Miro's radical decade, at MOMA in New York

The great Catalan master Joan Miro (1893-1983) is clearly a vital presence in 20th Century art, but the question of how to place him remains unsettled. His elder contemporary Picasso stole a march on the century with Cubism; his younger one, Dali, became the poster child of Surrealism. Later, the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet would represent L'Art brut, with its "crude" figuration and color and its use of rough textures and materials.

Miro's art partook of all these schools without being defined by any one of them, and his later reputation was that of a charming purveyor of whimsy, reliably good for a spiderweb canvas or a monumental bird figure, agreeable and unthreatening. You could always fill a museum corner with him, but there was no sense that you'd miss something critical if he were left out.

Miro may in a certain sense have outlived himself. But as a tightly focused exhibit now on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art makes clear, he undertook as radical a project as any in 20th-Century art when, in his mid-30s, he chucked his easel and determined, as he put it, to "assassinate" painting.

After Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Vorticism, Suprematism and what not else, there may not have seemed much convention left to challenge; but Miro, who'd dabbled in a variety of modern styles, was determined to reduce art to its most minimal gestures and elements, and to build a new language from the ground up. His work during the next ten years in a variety of media was a sustained attempt to see what art might look like without any preconception of beauty.

An empty canvas in an empty room

In a sense, Miro's gesture was 20th-Century art's Cartesian moment. Fauvism had done away with naturalistic colors and forms; Cubism had broken solid forms into abstract planes; Abstract Expressionism had eliminated representational forms altogether. But all of these movements had put something in place of the customary world; none had envisioned a vacuum. Miro alone asked what it would be like not merely to break with tradition but to abolish it; not merely to look at the world afresh but to posit it from the beginning, an empty canvas in an empty room.

Miro began with the canvas itself. Normally, a canvas is primed with a layer of gesso before being painted on, but Miro eliminated this step in his so-called anti-paintings of 1927, applying paint, collage and other materials to the raw fabric. This act made each application stand out separately, as if afloat on the canvas, a world of individual signs that pointed (by indirection) toward each other but made no effort to cohere. Many of these were amoeba-like blobs and primitive webs, incipient forms criss-crossed by thin striations.

Despite the seeming randomness of these streaks and dabs, however, they convey a powerful sense of genesis. At the same time, Miro frequently paints the titles of his work on the canvas, including one, simply titled 48, in which the number itself occupies a principal place in the composition.

Ferocity, wit and linoleum

Miro was equally experimental in his sculptures and constructions, many of which consist of found objects in juxtaposition. Spanish Dancer (1928), for example, evokes its subject with sandpaper, string, nails, linoleum and a strategically inverted drafting triangle; while Portrait of a Dancer makes do with a feather laid across a hatpin and a piece of cork.

There is wit here as well as economy, but some of the work is severe to the point of ferocity. Miro the sophisticate can't resist showing up, and even sending up, the work of great predecessors, but there is an elemental force to much of this production that is rivaled only by Picasso at his most brutal, and that would never reappear in Miro's work.

Even as he reintroduces images into his work— floating heads and wackily distorted figures— there is a sense of menace and even monstrosity, as if the human race were being observed by a distinctly unfriendly extraterrestrial. This is particularly true of his 1934 pastel series, which goes far beyond the point of caricature and bears comparison only with the later Cactus Man series of the great Catalan sculptor Julio Gonzalez.

Spain's monstrous agony

Miro denied that his work was intended to reflect the mounting political tensions in Spain that finally erupted in civil war in 1936. But his constructions Rope and People make obvious reference to contemporary events, and his Person in the Presence of Nature (1935) startlingly anticipates what would become the most famous expression of Spain's agony, the monstrous female figure of Dali's Soft Construction with Boiled Beans. Miro, Dali, Picasso and Gonzalez would in fact do for the Spanish Civil War what Goya had done for the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, and it is one of the great if tragic glories of Spanish art that no other culture has so captured the elemental horror of war.

Each room in the current exhibit features one of the different genres— painting on unprimed canvas, on Masonite, on copper, etc.— which Miro methodically explored in his great decade. This arrangement gives the show a natural unity, as well as displaying Miro's astonishing versatility and invention. He brought his grand experiment in reinventing art to a self-proclaimed end in Still Life with Old Shoe (1937, above), perhaps his greatest painting. If it announced a new direction in his art, however, it was also clearly a summation of what he had accomplished in the decade of his "anti-art"; and a comparison of it with the mutilated shoe depicted in his painted sculpture of 1936, Object of Sunset, reveals a clear continuity.

The Museum of Modern Art gave Miro a centennial retrospective in 1993. The present show makes a more compact and focused case for his achievement and for the intense and fructifying dialogue he carried on with his great Catalan contemporaries. It also suggests the profound influence he exerted on American artists from Pollock to Jasper Johns. This may be the one Miro show you have to see.