THE exhibition which opens at the National Gallery next Wednesday is entitled Miro Grahador, "Miro the Engraver", and includes 100 of his graphic works. Like his friend and fellow Catalan Picasso, he was a graphic artist just as much as he was a painter, not merely a painter who also drew and engraved. Both left vast outputs, both men were relentless, compulsive workers who had exceptionally long lives, both were emigres in France for much of their careers; but otherwise their personalities could hardly have been more different from each other.
Picasso's "difficult" character is well known, yet Miro was one of the relatively few people who never quarrelled with him. In fact, he scarcely quarrelled with anybody, though he was exceptionally astute in managing his life and career and fully lived up to the stereotypical image of the Catalans as the businessmen of Spain.
Bland, prudent, diplomatic, often the despair of interviewers who found that he agreed with almost everything they said and gave nothing of himself away, Miro looked and sounded like a bank manager or fonctionnaire rather than an artist. Even Picasso, his friend for well over half a century, remarked that no one ever really got to know him intimately.
When Miro died in 1983, he was 90, but seemingly still compos metis. Up to the end, he was a disciplined worker who lived according to the clock, went to his work each day like an accountant going to his office, and devoted himself to whatever medium he happened to be working in. At the end of his days, his work was largely in ceramics, a technique which he learned mainly from the Catalan potter Llorens Artigas. In fact, Miro lifted ceramics to a new plane in such commissions as those for the UNESCO building in Paris and for Harvard University.
Miro had sided with the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and even did propaganda work for the republican cause; but quite early in the fighting he left Spain and went back to France, where he had lived and worked since 1920. However, the Hitler invasion of France in 1940 took him by surprise, and forced him to choose between the Nazis and the Franco regime. He chose the latter, crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, and went to live quietly among the Catalan farming class which he knew from childhood.
He lay low, apparently was bothered by nobody, and stayed in Catalonia until 1948, when the worst of the Civil War hatreds and European post war bitterness in general had been defused. After that, he led an increasingly international, jetsetter life style, and got to know America, where his art had been admired since the 1930s and which he found a major experience.
Miro's origins were chiefly in Surrealism and he was living and active in Paris at the height of the movement - Hemingway, incidentally, bought his work during this period. Yet he really fits into no movement, any more than Picasso did, nor does there seem to be any convenient label to hang around his neck.
Unlike his compatriot Dali, he did not seek out scandal and shock tactics, nor did he join the infighting and schisms and under the belt tactics in which many of his fellow Surrealists indulged. Somehow, he contrived to go his own way without having to explain verbally how or why he did so, when fellow artists were setting up lifelong feuds and factions.
Whether this was calculation, or intellectual naivete, or simple prudence, is not quite clear, but certainly Miro appeared to emerge from every artistic movement or change of fashion smiling, fresh faced, and as unperturbed as a village priest at Sunday Mass. He was one of the great survivors of modernism, who seemed to make no enemies even when he lost old friends; often he appeared to be well behind the posse, yet somehow he usually contrived to emerge ahead of it and calmly up the track.
Unlike Picasso and his numerous marriages, affairs and domestic upheavals, Miro was monogamous, devoted to his wife and daughter and quite happy, once his tough daily work schedule was through, to sit still and look at television. His peut bourgeois mentality was sometimes commented on sarcastically, yet he was also a sophisticated man who was friendly with many poets and intellectuals, illustrated their work, and even wrote poetry himself.
Like a true Latin, he adored sport and while in America liked nothing better than to sit and watch boxing matches and basketball on TV.
What is his place in modern art? He was "second generation", that is to say, a little later (he was born in Barcelona in 1893) than Picasso or Braque or Derain, and he came to modernism when Cubism and Fauvism and abstract art had already "happened". Yet Miro, in his almost humble way, was a considerable innovator and this continued into his middle and even old age. He had, as is generally admitted, a strong influence on the American art of the post war era, but it influenced him in turn, and he was so shaken by the scale and vitality of the New York School that he took them on their own terms and re-created himself when most painters of his generation were merely repeating early successes.
Miro's late paintings often beat the Abstract Expressionists at their own game, even in sheer size, though this is seldom recognised.
His record as a graphic artist is at least equally distinguished, and it goes right back to the 1920s at least. He did a great deal of illustration for literary texts, without being merely illustrational, and one of the climaxes of his career was the Barcelona series of 1944. His achievement in this field was recognised at the Venice Biennale in 1954, when he won the Grand Prix for graphic art.
He was plainly influenced by Klee, by Picasso. perhaps by his fellow surrealist Andre Masson (they lived in adjacent studios in Paris in the 1920s yet "Miro style" is always unmistakable.
As he grew older, he grew increasingly more daring and improvisational, something which developed with his sheer technical virtuosity in the various graphic media. Fantasy, "eroticism, Goyaesque savagery, linear arabesques, luminous adventures in colour, smouldering "black" effects, combine to make his output in this field among the most important in the 20th century. In fact, it becomes difficult to reconcile this uninhibited world of dream and fantasy with the sober little Catalan bourgeois who produced it.
Great though he was as a painter, the graphic works are probably his most intimate and personal works, the ones in which his individual handwriting can be read and deciphered. Whether he used etching and its variants, or lithography, or another form of print making, he exploited its potential for his own ends and in his own vocabulary, and he was never too old or set in his ways to master new tricks.
There seem to be two basic types of Spanish artist - and Miro was nothing if not Spanish, even if Catalans' traditionally have detested Madrid (Miro, in any case, was decorated in old age by King Juan Carlos, which marks a full circle of some kind). On the one side, there is the artist or poet who has a huge, uneven output, like Lope de Vega with his 1,200 plays, Galdos with his shelves of novels, and Goya and Picasso in art. Against this there are Garcilaso with his handful of lyrics, or Machado, all of whose poetry fits into a single volume, or Velasquez with his notoriously slow, limited output.
Miro, obviously, belongs in the first category. In spite of the ultra respectability of his lifestyle, behind it there lurked a "black" Spanish vision, and in nothing is this clearer than his graphic art, a field in which he never stood still. Inside the plump, smiling little Catalan there was a goblin or duende striving to break out. He was one of those rare artists who got better as they aged, and up to the end continued to break new ground, technically and expressively.