There was a bit of a rumpus at the Berlin ITB travel fair. It was to do with a logo, the one for the Maldives, official partner of the 2016 fair. Was it familiar? Was it rather like the logo used for Spain by Turespaña, the one that the painter Joan Miró had designed all those years ago?
Well, perhaps there was some similarity in the image of the sun, though whether it was a conscious attempt at imitation would be impossible to say. What one can say is that the Maldives' logo lacks the distinctive Miró flavour. Similar maybe but not the discernible style that characterised much of Miró's work.
The Turespaña logo dates from 1984, the year after Miró died. It is a logo that is one of the most recognisable graphic displays of branding in the tourism world. In terms of recognition, it is right up there with New York. While Miró may not be to everyone's taste, there is no denying the unique quality of the logo and of so much of his oeuvre. It is unmistakably Miró and it is for this reason that the logo has acquired such a reputation. It is different. It stands out. It makes a statement. It also captures the essence of culture - art in this instance - and of what Spain represents for so many, the sun. As a logo, it does more or less everything a logo should do.
This was not the first time that Miró had designed a logo for tourism. In the early 1970s he donated one to the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board. The Sol de Mallorca should arguably now be as famous and as recognised as the Spanish sun. Perhaps they thought there would be confusion by having two Miró logos. Perhaps it was because the newly formed regional government wanted, from 1983, to have its own logo. Whatever the reason, the Sol de Mallorca ceased to be the abiding image for the island's tourism. There has not been a good one ever since.
A logo is only as good as what supports it and what it represents. If a destination lacks substance, strong attributes and messages, then a logo on its own achieves comparatively little. A strong logo isn't always necessary, though. Palma, for example, is doing fine without having one.
In Palma's case, it is the substance and the marketing of its virtues which are proving to be the bedrock for the city's current success. And one of these is Miró. Of the three giants of twentieth century Spanish art, Miró didn't cultivate fame and notoriety in the way that Dali and Picasso did. For this reason, his name is not as strong on a global stage. But it is strong enough, and precisely because he was an altogether more humble man, it can be argued that there was and is greater substance to him. He didn't need the extravagances of publicity to declare his genius.
Miró, the man, his work and his personality have become something of a marketing concept for Palma. It makes very good sense that he should be, as does the apparent closeness between the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation and the city in using this personality. To promote a city of culture, then who better to do so than an artist with such a strong association with the city and who bequeathed to it the buildings which combine to provide the Miró museum.
Mallorca has had a thing with using individuals for promotional purposes in the past, though this hasn't necessarily been terribly successful. Michael Douglas was arguably one of the more successful, but a weakness of the approach has been to use personalities whose associations are relatively superficial. This cannot be said of Miró. His Palma roots were and are deep.
When writing yesterday's article about the Tramuntana, I had thought about this use of personality. Reflecting on Palma's 365 marketing, Miró as some sort of figurehead is ideal. But Palma's marketing is, as observed yesterday, in a totally different league to that of the Tramuntana. It is heading towards a peak of excellence, while the Tramuntana's has yet to even aspire to make base camp.
If there were to be a personality for the Tramuntana, who would it be? Who, for a global audience, has the substance that Miró has for Palma? There are few candidates. Not Ramon Llull because the world doesn't know him. Not the Archduke Louis Salvador because only German speakers are aware of him. Chopin (and George Sand)? No. A three-month only residence disqualifies both as does the dislike that they expressed for Mallorca. Which leaves?
Someone with a deep association with the mountains and affinity with the culture. Someone whose name goes around the world. Someone who assisted in even better known personalities coming to Mallorca - Ava Gardner, Orson Welles and others. Robert Graves is that someone.
