró was the missing link that connected them to before the Civil War". Curiously, Portabella did not find the Civil War footage in the State but at the Toulouse Cinematheque.

Abstraction does not mean evasion

As he proposed with Tàpies, Guerra points out that Miró's apparently abstract paintings from the 70s are, in reality, history paintings, in that they reflect the overwhelming conditions of Francoism, as would be the case with La danse des coquelicots (1973). "This does not mean that Miró disengages from historical reality. The facts do not force painting to be subservient to narrative and figuration, but rather there is an ostensive relationship between them, and it is the spectator who decides if the work is political". In the final section, Miró's iconoclastic fury is seen once again in one of the famous burnt paintings, the one that is owned by the Fundació Joan Miró. These paintings, as can be seen in a film by Francesc Català-Roca, were made by Miró with the help of Josep Royo, with whom he had begun working a few years earlier, an essential figure in the Mironian tapestries.

The last two areas of the exhibition are dedicated to Mori el Merma, and to other works that are linked to it, because the figure of Ubu appears in the La Claca production to refer to Franco, and Miró made the illustrations for Ubu Roi (1966), Ubu in the Balearics (1971), evocative of the wild construction in Mallorca, and The Childhood of Ubu (1975). On the other hand, Guerra recalls another attack that Miró suffered following Mori el Merma: when it could be seen at the Teatre Principal in Palma, someone scribbled out Miró's name on a poster and wrote below it the word "xuetó", that is, a diminutive of the word "xueta", the historical term used to refer disparagingly to the descendants of converted Jews. Miró was one of the traditional surnames of the xuetes. "When you want to understand the reactive character, the, let's say, aggressive character of Miró's response; you think it is something that comes out of him in an essentialist way from the inside and, nevertheless, you see that it goes through many episodes in which he has been attacked, since 1918, at the Galeria Dalmau, when they tore up his drawings, or the scandal of the premiere of Romeo and Juliet. To understand it, I compare it with what Judith Butler says about feminism or the feminism of the 60s and 70s, as the ability to resignify what was initially an insult", concludes Guerra.