Tesi presentada a la Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Institute of Fine Arts at New York University

Bibliografia

This is an authorized facsimile, made from the microfilm master copy of the original dissertation or master thesis published by UMI. Printed in 1999

Tesi presentada a la Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Joan Miro's collages of the 1920s comprise a significant body of work that has never been studied in depth. Created during one of the most important decades in Miro's career, they provide the basis for a reconsideration of his contribution to Surrealist aesthetics and of the ways his desire to challenge "painting" manifested itself. In 1924 Miro told his friend, the French poet, writer, and ethnographer, Michel Leiris, that his current work was "hardly painting, but I don't give a damn." These words announce the dialectic between "painting" and "anti-painting" that persisted in Miro's work throughout the 1920s. This thesis explores the question of what Miro meant by "painting" and the particular role of collage as a model for what it ("painting") was not. Close attention is paid to the internal dynamics of Miro's collages and related works of the period and to their position relative to French Surrealist and Catalan cultural debates. Andre Breton and Louis Aragon's language-based definitions of collage are considered, as are the theories of dissident Surrealists such as Leiris and Georges Bataille, along with the films, paintings, and writings of Miro's younger Catalan compatriot, Salvador Dali Both Miro and the Surrealists shared a desire to disrupt the stable, rational order postulated by the post-war Cubists and their supporters. In their syntactical disjunction, destabilization of fixed meanings, unconventional use of materials (including paint), sexual innuendos, and pointed attacks on the visual field, Miro's collages of the 1920s function not only as formal but as cultural critiques. They make clear that Miro conceived of his work as an oppositional practice, calling attention to his deep involvement with sensual, carnal, and tactile realities (as opposed to celestial metaphors). They introduce notes of contradiction, argument, and aggression into Miro's early work, and highlight the heterogeneity of his production, presenting the flip side of the lyrical, poetic, painterly transformations for which he is best known.