Showing posts with label Joan Miró. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joan Miró. Show all posts
Friday, March 18, 2016
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Miró And The Japanese Connection
This is a story which starts a long way from Mallorca in the land of the rising sun, a land from which Mallorca might hope one day to attract tourists, who are said to be particularly interested in Mallorcan footwear, according at least to some mad buggers in Inca who seem to think they can create a flourishing tourism industry in the town. That's another story, though, as this one, indirectly, begins with a Japanese artist called Ito Shinsui (real name Ito Hajime). If you don't know who Shinsui was, you will almost certainly be familiar with his work. He was one of the great names in the shin-hanga art movement in Japan, one that was typified by those paintings of geisha girls and landscapes which consisted of lots of creams, whites, some blacks and splashes of colour here and there (you might sense that I'm not exactly an art critic or reviewer).
Anyway, Shinsui became so ultra famous and important that he was honoured with being a Living National Treasure in Japan and with receiving the Order of the Rising Sun. He also became very rich. His son, and this is where the story begins to move closer to Mallorca and Spain, is someone by the name of Kazumasa Katsuta, and he is one of the world's leading art collectors. To give a flavour of how much he has tended to collect, in 1991 he bought 530 works at Sotheby's. They were all by the one artist, the Barcelona born but mainly Mallorcan resident Joan Miró.
Putting an exact figure on Miró's total artistic output is difficult. Approximately though, he was responsible for 2,000 oil paintings, 500 sculptures, 400 ceramics and 5,000 various drawings and collages. Whatever the precise number, in 1991 roughly 7% of the entire Miró ouevre was scooped up at one bid by Shinsui's son.
Not all of Miró's work was done in Mallorca as he didn't finally settle on the island until 1956, though he had periods when he had been living here prior to this; his wife and mother were both Mallorcan. But a great deal of his work was created on the island. Miró is inextricably linked to Mallorca as much as he is linked to the city of his birth, Barcelona, and nowadays the Miró Foundation has premises in both Palma and Barcelona.
Though the foundation is the keeper of the greatest number of Miró's works, Katsuta is probably the keeper of the largest private collection, but he hasn't sought to keep them under lock and key somewhere in Japan. He has sent some of the works to Barcelona. In 2000 the foundation received 25 works to mark the 25th anniversary of its founding. In 2005, by which time Katsuta's total stock of Mirós was said to have increased to 780, some important landscape paintings from the mid-1920s were ceded to the foundation. Five years later, ten more pieces arrived. By now, Katsuta was also a patron of the foundation, and in 2011 he was made an honorary citizen of Barcelona in recognition of his collaboration with the foundation and, by extension, with the city.
So, Katsuta has been a very important figure in the Miró story and in supporting the foundation in Barcelona and Palma. But into this story we must now add Portugal. And why? In order to answer this, one has to go back to 2006. In that year the Banco Português de Negócios (BPN) bought 85 works by Miró from Katsuta. They are said to be worth 35 million euros but could fetch at least double this at auction.
BPN bought the works solely as an investment. They have never been exhibited in Portugal, though the bank did once consider exhibiting them. This was before its former president was arrested on corruption charges. BPN was a victim of economic crisis and of less than scrupulous behaviour. It collapsed in 2008, the Portuguese Government nationalised it and acquired, into the bargain, the 85 Mirós. It still has them, sitting in a vault somewhere, but it is planning to sell them at auction. They are not a priority, and the government says it doesn't have the spare cash to acquire them, a line of argument which doesn't wash with a number of critics. What is there to acquire, if the government and so therefore the state already owns them?
Putting the Mirós up for auction has caused a storm of protest, opponents saying that they belong to Portugal and should be exhibited and enjoyed by the Portuguese people. The government seems unmoved. Though 70-odd million euros would come in handy, in the scale of things (national debt), it isn't really a lot. But, auction it will doubtless be. Whether Kazumasa Katsuta will be one of the bidders would probably be unlikely. Why would he buy them for a second time? Wherever they end up though, the chances are that, like the works that Katsuta owns, they might find their way back, if only to be exhibited. Not, one imagines, to Portugal, but to Miró's lands - Barcelona and Mallorca.
