The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joan Miró · oil on canvas, wider than high and under a metre wide, between cabinet and easel size · a room of warm brown wall above and pale floor below, a window at the upper right onto a dark shape and a star, a moustached Harlequin left of centre with a guitar body torn open in its middle, a ladder at the left, two cats with a ball of yarn at the lower right, a table, a globe, musical notes and a swarm of small creatures and signs · painted 1924 to 1925 in the studio at 45 rue Blomet, Paris · the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York · the unit scored is the one canvas, as it hangs in Buffalo
Mode
Surrealist painting of the rue Blomet years: the object signed rather than depicted, the body an ideogram, a room of weightless signs
Mythos
Carnival, the feast before the fast and the world turned upside down, built as the picture’s method; Harlequin, the hungry trickster and figure of the artist, and the ladder of escape evoked
Phase
One festival in one room, held without event or sequence; painted 1924 to 1925
Presentation
Oil on a canvas wider than high and under a metre wide; flat, bright, unmodelled fields of red, yellow, blue, black and white on a warm brown and pale ground; fine black line throughout
Register
High glee, whimsy and a nervous delight, with a want at its centre
Scale
One room, one figure as host, a ladder, a window, two cats and a few dozen small creatures and signs, read at close range sign by sign
Governing Proposition
A brown wall and a pale floor make a room. In it a Harlequin with a moustache and a pipe stands left of centre, his body a guitar with a hole torn in its middle, and around him the room has come alive: a ladder climbs at the left, two cats play with a ball of yarn, notes of music, a globe, fish, insects and winged things crowd the air, and a window at the upper right gives onto a dark shape and a star. Everything is a flat sign drawn in one fine black line and one unmodelled colour. The wager of the canvas is that the starving imagination does not empty but swarms, and that a painting can be made from what the mind throws up rather than from what stands before the eye.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Joan Miró painted The Harlequin’s Carnival, Carnaval d’Arlequin in French and Carnaval d’Arlequí in Catalan, in 1924 to 1925, in his studio at 45 rue Blomet in Paris. It is oil on canvas, wider than high and under a metre wide, a size between the cabinet picture and the easel picture, made to be read at close range. It hangs in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York. The unit scored is the one canvas as it hangs there. The preparatory drawings, the neighbouring canvases of the rue Blomet years, The Tilled Field and Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) of 1923 to 1924 and Dog Barking at the Moon of 1926, and the painter’s later text about the picture are context, and are not scored.
The ground is divided into two broad zones: a warm brown or ochre wall above and a lighter, pinkish floor below, and their junction is a horizon that turns the canvas into a room. At the upper right a window opens onto a sky with a star in it and a dark shape against it. Left of centre stands the Harlequin, with a moustache and a pipe, his body shaped like a guitar or a lute with a hole torn in its middle. A ladder rises at the left. At the lower right two cats play with a ball of yarn, and at the right stands a table with objects on it. A globe, notes of music and a few dozen small creatures and loose signs, insects, fish, a line like a snake, winged things, are dispersed across the whole room. Everything is painted in flat, bright, unmodelled fields of red, yellow, blue, black and white, and drawn in a fine black line.
The subtractive test is hard on a carnival, and the picture invites it. The frame is required. The Harlequin is the host, and the hole in his body is the hunger the feast surrounds. The ladder is the one vertical that climbs out of the room. The window keeps the outside world at a distance, the cats give the lower right its one sustained action, and the wall and floor make a room without which the swarm would float in nothing. What yields is the swarm itself: a given insect, fish or note, and exactly where it sits, could change or go without loss. Profusion is the method, and at the scale of the single sign profusion is permitted rather than compelled. The canvas stands just above the cap for that.
Movement II
At the centre of the feast is a wound. The Harlequin’s body is a guitar, and the guitar is torn open where its sound hole would be: the host of the carnival is hollow. Years later Miró wrote about the picture and tied it to the hallucinations of hunger in his poor Paris years, the visions that came to him when he had not eaten. Those words are given here in paraphrase, not quoted. The account makes hunger the picture’s occasion. In the image the wound is a small dark hole among bright things, and the room around it is gleeful.
That is the disclosure and its limit. Something can be stated and holds: deprivation breeds abundance in the mind; the starving imagination does not empty but swarms, and a bare room becomes a festival. The inner life is shown as populated, a world of living signs answering one another, and the picture shows a state the waking eye does not report, that perception, loosened, animates everything it rests on, so that a table holds a fish that is alive. These are claims about the mind that can be stated plainly. But what the canvas gives first and longest is a mood, high glee and a nervous delight, and the meaning of hunger is carried more by the painter’s later account than by the image. Mood outweighs meaning, and the disclosure stands below the line of Tier IV.
