THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD
JOAN MIRÓ, 1925
First thing, this one is big. Eight feet tall, and most of it is fog. Stains, spills, washes of gray. Up close it barely looks decided. More like weather than a picture. That's the recipe, though. Miró primed the canvas badly on purpose, patchy, so the paint would never behave. Then he poured it, brushed it, flung it. Some of it soaks in, some of it sits there. Chance gets to paint the background. And then, this is the move, he comes back with a steady hand and drops in the little signs. A red balloon on a long yellow string. A black triangle that might be a kite. A white ball. Down in the corner, a spidery little star. His own description says it all. A sort of genesis, he called it. And then, his words, the second stage is carefully calculated. First the fog, then the thought. He didn't even name the thing. His friends were poets, Surrealist poets, and they took one look and called it The Birth of the World. Poets, right? But maybe that's why it stuck. It has that look, the second before things click. And pouring paint, letting the mess lead? That's Pollock's whole legend, twenty years later. Miró got there first, on a farm in Catalonia, with nobody watching. And that's sort of how everything starts, isn't it. Spills. Nobody knowing what they're doing. Then someone draws one line with confidence, and everyone acts like the plan was always there. Anyway. Maybe he just caught the world early. While it was still deciding what it wanted to be.