Anyway, Shinsui became so ultra famous and important that he was honoured with being a Living National Treasure in Japan and with receiving the Order of the Rising Sun. He also became very rich. His son, and this is where the story begins to move closer to Mallorca and Spain, is someone by the name of Kazumasa Katsuta, and he is one of the world's leading art collectors. To give a flavour of how much he has tended to collect, in 1991 he bought 530 works at Sotheby's. They were all by the one artist, the Barcelona born but mainly Mallorcan resident Joan Miró.
Putting an exact figure on Miró's total artistic output is difficult. Approximately though, he was responsible for 2,000 oil paintings, 500 sculptures, 400 ceramics and 5,000 various drawings and collages. Whatever the precise number, in 1991 roughly 7% of the entire Miró ouevre was scooped up at one bid by Shinsui's son.
Not all of Miró's work was done in Mallorca as he didn't finally settle on the island until 1956, though he had periods when he had been living here prior to this; his wife and mother were both Mallorcan. But a great deal of his work was created on the island. Miró is inextricably linked to Mallorca as much as he is linked to the city of his birth, Barcelona, and nowadays the Miró Foundation has premises in both Palma and Barcelona.
Though the foundation is the keeper of the greatest number of Miró's works, Katsuta is probably the keeper of the largest private collection, but he hasn't sought to keep them under lock and key somewhere in Japan. He has sent some of the works to Barcelona. In 2000 the foundation received 25 works to mark the 25th anniversary of its founding. In 2005, by which time Katsuta's total stock of Mirós was said to have increased to 780, some important landscape paintings from the mid-1920s were ceded to the foundation. Five years later, ten more pieces arrived. By now, Katsuta was also a patron of the foundation, and in 2011 he was made an honorary citizen of Barcelona in recognition of his collaboration with the foundation and, by extension, with the city.
So, Katsuta has been a very important figure in the Miró story and in supporting the foundation in Barcelona and Palma. But into this story we must now add Portugal. And why? In order to answer this, one has to go back to 2006. In that year the Banco Português de Negócios (BPN) bought 85 works by Miró from Katsuta. They are said to be worth 35 million euros but could fetch at least double this at auction.
BPN bought the works solely as an investment. They have never been exhibited in Portugal, though the bank did once consider exhibiting them. This was before its former president was arrested on corruption charges. BPN was a victim of economic crisis and of less than scrupulous behaviour. It collapsed in 2008, the Portuguese Government nationalised it and acquired, into the bargain, the 85 Mirós. It still has them, sitting in a vault somewhere, but it is planning to sell them at auction. They are not a priority, and the government says it doesn't have the spare cash to acquire them, a line of argument which doesn't wash with a number of critics. What is there to acquire, if the government and so therefore the state already owns them?
Putting the Mirós up for auction has caused a storm of protest, opponents saying that they belong to Portugal and should be exhibited and enjoyed by the Portuguese people. The government seems unmoved. Though 70-odd million euros would come in handy, in the scale of things (national debt), it isn't really a lot. But, auction it will doubtless be. Whether Kazumasa Katsuta will be one of the bidders would probably be unlikely. Why would he buy them for a second time? Wherever they end up though, the chances are that, like the works that Katsuta owns, they might find their way back, if only to be exhibited. Not, one imagines, to Portugal, but to Miró's lands - Barcelona and Mallorca.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Tourism Logos: the Sol of Miró
The Sol of Miró, as the logo is commonly referred to, could only have come from Miró. Thirty years represent a lifetime for any logo to have been in existence, and, despite thoughts by different governments that the time might have come for a change, the Sol has remained.
The logo hasn't enjoyed universal acclaim - it has been re-named the Fried Egg of Miró - but it is, thanks to its novelty and sheer longevity, one of the best known of all tourism logos. But is it the best known or the most ground-breaking? There have been attempts to imitate it, but there is one tourism logo that has been imitated more than any other, and that is New York's. The imitation is such that critics of Palma de Mallorca's logo consider its heart to have been borrowed from New York's.
The degree of imitation has, it might be argued, devalued New York's tourism promotion, but whatever attempts there may have been to imitate the Sol, Miró's logo has not lost any power because of the flattery of imitation; it is just too difficult to borrow the idea and make a logo look as though it hasn't been nicked, which is testimony to the power of Miró's unique style.