The archetype is built in one place. Carnival is the feast before the fast and the world turned upside down, and here it is set in a starving painter’s room, so that the feast is made from want. The inversion bears the load: the picture’s whole method, objects made alive, the high and the low mixed, the room become a fair, is the carnival’s law. Harlequin, the commedia’s hungry servant and trickster and the figure of the artist in the harlequins of Cézanne and Picasso, is the right host, and the wound in his guitar body ties the trickster to his hunger. The rest is evoked. The Harlequin arrives by inheritance from Picasso as much as he is rebuilt, and the many small creatures remain emblems of a private bestiary rather than becoming archetypes.
Movement III
Two things in the room lead out of it. The ladder at the left is the one vertical that climbs past the horizon of wall and floor, the old figure of escape and ascent, the way up and out. The window at the upper right is the other, held at a distance: through it the night, a star and a dark shape, the city kept outside. Take the two most distant elements in the picture, that window and the two cats with their yarn on the floor, the most domestic play in the most hallucinated room, and one law holds them. Everything is a flat sign, drawn in the same line and the same unmodelled colour, and everything is alive and taking part in the festival. Nothing is modelled, nothing is shadowed, nothing stands outside the play.
The law is complete, and its range is narrow: one room, one register of bright glee, and narrowness is not coherence. The hunger the picture is said to come from is the one element the law does not quite take in, since the wound reads as one more sign among delighted ones. The form, though, is the knowledge. A modelled fish would be a fish in a room; a fish drawn as a sign is a thought present in a room, and that presence is the picture’s subject. The dispersal across the whole field is the knowledge of hallucination, which has no centre and no single point of attention. The room is the knowledge that the dream is lived in an actual place, the poor studio, which is why this is not yet the open fields of the canvases of 1925 to 1927.
The elevation is of one kind: delight, the lift of a world in which every object has come alive and is enjoying itself. It comes in the first sight of the room full of signs, again in the window where the far star opens the closed room onto the night, and in the notes and the ladder, which give the room an upward motion. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport by scale. The canvas asks to be read sign by sign, and that divides the delight into many small pleasures rather than lifting it into one. The height is real and low, sustained across the surface rather than rising to summits; the axis stands lowest but one.
Movement IV
Behind the canvas stands the painter’s own detailed realism of The Farm (1921 to 1922), Catalan and meticulous, with Cubism and the Fauves behind it, and the Paris of Picasso, whose harlequins this picture both quotes and dismantles. The departure is in kind. The object is no longer depicted but signed; the body becomes an ideogram; the picture space becomes a room in which signs float without weight and without modelling; and the painting is made from the image the mind throws up rather than the scene before the eye. The stake was real. Miró had just won notice with a painstaking realist manner and left it for a language most of the market could not read, beside a movement, Surrealism, whose manifesto of 1924 had not yet settled whether painting could serve it.
The turn was not made here first. It was made in The Tilled Field and Catalan Landscape, and this canvas is its fullest statement more than its origin; much of its form was worked out across several canvases of those two years, and this one fills it rather than finds it. The making is load-bearing in two places. The line is fine, sure and continuous and gives each sign its exact character, a cat or an insect in a few strokes. The colour is placed so that a scattered composition stays in balance, the reds and yellows distributed so that the eye travels and no corner goes dead. The costs are charged: the paint itself is thin and does little, the brown ground is a backdrop more than a built surface, and in places the crowding trades clarity for profusion.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV. Its swerve, its making and its law stand high, and its survival is whole; but the axes of disclosure and archetype stand low, its elevation is the delight of many small things, and the world it holds is one room of one mind. Against I and the Village (8.2), the nearest kind, a dream-room of signs, animals and memory, it stands lower on every axis. It stands a tenth above Angelus Novus (7.7), a small sign-painting of the same years, leading on the swerve, the form, the reach, the making and the law, behind on necessity, the disclosure, the elevation, the archetype and the well, level on survival and on the world it holds. The Son of Man (7.6) stands below it, ahead on necessity and disclosure, behind on the swerve and the reach. Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (8.1) stands three tenths above it, ahead on disclosure, archetype and elevation, behind on the swerve and, by a tenth, on the reach.
Movement V
The canvas is whole at about a century: one canvas, the image the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. It hangs in a public collection in Buffalo, is widely reproduced, and is one of the images by which Miró is known; its presence is narrower than that of the most visited canvases in the largest museums. It is oil thinly painted on a prepared ground, and no conservation history is charged beyond the ordinary risk of an oil of its age. Its subject, a poor studio in Paris in the 1920s, does not stand between the picture and its viewer.
