Joan Miro 1917-1934: I'm Going to Smash Their Guitar

The popular image of Miro may portray him as a childlike creator of whimsical doodles, but this hulking slab of a coffee table book, published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, brilliantly restores Miro's violence and thorny intellectualism. Covering the 17-year period during which, as Bruno Racine writes, ""the artist's visual language had time enough to develop but not to become formulaic,"" the book takes its title from a comment the artist made about Cubism. The guitar in question stood for all that had become stereotypical about that style. But Miro's iconoclasm, the book makes clear, extended even to his own ambitions, and to art itself. As he once remarked, his goal was to ""murder painting."" In the most interesting of the book's six densely argued essays (written by assorted intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic), Remi Labrusse explores the aesthetic of destruction that took hold in Europe after WWI, while making it clear that Miro himself never gave in to a fashionable nihilism: ""Whereas Dada sought to do nothing, Miro was led to a terrible contempt for something he still actually did."" In addition to the essays, the book includes an exhaustive chronology, but the real heart of the volume lies in its rich, full-color reproductions of Miro's works. The 231 illustrations showcase mostly paintings, including such famous works as ""Harlequin's Carnival"" and ""The Siesta,"" but a few of Miro's relief-sculptures also appear and, in keeping with the book's focus on the raw and the formative, there are plenty of sketches and studies. Though the price is high, if you can afford it, this is the Miro book to get. The dazzling quality of the reproductions and the new interpretive frame supplied by the book's authors allow Miro's odd genius to blaze with greater depth, sharper edges and darker shadows than are usually seen.