Constellations

Every year during the first week of May, I attend a conference in Washington D.C. Washington being a town especially rich in museums, I always try to schedule visits to one or two of the city’s many famous art galleries.

This year, I wanted to make sure to hit the Phillips Collection, which is hosting an exhibit entitled, “Miró and the United States.” The show is co-sponsored with the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, and features a breathtaking collection of the Catalan master’s paintings shown in the context of the work of several American artists who influenced him and whom he, in turn, influenced — among them Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Alexander Calder.

I know very little about art history, and even less about visual arts techniques. I typically respond to art in a visceral way. In saying that, I mean that looking at fine art often thrusts me into a mental channel in which I lose myself to awe, but have no idea why. Scientists have found that the act of looking at fine art actually releases all the feel-good hormones — oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin. These hormones apparently promote feelings of bonding and oneness with the world. True enough for me. Capturing those feelings is why I go to museums, and also why once I’m in a museum I don't stay for very long. The experience, when timed judiciously, is incredibly uplifting; but after a while, that uplift becomes exhaustion.

The Phillips Gallery Miró exhibit features some remarkable individual works — one of them a bronze sculpture called “Woman” that is a whimsical modernist variation on the fertility goddess theme. It seemed to me the sculpture evinced therianthropic characteristics — in this case references to perhaps a penguin. But maybe I was just projecting; Miró loved to incorporate bird images in his work.

An amazing painting placed right next to the sculpture also stopped me in my tracks. Entitled, “The Red Sun,” it had a depth, stillness, and opaqueness of color so different from what I would have expected from the artist that I found myself looking very closely at it and marveling at the different textures Miró was able to create, apparently with a palette knife.

But the big reward for me came in the room where the 22 famous Constellations were displayed. It should be mentioned here that the originals of this marvelous celestial series, painted in gouache and oil, are widely dispersed so that the Phillips is displaying pochoir (hand stenciled) prints that the artist prepared for his 1959 retrospective at MoMA. The effect is not, I would think, any less brilliant than the originals would have been. The works feature bold colors, rounded irregular shapes, swirling lines and doodles (these evidently derived from “automatism” exercises involving spontaneous unconscious drawing) and ubiquitous eyes — all swimming on background surfaces that range and alternate in color from yellow and beige through red to blue and smoky black.

My parents loved Miró and purchased prints of two of the Constellations way back in the 1960s. I have lived with them now for nearly 60 years. I love them not only because of their familiarity (They have adorned the walls of my living space nearly my entire life), but because they are among the happiest works of visual art I have ever seen.

I had never viewed the Constellations series together in one room, nor even seen them pictured together in a book. And the experience confirmed my favorite, which could be described as among the sparsest in line, and the lightest in background. It is entitled “Women on the Beach.” In fact, I have spent many a moment at home gazing on this painting and dreaming of I don't know what — certainly not of women, and not always even of beaches. But the work always conjures in me a feeling of respite and quiet joy.

I have no idea of this painting’s inner meaning, and little clue as to its representational references, other than that there seems to be a woman’s head, arm. and exposed breast in its lower right quadrant and what looks to be a mermaid with a very colorful fish body that draws my eye to the center. I come away from contemplating these figures with a healthier resignation to all those mysteries of life that completely elude my understanding.

According to the MoMA website, Miró created the Constellations during World War II as an antidote to the chaos and anguish of the times. In other words, they represented for him some hope in the midst of horror.

The Wikipedia entry on them mentions that Miró painted them largely while listening to music, and principally the music of Mozart and Bach. If one squints one’s eyes a bit, one can curiously see in many of the works the shapes of music notation. Indeed, many have that busy, visually contrapuntal quality of an orchestral score. All of which convinces me that it would be impossible to express in language what the Constellations are all about except to say that they are each and every one wholly original works of intense play, far too complex to unravel through mere language, and are, in my humble estimation, polyphonic music to the eyes.

*Note to subscribers: My last week’s Substack entry errantly identified the White House Correspondents Association dinner as the White House Press Corps dinner. I have corrected this, and apologize to my readers.