Its reach is large and is shared. With the canvases around it, it reorganised the picture into a field of animated signs, made the biomorphic sign a unit of painting, and answered the question whether painting could be Surrealist at all. Miró’s sign language passed into Arshile Gorky’s paintings of the 1940s, into Calder’s mobiles and paintings, into the early work of Pollock, Baziotes and Motherwell, and widely into the design and animation of the middle of the century. That reach belongs to the manner of 1923 to 1927 and to the later Constellations as much as to this canvas, which is the emblem of the manner rather than its single source. Beside The Persistence of Memory (8.6), Dalí’s Surrealist canvas of 1931, it stands lower on every axis but survival, where the two are level. The questions stay open: how far it is automatism and how far planned, how much of the hunger is the painter’s later framing, whether its signs make a lexicon, and how Catalan the carnival is and how Parisian.
The orders it holds are consciousness in the hallucination that is its subject, the body in hunger and its wound, art and music in the Harlequin and the notes, the animal world in the cats, fish and insects, the domestic room, and the cosmos in the globe and the star. No labour is shown but the painter’s want, no state, no family, no history, and the sacred only as carnival turns it over. The figure describes the form: a room of one mind. The Harlequin still stands open at the middle, the cats still play on the floor, and the ladder still leans toward a way out.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hard on a carnival, and the picture invites it. Some parts are required. The Harlequin is the host, and the hole in his body is the hunger the feast surrounds; take it away and the carnival loses its centre and its cause. The ladder is the one vertical that climbs out of the room, the escape the picture is about. The window holds the outside world at a distance, and the cats with their yarn give the lower right its one sustained action. The wall and floor make a room, without which the swarm would float in nothing. What yields is the swarm: a given insect, fish or note could change or go without loss, for profusion is permitted rather than compelled at the scale of the single sign.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Something can be stated and holds, through image. Deprivation breeds abundance in the mind: the starving imagination does not empty but swarms, and a bare room becomes a festival. The inner life is shown as populated, a world of living signs answering one another, and the picture discloses a state the waking eye does not report: that perception, loosened, animates everything it rests on, so that a table holds a fish that is alive. These are claims about the mind that can be stated plainly. But what the canvas gives first and longest is a mood, high glee and nervous delight, and the meaning of hunger is carried more by the painter’s later account than by the image, where the Harlequin’s wound is a small dark hole among bright things.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The elevation is of one kind and of modest height: delight, the lift of a world in which every object has come alive and is enjoying itself. It comes in the first sight of the room full of signs; again in the window, where the far star and the dark shape open the closed room onto the night; and in the musical notes and the climbing ladder, which give the room an upward motion. There is no grandeur, no terror and no transport by scale. The canvas is under a metre wide and asks to be read at close range, sign by sign, which divides the delight into many small pleasures rather than lifting it into one. The height is real and low, sustained across the surface rather than rising to summits.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Some is built, more is evoked. The built part is carnival itself: the feast before the fast, the world turned upside down, set in a starving painter’s room so that the feast is made from want. The inversion is load-bearing, not allusion, since the picture’s whole method, objects made alive, the high and the low mixed, the room a fair, is the carnival’s law. Harlequin, the commedia’s hungry servant and trickster and the figure of the artist in the harlequins of Cézanne and Picasso, is the right host, and the wound in his guitar body ties the trickster to his hunger. The ladder of ascent is old and present. But the Harlequin arrives by inheritance as much as he is rebuilt, and the small creatures stay emblems of a private bestiary.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The inheritance is Miró’s own detailed Catalan realism of The Farm (1921 to 1922), with Cubism and the Fauves behind it, and the Paris of Picasso, whose harlequins this picture both quotes and dismantles. The departure: the object is no longer depicted but signed; the body becomes an ideogram; the picture space becomes a room in which signs float without weight or modelling; and the painting is made from the image the mind throws up rather than the scene before the eye. The stake was real: the painter left a manner that had just won him notice for a language most of the market could not read, beside a movement whose 1924 manifesto had not settled whether painting could serve it. Held below the top because the turn was made first in The Tilled Field and Catalan Landscape.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute a different form and much goes. The flat, unmodelled sign on an open ground is the knowledge: a modelled fish would be a fish in a room; a fish drawn as a sign is a thought present in a room, and that presence is the picture’s subject. The dispersal across the whole field is the knowledge of hallucination, which has no centre and no single point of attention. The room of wall, floor and window is the knowledge that the dream is lived in an actual place, the poor studio, which is why the picture is not yet the open fields of 1925 to 1927. Held below the top because the content could be carried, with a loss of colour more than of knowing, in a drawing, and because this canvas fills a form found across several canvases of those years.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: about a century of return, steady attention in the literature on Miró and on Surrealist painting, and a picture whose density rewards close looking each time. The open questions are real: how far the picture is automatism and how far planned, since the preparatory drawings argue planning and the painter’s own account argues trance; how much the hunger is the painter’s later framing; what the many signs are and whether they form a lexicon, the debate over Miró’s sign language turning on this period; how Catalan the carnival is and how Parisian. The canvas yields new detail on every return. Held below the top because much of that yield is inventory, another creature found, and much of the debate concerns the painter’s method rather than this canvas.