MoMA for Members

The MoMA opens its doors early once a month or so to members, supposedly for certain exhibitions only, but you really have the full run of the Museum from 8 AM to 10:30 when the hordes roll in. Recently we walked through "Joan Miro -- Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-37". Never one given to understatement, Miro was out to, in his own words, "assassinate painting." What he did in that decade was not assassinate but experiment, with collages, with heightened abstraction, with minimalism, with deconstruction, and at the end after -- in my limited eye -- some very successful experiments (Spanish Dancers, Dutch Rooms, and especially a painting called Mediterranean Landscape)



and some not at all successful grotesque distortions of human figures and genitalia, he returned to where he began -- and like Eliot -- knew the place for the first time. His Old Shoe painting is at once hallucinatory and glorious, with colors and distortions that almost cause the eye to ache. I could have stood in front of it for quite awhile but the doors opened and the mobs arrived.