"A noir – O bleu !" Von Laut und Schrift zur Fläche. Joan Miró und seine Methode der 'peinture-poétique'

Abstract

Summary: Joan Miró is a towering figure in the landscape of modern art. In the 1920s, when the Catalan painter came to Paris, he totally renewed his conception of techniques and aesthetics. Generally, the works of this period are regarded as “dream pictures”, “automatic paintings”, as a constant part of French Surrealism. The following study tries, in opposition to the current approach, to show that Miró was sceptical about the surrealistic theories and practise of art, conceding having only “une tendance surréaliste”. In the Écrits, Miró offers details about important origins of inspiration: the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud (poet-seer), Guillaume Apollinaire (poet-painter) and the Dadaists (poetry-provocation). Miró not only developed a “poetic style”, but experimented with poetic texts for the process of painting. Miró’s peinture poétique can be related to Rimbaud’s famous sonnet Les voyelles (1871). The painter transferred Rimbaud’s vision of pure sounds, his suggestive and metaphysical dimension of letters into visual painting, using the language as phonetic material. In different drawings, paintings and collages the vocals A, E, I, U, O correspond to symbolic signs and can be seen as objective, abstract geometric forms. For the painter-poet Miró, writing and painting are analogue processes. Various combinations of “letter-pictures” seem to have offered an inexhaustible inventory for Miró’s poetic art. [Keywords: Miró, Rimbaud [Arthur], poetics, Les voyelles, Apollinaire [Guillaume], Calligrammes, Dadaism, Surrealism, peinture poétique].