Everywhere has a tourism logo and mostly everywhere updates its logo periodically. There are always vogues as to what is "in" at any given time in design, and the current vogue is for typography that suggests movement. Consequently, a light, brush script style has become commonplace, not that this familiarity breeds the contempt of unoriginality or of lack of appeal. Excellent logos can appear from the most unexpected places, and Haiti, as a tourist destination, is one of them; a design with a quasi-italicised font and based on the national flower, the hibiscus, is quite stunning.
Whether of course it helps in attracting much-needed tourism to Haiti is an entirely different matter. And in a world where there is so much design and so many logos, memorability and recognition are hard to achieve, which is a further reason for not meddling with Miró's Sol. It appeared at a time when a strong logo stood a very good chance of standing out from the crowd, because the crowd was very much smaller. As it was so original, it became almost instantaneously recognisable. To what extent or even whether one can attribute increases in tourism numbers to the logo is impossible to say, but were there to now be a new logo, it would have to be something that was pretty special. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If a tourism logo has any value, it has to say something about the destination. And so, with this in mind, we come to Mallorca, which, in effect, has two logos. One of them is another Miró. It was given to the Mallorca Tourist Board in 1973, at a time when the tourist board was very much the tourist board and so ten years before the first regional government and first tourism ministry in the Balearics were formed. The other is the generic logo for the Balearics, which can be adapted to use the name of the individual islands. This four-coloured affair, which looks like slices of fruit, is in need of an overhaul. It lacks dynamism and, in line with the current vogue, a sense of movement. Ideally, there should be a separate logo for Mallorca; the lumping together with the rest of the Balearics makes little marketing or branding sense.
One could, I suppose, say that Palma's new logo does Mallorca's job for it. One could say this, but it would be wrong to say it. Palma's logo may have some virtue in its lightness of typography, but otherwise it looks like an advert for a medical charity. The image is wrong, and it is only Palma's image, not Mallorca's.
Getting a logo right, therefore, is not an easy task. I'm sure Miró didn't find it easy to come up with either the Sol of Mallorca or the Sol of Miró for Turespaña. Or maybe he did. If you are a genius, things aren't necessarily difficult, though I am only guessing.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Friday, May 10, 2013
109 Surrealist Years: Salvador Dalí
A year from tomorrow, I guess we can anticipate there being something of an anniversary celebration. One hundred and ten isn't a particularly notable anniversary but it is more so than one hundred and nine.
On 11 May 1904, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domenech was born. The people of the town of Figueres in Catalonia would have had no idea what this birth was to mean. The world didn't know what it was in for.
I try to imagine what the reaction to Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" in 1932 would have been. Art critics were probably divided between those who loved it and those who hated it. The ordinary man in the street, had he even been aware of it, would surely not have known what to have made of it. But then experimental and surrealist art has never really been the stuff of the common man. Think Damien Hirst, for example.
But Dalí forged a place in the world of the common man. For students of the sixties and seventies, a Dalí poster (usually "Metamorphosis of Narcissus") was as de rigueur as one of Che Guevara or Jim Morrison. For mostly everyone else, Dalí was a total nutter, an eccentric of quite industrial proportions. He was, as he once insisted when being harangued by the rest of the surrealist movement, the only real "surrealist". His whole being was surreal, though to what extent it was all simply a front designed to attract publicity, fame and wealth is hard to say. It's difficult to believe that anyone could truly be as batty as Dalí was without some of it having been stage-managed.
Dalí, along with Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, formed a troika of Spanish painters who, in many respects, dominated the whole world of twentieth-century art. Though they were connected in their earlier years - Picasso was admired by Dalí, while Miró had recommended Dalí to Picasso - they went their separate ways. And Dalí went a separate way that was nothing like the quiet life that Miró found for himself in Mallorca.
