Label only what you need to talk about
This is the second painting completed after a pivotal Barcelona trip. Bright simple primaries. I was struck by how central a role the basic primaries play throughout Miro’s career. Later on, and especially in the ceramics, that’s pretty much all Miro used. The blue, yellow, red, and black you think of when you hear the names of those colors. Which puts you at a remove, substituting the concept of ‘primary colors’ for the phenomenological vibrations you could otherwise be experiencing if you resisted labeling them and filtering your visual input accordingly. Why make the experience of color less than it could be? I suppose his attempts to show how little was necessary to make a painting included color in their scope.
This is why the room in the Picasso Museum with all the studies from the incomparably singular “Las Meninas” by Velasquez left me cold. That one is mainly brown, this one is mainly green. Yellow here, but flat, lacking a sense of space or light, the analysis of the source material amounting more to dismemberment than autopsy. There is a luminosity to Fauvism that is absent from these. Picasso was jealous of Matisse with good reason.
In spite of finding his palette perplexing, I remain a big fan of Miro. Especially when it comes to how he handled figure and ground.