From Publishers Weekly
By comparing Spanish artist Joan Miro's finished paintings and sculptures with more than 1200 of his sketches and preparatory studies, Gimferrer places Miro's art in a surprising new perspective. Marvelously illustrated with 285 radiant color plates and 1276 in black-and-white, this intensive analysis of Miro's creative process explains how he would first isolate some element from the teeming outside world, then incorporate a graphic sign into it, thus setting in motion a transfigurative process in which objects, signs and symbols underwent a constant metamorphosis. In placing Miro's preliminary drawings alongside the pictures to which they gave rise, Spanish poet and art critic Gimferrer illuminates the inner alchemy by which Miro discovered his major motifs and set them loose in a free-floating pictorial universe.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In preparing this monumental work, Gimferrer ( De Chirico , Rizzoli, 1990; Toulouse-Lautrec , Rizzoli, 1989) spent many years studying the technical creation of 4,556 sketches and preparatory studies by Miro, worked through a mountain of documents collected by the Miro Foundation, and interviewed the artist extensively. Gimferrer's literary background as a critical essayist shines through as he lays open Miro's evolution and ties it to the broader accomplishments of modernism. The over 1200 carefully chosen reproductions combined with the text brilliantly elucidate Miro's artistic innovations. The scholarly methodology employed here is destined to have a positive impact on art historical investigation. Essential for research libraries and specialized collections covering 20th-century painting.
- Paula A. Baxter, NYPL
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Paula A. Baxter, NYPL
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
