Picasso and Miró in the 1960s Degree Zero of Painting Picasso and Miró’s final works offer a unique insight into the twilight of painting as the foremost medium of avant-garde experimentation. Towards the end of their careers, both artists were exploring the limits of painting in very different ways. Picasso turned painting in on itself in his series El pintor y la modelo (The Painter and his Model), 1963, creating unsolvable meta-artistic origami. Miró, on the other hand, got closer to the degree zero of painting in an attempt to transcend all boundaries.
The intention behind this space is to raise the profile of other artistic experiences that are somewhat overlooked in a lineal discourse which, organized around successive superceding stages, ignores the contribution that artists of the caliber of those that we are focusing on made to the painting of the Sixties. This, the final work of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Joan Miró (1893-1983), was ignored by critics until very recently, treated as material that was derivative of their other periods. But this room recuperates this output, focusing on how resistant it was, and how that meant its discourse could withstand the simultaneous discourse of the new generation it was questioning and responding to. By bringing these two environments face to face, with all their similarities and differences, we are enriching the view of this period, and of the artists involved. It is interesting to feel the change in atmosphere between previous rooms and those of these two artists, which have a serenity and formal elegance so different from the explosion of subjectivities and gestural violence of the previous ones. Unlike the expressive, the scream, Miró and Picasso withdraw into the silence of the artist’s studio and the emptiness of painting. Both use a pictorial space without narrative, without expression, as a metaphor for the nature of artistic work; nothingness, degree zero, as a vehicle of change. This stance from the post-Second World War avant-garde evolved from the tragic to the constructive, bringing back experiences and genres from before the conflict. Rather than the pathos and unworkability of the subjective, Miró and Picasso continued to move towards revolution, to achieve change, to achieve a Utopia. In Picasso’s case, a number of works from El pintor y la modelo, 1963, are on show, this being one of the most important series from the latter years of his career. The artist, with his characteristic immediacy and irony (shown in his almost caricaturesque Rembrandt-style painter, and the odalisque-like model) and the repeated and stereotyped
elements, is using the subject matter as a metaphor for the conceptual nature of art, of the transformation of the real into the sign, as a paradox of the relationship between reality and art. A significant amount of Miró’s work over the last two decades of his life seems to lean towards stripping down, calmness and emptiness. The artist’s relationship with poetry and writing (which strengthened in those years because of a visit to Japan where he learnt about eastern techniques of calligraphy) had a decisive influence. In these works, of which some very important examples are on show, the author reaches the absolute limits of the purification of painting, organizing poetic spaces where vibration, rhythm and emotion are key. Bibliography Esteban, Paloma [Comisaria]. Picasso: las grandes series. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía y Aldeasa, Madrid, 2001. Krauss, Rosalind; Rowell, Margit. Joan Miró. Magnetic Fields. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1972. Links www.fundaciomiro-bcn.org www.museupicasso.bcn.es www2.museopicassomalaga.org www.musee-picasso.fr