What each of them achieved, with their varying and distinctive styles, was an opening of the mind. Though Miró was critical of the excesses of the surrealists, they, and Dalí in particular, exposed an alternative perception, one that was to later appeal to those who sought perception-altering experiences through LSD or magic mushrooms. Dalí claimed never to have taken mind-altering drugs. If he didn't, the mind boggles at how he came up with what he did and how he managed a painting like "The Hallucinogenic Toreador" in 1970 at a time when psychedelia and hippy culture were still very much in vogue.
Dalí's work was fantastic, an adjective that can be taken in different ways: superb or bizarre. But it is a shame that his globe-trotting self-promotion and all-round lunacy got in the way of what he achieved. He is remembered almost exclusively for what he produced in the 1930s, yet even at a time when he was cropping up on the American "What's My Line" (look it up on YouTube), he was creating a piece as magnificent as the giant "The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus" in 1959. I look at this now and begin to understand where the KLF got the idea for their video for the "America" version of "What Time Is Love". And where pop/dance acts are concerned, few have ever been as batty as the KLF.
It was his obsession with his image and his own publicity that let Dalí down. To an extent, Picasso was also undermined by his ego as well as by his affairs, but he did continue to concentrate on his art, while Dalí concentrated on being bonkers. Of the great Spanish threesome, Picasso and Miró just kept getting better. The legacy of both these artists is vastly superior to that of Dalí's as a result, and while Picasso had those who criticised his desire for wealth and women, as a person he didn't come to be as divisive a figure as Dalí; George Orwell said of him that he was "a disgusting human being".
In part, this was because Dalí was generally supportive of Franco. Picasso most certainly wasn't, while Miró tried to avoid the subject (he had been a Republican sympathiser). So, as people, both Picasso and Miró left stronger legacies as well.
Whatever was thought of Dalí as a person, he was a remarkable artist. It is his 109th anniversary. Far from not being notable, Dalí would probably have approved of an eccentric number being chosen to commemorate him.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
On 11 May 1904, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domenech was born. The people of the town of Figueres in Catalonia would have had no idea what this birth was to mean. The world didn't know what it was in for.
I try to imagine what the reaction to Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" in 1932 would have been. Art critics were probably divided between those who loved it and those who hated it. The ordinary man in the street, had he even been aware of it, would surely not have known what to have made of it. But then experimental and surrealist art has never really been the stuff of the common man. Think Damien Hirst, for example.
But Dalí forged a place in the world of the common man. For students of the sixties and seventies, a Dalí poster (usually "Metamorphosis of Narcissus") was as de rigueur as one of Che Guevara or Jim Morrison. For mostly everyone else, Dalí was a total nutter, an eccentric of quite industrial proportions. He was, as he once insisted when being harangued by the rest of the surrealist movement, the only real "surrealist". His whole being was surreal, though to what extent it was all simply a front designed to attract publicity, fame and wealth is hard to say. It's difficult to believe that anyone could truly be as batty as Dalí was without some of it having been stage-managed.
Dalí, along with Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, formed a troika of Spanish painters who, in many respects, dominated the whole world of twentieth-century art. Though they were connected in their earlier years - Picasso was admired by Dalí, while Miró had recommended Dalí to Picasso - they went their separate ways. And Dalí went a separate way that was nothing like the quiet life that Miró found for himself in Mallorca.
What each of them achieved, with their varying and distinctive styles, was an opening of the mind. Though Miró was critical of the excesses of the surrealists, they, and Dalí in particular, exposed an alternative perception, one that was to later appeal to those who sought perception-altering experiences through LSD or magic mushrooms. Dalí claimed never to have taken mind-altering drugs. If he didn't, the mind boggles at how he came up with what he did and how he managed a painting like "The Hallucinogenic Toreador" in 1970 at a time when psychedelia and hippy culture were still very much in vogue.