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is painting in Paris in the middle 1920s, and Surrealist painting in particular, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: with the canvases around it, a reorganisation of the picture into a field of animated signs, the biomorphic sign made a unit of painting, and an answer to the open question whether painting could be Surrealist at all. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Miró’s sign language and biomorphism passed into Arshile Gorky’s paintings of the 1940s, into Calder’s mobiles and paintings, into the early work of Pollock, Baziotes and Motherwell, and widely into mid-century design and animation. The discount: that reach belongs to the painter’s manner of 1923 to 1927 and to the later Constellations as much as to this canvas, which is the emblem of the manner rather than its single source.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about a century, in the row of seventy years to two centuries. Form: whole. It is one canvas, the image the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: in a public collection in Buffalo, widely reproduced, one of the images by which Miró is known. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little, and its presence is narrower than that of the most visited canvases in the largest museums, so the widest-presence figure of its row is not given. Fabric: oil thinly painted on a prepared ground; no conservation history is charged beyond the ordinary risk of an oil of its age. The usual figure for its row.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing in two places. The line: a fine, sure, continuous black drawing that gives each sign its exact character, wit in a contour, a cat or an insect in a few strokes. The colour: flat, saturated fields placed so that a scattered composition stays in balance, the reds and yellows distributed so that the eye travels and no corner goes dead, against the warm ground that holds them. The costs are charged: the paint itself is thin and does little; the brown ground is a backdrop more than a built surface; and the crowding in places trades clarity for profusion, so that some passages read as busy rather than composed. High command of drawing and placement, narrower command of paint.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dark shape and the star in the window, the outside world at night, and the two cats with their yarn on the floor, the most domestic thing in the room. One law holds them: everything is a flat sign, drawn in the same line and the same unmodelled colour, and everything is alive and taking part in the festival. Stars, notes, ladder, globe and insects obey it equally; nothing is modelled, nothing is shadowed, nothing stands outside the play. The law is complete. But its range is narrow, one room and one register of bright glee, and narrowness is not coherence; and the hunger the picture is said to come from is the one element the law does not quite take in, since it reads as one more sign among delighted ones.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, in the hallucination that is the subject; the body, in hunger and its wound; art and music, in the Harlequin, his guitar body and the notes; the animal world, in the cats, fish and insects; the domestic room; and the cosmos, in the globe and the star beyond the window. The room integrates them as one festival seen by one mind. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or merely present: the city is a shape in a window; there is no labour but the painter’s want, no state, no history, since the poverty of the Paris years stands outside the image, no family, and the sacred only as carnival’s inversion of it. The figure describes the form: a room of one mind.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Swerve and The Made at 8.3 and The Inner Law at 8.2. One canvas whole after about a century, in a public collection and one of the images by which its painter is known; a departure from a detailed realism that had just won notice into a language of flat signs, made at real cost; a fine, sure line and a placed colour that keep a scattered field in balance; and one law under which everything, from the star in the window to the cats on the floor, is a flat sign alive in the festival.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.4: consciousness, the body, art and music, the animal world, the room and the cosmos held in one room of one mind; labour, the state, history and the family absent, the city a shape in a window. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.0: one kind of elevation, delight, real and low, divided among many small signs. Then The Unconcealment at 7.4: the abundance of the deprived imagination disclosed, with mood leading meaning. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.5: carnival built as method, the Harlequin inherited and the creatures a private bestiary.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.4, The Archetypal Deep at 7.5, The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Unconcealment, 7.4, and at The Sublime, 7.0, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 93.4, an average of 7.78 that displays 7.8. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas well as an image and moderately as an object: its composition, its principal motifs and its place in the painter’s turn of 1923 to 1925 securely, the exact inventory of its small creatures, its surface condition and its conservation record not, so that where a judgment turns on these it is held more loosely. The work scored is the one canvas, oil, painted 1924 to 1925 at 45 rue Blomet in Paris, as it hangs in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The preparatory drawings, the related canvases of the rue Blomet years and the painter’s later text about the picture are context and are not scored. No words are quoted: the titles are given, and the painter’s later account of hunger is given in paraphrase, since its wording could not be checked. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the canvas’s exact dimensions, the year and fund of its acquisition, what the dark shape in the window represents, whether an ear and an eye are attached to the ladder, the exact count of its figures and signs, its first exhibition, whether and when it has been off view, the year of the painter’s text about it, and its conservation history.