Exhibit of the week: Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through Aug. 12

Maybe there’s no need to make the acquaintance of “another Miró,” said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. This “exhilarating” show at the National Gallery goes out of its way to convince us that the great Catalan painter was more politically engaged than history remembers, “yet it is more uninteresting than enlightening” to even have that argument. Of course Joan Miró (1893–1983) wasn’t blind to the 20th century’s upheavals. He lived through the rise and fall of an independent Catalan state and through the Spanish Civil War. He fled Paris for home just ahead of the 1940 Nazi invasion. He deeply sympathized with 1968’s student protesters. But let’s consider the image that gives this exhibition its subtitle: the simple ladder-like figure he used in many of his paintings. This was a man who may have had one foot “in the messy world of human affairs,” but “the rest of him aspired up and out of the earthbound.”

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There is anger in some of these works, sometimes “as subtle as a car crash,” said Roland Flamini in The Washington Times. Often, Miró’s abstract figures seem to be howling at the moon, and we get “vicious-looking birds tearing at heaven knows what.” Still, “the case for the more politically engaged Miró is circumstantial at best.” You’ll find here no Miró equivalent of Guernica—Picasso’s raging 1937 response to the bombing of a Basque city. It’s been said that Miró’s Guernica is Still Life With Old Shoe (1937), but that diminishes him. The painting is merely “a mundane collection of everyday objects”—a crust of bread, an apple pierced by a fork, that shoe—set against “a background of flame and shadow.”

“The exultant beauty” of Miró’s work should be argument enough for its importance, said Laura Cumming in The Guardian (U.K). Ignore the insistence that Miró was a protest artist and this otherwise “beautifully orchestrated” exhibition makes vivid how, across 60 productive years, he devised various ways “to get painting airborne, to make it more alive in as many senses and dimensions as possible.” Key to this effort was amassing a collection of personal symbols—birds, peasants, suns, ladders—and then paring them to abstract essences. Sometimes, those ladders reach out to the viewer, inviting you to climb right into the paintings. Whenever he achieved what he was reaching for, “the result is pure joie de vivre.”