Dalí's work was fantastic, an adjective that can be taken in different ways: superb or bizarre. But it is a shame that his globe-trotting self-promotion and all-round lunacy got in the way of what he achieved. He is remembered almost exclusively for what he produced in the 1930s, yet even at a time when he was cropping up on the American "What's My Line" (look it up on YouTube), he was creating a piece as magnificent as the giant "The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus" in 1959. I look at this now and begin to understand where the KLF got the idea for their video for the "America" version of "What Time Is Love". And where pop/dance acts are concerned, few have ever been as batty as the KLF.
It was his obsession with his image and his own publicity that let Dalí down. To an extent, Picasso was also undermined by his ego as well as by his affairs, but he did continue to concentrate on his art, while Dalí concentrated on being bonkers. Of the great Spanish threesome, Picasso and Miró just kept getting better. The legacy of both these artists is vastly superior to that of Dalí's as a result, and while Picasso had those who criticised his desire for wealth and women, as a person he didn't come to be as divisive a figure as Dalí; George Orwell said of him that he was "a disgusting human being".
In part, this was because Dalí was generally supportive of Franco. Picasso most certainly wasn't, while Miró tried to avoid the subject (he had been a Republican sympathiser). So, as people, both Picasso and Miró left stronger legacies as well.
Whatever was thought of Dalí as a person, he was a remarkable artist. It is his 109th anniversary. Far from not being notable, Dalí would probably have approved of an eccentric number being chosen to commemorate him.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Black Or White: Spanish crisis and the arts
I have been researching a feature on the Barcelona-born artist Joan Miró who, despite having been a supporter of Republicanism, lived quietly enough in Mallorca under the Franco regime. The impression I formed was one of his not having been bothered by the regime so long as he had done nothing to bother it. And Miró didn't bother it. He was only really bothered about getting on with his art.
Miró's abstract paintings and sculptures could have symbolised any number of things. One of the beauties of abstracts is that they can mean everything or they can mean nothing. The observer can interpret them as he sees fit, projecting his own prejudices, opinions and attitudes onto the painter's canvas in creating a perception as to what the artist actually means. The obscurity of meaning makes proof very difficult. So long as the artist keeps his thoughts to himself, which is pretty much what Miró did, then a regime is none the wiser as to what he might be thinking or not.
Obscurity of meaning helps. I fancy that autocrats and technocrats can't get their heads around anything that isn't black or white. I imagine them to be incapable of understanding irony or innuendo. Only if a painting, a song, a film slaps them firmly in the face with an unequivocal message, be it pro or anti, will they get the meaning. Some artists got away with things during the Franco era because the authority figures were probably too thick to understand. Andrés Rábago, the cartoonist, was one such artist.
Alternatively, the regime may have felt it necessary to cut the arts world some slack. By the fifties it had stumbled on the realisation that the arts world was a potential source of making it look better to the rest of the world. This is one reason why so much effort was put into attracting film-makers, an effort that produced the Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic "El Cid", a film of magnificent cinematography but one that did rather gloss over some of the true nature of El Cid - that of having been a mercenary.
At the same time as the regime was looking to Hollywood and foreign money in order to give Spain a more acceptable global image, it wouldn't have been wise to have been stamping down too much on its own artists. Of course, it did do and had done. Federico García Lorca, one of Spain's most important poets of the twentieth century, was executed in 1936. But then that had been a time of war. Twenty years on, things were a bit different.
The arts world doesn't operate in a cultural, social, political or economic vacuum. An artist who wants to get on and flourish when the politics are repressive has to be a Leni Riefenstahl. A leftie like García Lorca in 1936 stood no chance. When the gloves of repression are removed and artists' hands can be waved with full freedom of expression, the canvases on which they work change completely. But making appropriate artistic gestures under unrestricted democratic regimes bring their own problems. Too often they can appear to be ones that veer towards a political extreme, usually the left, and so open themselves up to criticisms of being overly and overtly political.
Spain's artists of today face just this dilemma, those who haven't jumped ship and gone abroad. There may be democracy in Spain, but the arts world doesn't always benefit from such democracy. The artist Santiago Sierra has pointed out that art which deals with economic crisis in Spain doesn't get a great deal of visibility, a key reason being that critical thinking or expression is deterred because the major art collectors happen to be banks or the state.
