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.

Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miró in the 1920s

Palermo, Charles

Biographies & Memoirs

Penn State University Press

Picasso and Braque offers an intimate look at one of the most pivotal exchanges in the history of Western art: the culminating two years (1910-12) of Analytic Cubism. While the Cubist experiment has long been a requisite chapter in the history of modernism, this is the first publication to delve deeply into these two intense years of productivity, revealing the intriguing pictorial game being played out between these two great masters. 
Essays by prominent curators and historians offer sustained readings of paintings, drawings, and prints in terms of their engagement with issues of genre, format, medium, and artistic process. In addition, the new technology of spectral imaging provides reproductions of astounding color and textural fidelity, making this an essential publication for those seeking to understand better the complexity of Picasso's and Braque's mark-making, which typically evades conventional photography.

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912

Arts & Photography

Bourneuf, Annie

Poggi, Christine

Cooper, Harry

Barry, Claire M.

Kahng, Eik

Devolder, Bart

History & Criticism

Kimbell Art Museum

A compelling new look at the late works by one of art history’s most renowned and inventive modern artists This groundbreaking publication offers a reassessment of renowned modernist Joan Miró’s late-career works, created between 1963 and 1981. This body of work, almost entirely unknown in the United States, showcases Miró’s exceptional ingenuity as both a painter and sculptor. Miró: The Experience of Seeing includes color illustrations of nearly 50 paintings, drawings, and sculptures that show the breadth and contrast of this body of work—from bold, colorful canvases with expressive gestures to the most minimal calligraphic markings on white fields. His sculptures made of found objects are a revelation. Comparisons between paintings and sculptures highlight startling connections between shapes and symbols that Miró used in each medium. These mature works represent the culmination of the artist’s development of an innovative and personal visual language. Engaging texts, including a contribution by noted Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella, explain Miró’s role as a political figure and his quest to speak about the most intangible subjects through the materiality of objects and the painted gesture. This important new examination of Miró’s later work allows for a richer, deeper understanding of this significant modern artist’s distinguished career.

Miró: The Experience of Seeing―Late Works, 1963–1981

Fernández Aparicio, Carmen

Portabella, Pere

Carrillo, Jesús

Galán Martín, Belén

Yale University Press

Modernism and Authority presents a provocative new take on the early paintings of Pablo Picasso and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Palermo argues that references to theology and traditional Christian iconography in the works of Picasso and Apollinaire are not mere symbolic gestures; rather, they are complex responses to the symbolist art and poetry of figures important to them, including Paul Gauguin, Charles Morice, and Santiago Rusiñol. The young Picasso and his contemporaries experienced the challenges of modernity as an attempt to reflect on the lost relation to authority. For the symbolists, art held authority by revealing something compelling―something to which audiences must respond lest they lose claim to their own moral authority. Instead of the total transformation of the reader or viewer that symbolist creators envision, Picasso and Apollinaire imagine a divided self, responding only partially or ambivalently to the work of art’s call. Navigating these problems of symbolist art and poetry entails considering the nature of the work of art and of one’s response to it, the modern subject’s place in history, and the relevance of historical truth to our methodological choices in the present.

Modernism and Authority: Picasso and His Milieu around 1900

University of California Press

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