Tatham Art Gallery

Album 19, no V

colour lithograph

Joan Miro (1893 - 1983)

by Michael Lambert

Barcelona, capital of the autonomous region of Cataluna in Spain, nurtured and inspired some of the most famous artists of the 20th century: Gaudi's visionary architecture gives the city its distinctive style and ambience; Picasso, born in Malaga, attended the art school there (a decade before Miro); Salvador Dali was proud of his Catalan origins; and Miro, the "most surrealist of us all", according to Breton, created some of his most important works in the city of his birth, which has honoured him by establishing an artist's foundation in his name.

In this work, Miro continues his experimentation with form, rhythm and colour. The geometry of the interlocking conical shapes is subverted by the contraction of the background cone (is this an allusion to Gaudi's cathedral, The Sagrada Familia?) and by the expansion of the foregrounded shape into the egg-shaped head of a rattled professor, his stringy hair waving and springing from his bald pate in contrasting movements. Self-portraits feature significantly in Spanish art (Velasquez, El Greco, Goya): is this Miro's witty allusion to this tradition? His self-portrait splashed across the colourful exuberance of Barcelona? The bold, black lines, both parallel and intersecting, create a children's playground, a maze of jungle gyms - perhaps the wavy and irregular skyline of Barcelona , flecked with blobs and dashes of green, blue, yellow and red (in fauvist glee!). Childlike stars, suns, a crested moon or weather-vane and wilted tendrils, extend Miro's play with shapes and forms. This play is heightened by the contrast between Picasso's early cubist head (on the left of the Miro) and Braque's elegant, sinuous Cretan woman on the right.

For the past three years I have taken my Spanish class from the university to discuss the three important Spanish works in this room in the Tatham. Many of the students express astonishment that a provincial art gallery in Africa has a collection that includes Chagall, a Degas, a Sisley, two Picassos, a Kollwitz, a Miro and a Kokoschka. For teachers of Spanish, German and French (there are more than seventy works by French artists in the Tatham), the Tatham is a wonderful resource, enabling the teacher to root the language in some kind of cultural context.

Furthermore, students of art and art historians, interested in exploring critical moments in the history of twentieth century Western art, need look no further than this room, which is of inestimable value to this city and to the nation. Two visiting British art historians I met recently in this room of the Gallery wondered why the Tatham was not South Africa's National gallery.

Indeed.

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