Another member of the arts world, the film director Isabel Coixet, has chosen to mostly work abroad, but her latest film was shot in Catalonia. It portrays a Spain four years from now, one that has descended into anarchy. Doom-laden messages from the arts world are natural responses to poor or deteriorating circumstances.
Pedro Almodóvar's latest film - "I'm So Excited" is its English title - is unusual in taking a very different approach. He has made a highly camp comedy in which scandals involving the government and the royal family make the film appear as though it were a metaphor for them. Almodóvar hadn't foreseen these scandals, but whether he had or he hadn't, comedy, rather than apocalyptic visions, can be a better way of getting a message over. But not to politicians. Democratic the times may be, but present them with a metaphor which isn't black or white and they won't have a clue.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Miró's abstract paintings and sculptures could have symbolised any number of things. One of the beauties of abstracts is that they can mean everything or they can mean nothing. The observer can interpret them as he sees fit, projecting his own prejudices, opinions and attitudes onto the painter's canvas in creating a perception as to what the artist actually means. The obscurity of meaning makes proof very difficult. So long as the artist keeps his thoughts to himself, which is pretty much what Miró did, then a regime is none the wiser as to what he might be thinking or not.
Obscurity of meaning helps. I fancy that autocrats and technocrats can't get their heads around anything that isn't black or white. I imagine them to be incapable of understanding irony or innuendo. Only if a painting, a song, a film slaps them firmly in the face with an unequivocal message, be it pro or anti, will they get the meaning. Some artists got away with things during the Franco era because the authority figures were probably too thick to understand. Andrés Rábago, the cartoonist, was one such artist.
Alternatively, the regime may have felt it necessary to cut the arts world some slack. By the fifties it had stumbled on the realisation that the arts world was a potential source of making it look better to the rest of the world. This is one reason why so much effort was put into attracting film-makers, an effort that produced the Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic "El Cid", a film of magnificent cinematography but one that did rather gloss over some of the true nature of El Cid - that of having been a mercenary.
At the same time as the regime was looking to Hollywood and foreign money in order to give Spain a more acceptable global image, it wouldn't have been wise to have been stamping down too much on its own artists. Of course, it did do and had done. Federico García Lorca, one of Spain's most important poets of the twentieth century, was executed in 1936. But then that had been a time of war. Twenty years on, things were a bit different.
The arts world doesn't operate in a cultural, social, political or economic vacuum. An artist who wants to get on and flourish when the politics are repressive has to be a Leni Riefenstahl. A leftie like García Lorca in 1936 stood no chance. When the gloves of repression are removed and artists' hands can be waved with full freedom of expression, the canvases on which they work change completely. But making appropriate artistic gestures under unrestricted democratic regimes bring their own problems. Too often they can appear to be ones that veer towards a political extreme, usually the left, and so open themselves up to criticisms of being overly and overtly political.
Spain's artists of today face just this dilemma, those who haven't jumped ship and gone abroad. There may be democracy in Spain, but the arts world doesn't always benefit from such democracy. The artist Santiago Sierra has pointed out that art which deals with economic crisis in Spain doesn't get a great deal of visibility, a key reason being that critical thinking or expression is deterred because the major art collectors happen to be banks or the state.
Another member of the arts world, the film director Isabel Coixet, has chosen to mostly work abroad, but her latest film was shot in Catalonia. It portrays a Spain four years from now, one that has descended into anarchy. Doom-laden messages from the arts world are natural responses to poor or deteriorating circumstances.
Pedro Almodóvar's latest film - "I'm So Excited" is its English title - is unusual in taking a very different approach. He has made a highly camp comedy in which scandals involving the government and the royal family make the film appear as though it were a metaphor for them. Almodóvar hadn't foreseen these scandals, but whether he had or he hadn't, comedy, rather than apocalyptic visions, can be a better way of getting a message over. But not to politicians. Democratic the times may be, but present them with a metaphor which isn't black or white and they won't have a clue.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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