Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miró in the 1920s

by Charles Palermo

Overview

Fixed Ecstasy advances a fundamentally new understanding of Miró’s enterprise in the 1920s and of the most important works of his career. Without a doubt, Joan Miró (1893–1983) is one of the leading artists of the early twentieth century, to be ranked alongside such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and Pollock in his contributions to modernist painting. Still, Miró’s work has eluded easy classification. He is best known as a Surrealist, but, as Charles Palermo demonstrates, Miró’s early years in Barcelona and Paris require a revisionist account of Miró’s development and his place in modernism.

Palermo’s arguments are based on new research into Miró’s relations with the rue Blomet group of writers and artists, as well as on close readings of the techniques and formal structures of Miró’s early drawings and paintings. Chapter by chapter, Palermo unfolds a narrative that makes a cogent argument for freeing Miró from long-standing dependence on Surrealism, with its strong emphasis on dreams and the unconscious. Miró, along with associates such as Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein, and Michel Leiris, pressed representation to its limit at the verge of an ecstatic identification with the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271029726
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2007
Series:	Refiguring Modernism , #9
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Charles Palermo is Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the College of William and Mary. He has published articles in such periodicals as October, MLN, and The Art Bulletin.

Table of Contents

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction: Silence in Painting

1. Calligraphy: Vine and Sundial

2. Extension: Toys and Rainbows

3. Stroke: Medium and Compass

4. Entering Painting’s Thickness: Translucence and Turning

5. Suicide: Leiris and Siriel

Conclusion: Miró in Silence

Works Cited

Index

Editorial Reviews

These beautiful and elegantly complex volumes reconsider major figures in the development of 20th-century modernism. . . . While these volumes, like others in the series, may seem geared for the specialist, their value lies in their willingness to question, to use new evidence and new methods of addressing art history, and to forge new connections between disciplines. Patient readers will find these books can enliven and deepen their examination of art.”

—R.K. Dickson Bloomsbury Review

“To complete his extremely thorough examination, Palermo regularly compares his conclusions with ideas put forth by other scholars in recent Miró scholarship, often quoting extensively from their writings, and thereby offering a glimpse of the entire spectrum of current views on Miró.”

—W.S. Bradley Choice

“Palermo’s study not only breaks new ground by reevaluating Miró’s relationship to Surrealism, but also elucidates the stakes of the artist’s commitment to automatism. . . .

The volume . . . constitutes a major contribution to the field.”

—Michael Schrevach CAA Reviews

From the Publisher