Over the months they were there, Masson and Mir\u00f3 became close friends, and Mir\u00f3 started spending time with many of the poets, artists, and writers that impressed him so, including Roland Tual, Michel Leiris, Antonin Artaud, Armand Salacrou and Georges Limbour.<\/p>\n
They all viewed Masson as their mentor, given his extensive erudition and his harrowing experience as a soldier during the First World War. Mir\u00f3 recalled those times in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney: \u201cMasson was in the studio next door. He was always a great reader and full of ideas. Among his friends were practically all the young poets of the day. Through Masson I met them. Through them I heard poetry discussed. The poets Masson introduced me to interested me more than the painters I had met in Paris. I was carried away by the new ideas they brought and especially the poetry they discussed. I gorged myself on it all night long \u2013 poetry principally in the tradition of Jarry\u2019s Surm\u00e2le.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRue Blomet was a decisive place, a decisive moment for me. It was there that I discovered everything I am, everything I would become.\u201d<\/p>\n For Masson, 45 Rue Blomet was also a space for leisure, and their friendship was anything but intellectual: they shared meals, talked, listened to music, danced, and worked driven by a common spirit.<\/p>\n Mir\u00f3 engaged in this atmosphere both from his own studio and from Masson\u2019s. The doors were always open, and a hole in the dividing wall further contributed to their connection.<\/p>\n Mir\u00f3\u2019s work discipline was entirely different from his neighbour\u2019s: \u201cI was a maniac of order and cleanliness […] I liked to leave my monk\u2019s cell and go to the studio next door, with its unbelievable clutter of papers, bottles, canvases, books, and household objects. […] Masson worked feverishly. Listening to music, in the midst of loud conversations. I could only work alone and in silence, with ascetic discipline […]\u201d.<\/p>\n Books and notebook from Joan Mir\u00f3\u2019s personal library In Joan Mir\u00f3\u2019s personal library, held at the Fundaci\u00f3\u2019s archive, we find many of the books that were talked about in those gatherings and by the poets attending them. Mir\u00f3, always methodical, listed the books that had been discussed in his notebooks and crossed them out when he had managed to read them.<\/p>\n However, although Rue Blomet was a meeting place for friends and colleagues who discussed painting, theatre or literature and played chess, darts, or cards, it was \u2013 for most of the group, and especially for Mir\u00f3 \u2013 a journey of initiation and personal growth.<\/p>\n Poem-painting<\/em> (“Le corps de ma brune puisque je l’aime comme ma chatte habill\u00e9e en vert salade comme de la gr\u00eale c’est pareil”)<\/em>.\u00a0Joan Mir\u00f3,\u00a01925\u00a0\u00a9 Successi\u00f3 Mir\u00f3, 2021<\/p>\n The spirit of rebellion in the atmosphere at Rue Blomet gave Mir\u00f3 the freedom to use all sorts of images: personal and borrowed, poetic and scatological, magical and trivial. In the process of stylization and transformation that unfolded in Mir\u00f3\u2019s work beginning with The Farm<\/em> (1921-22), with The Tilled Field <\/em>the artist succeeded in shedding all conventions and took his painting to an unprecedented state of freedom. His output ceased to perform a descriptive function, acquiring a symbolic character that was reinforced by the introduction of letters and numbers, first simply as appealing visual elements (Untitled<\/em>, 1924) and gradually gaining symbolic and expressive value (Poem-painting<\/em> (“Le corps de ma brune puisque je l’aime comme ma chatte habill\u00e9e en vert salade comme de la gr\u00eale c’est pareil<\/em>, 1925)<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI make no distinction between painting and poetry\u201d<\/p>\n Encountering the poets and poetry \u2013 as a literary form \u2013 allowed Mir\u00f3 to find new ways to move beyond painting. They all agreed on the importance they attributed to poetry. \u201c[…] for us, poetry, in the broadest sense, had a value that it would not be an exaggeration to qualify as sacred […].\u201d \u201cPoetry, both for Joan and for me [Masson], was of the utmost importance. Our ambition was to become poet-painters […]\u201d.<\/p>\n Untitled.\u00a0<\/em>Joan Mir\u00f3, 1924\u00a0\u00a9 Successi\u00f3 Mir\u00f3, 2021<\/p>\n In Mir\u00f3\u2019s work, poetry was the distillation process that he applied to his pieces. He went from the accumulation of anecdotes to symbolic representation by slowly and reflexively stripping away the superfluous, as we can see in works such as La sieste<\/em>, Peinture \u201c48\u201d<\/em>, and Untitled<\/em>. These pieces are not the result of the mimesis of another painter\u2019s gesture, nor of Mir\u00f3\u2019s reading of poets, nor of a random mirroring; they involve a slow creative process of poetic emulsion <\/em>that gradually introduces all these ingredients, arising from an inner quest for synthesis which succeeds in taking painting to a level of lyricism eloquent enough to blur the boundaries between painting and poetry.<\/p>\n Preliminary sketches\u00a0for The Siesta.\u00a0<\/em>Joan Mir\u00f3, 1925<\/p>\n La sieste<\/em>.\u00a0Joan Mir\u00f3, 1925\u00a0\u00a9 Successi\u00f3 Mir\u00f3, 2021<\/p>\n While in The Farm <\/em>the virtuosity of detail taken to the extreme led Mir\u00f3 along the path to stylization, it was poetry \u2013 in the most etymological sense of the word \u2013 that opened the door to an endless world of signs and constellations.<\/p>\n In 1926, Mir\u00f3 left Rue Blomet and moved across the Seine to the rive droite, <\/em>into a new studio on Rue Tourlaque, and the next year Masson followed him. Mir\u00f3 realized it was the end of an era: \u201cRue Blomet: everything that moved there did not belong to this world. What happened? Have we come down to earth? I can\u2019t resign myself to believing we\u2019re so lost.\u201d Michel Leiris also recalled the moment when their meeting place on Rue Blomet disappeared. \u201cDoes that mean that it ceased to exist? Yes, if we consider that […] it only made sense that we would all go separate ways. And no, if we take into account the trend […] that I continue to represent,\u201d although from that moment on, the story of the people who made up that group was intertwined with the history of Surrealism.<\/p>\n Mir\u00f3 also carried those memories with him for many years. They came up in the interviews he gave throughout his entire life and left their visual mark in Peinture (\u201c48\u201d) <\/em>from 1927. This piece, executed after he left Rue Blomet, shows a large number 48 in the lettering used in the sign that Mir\u00f3 saw every day across the street from his studio.<\/p>\n Peinture-Po\u00e8me\u00a0<\/em>(\u00ab48\u00bb<\/em>).\u00a0Joan Mir\u00f3 1927\u00a0\u00a9 Successi\u00f3 Mir\u00f3, 2021<\/p>\n Mir\u00f3 stayed in touch with many of the poets from the Rue Blomet circle, but especially with Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille, two of the founders of the journal Documents <\/em>and both fairly critical of Breton. The Poem-painting <\/em>(Musique, Seine, Michel, Bataille et moi<\/em>), from 1927, bears witness to that friendship: the only piece that refers to the artist\u2019s biography, it evokes three friends, three poets, three makers of images walking together at night along the Seine.<\/p>\n Bibliographical references:<\/p>\n Epistolari catal\u00e0. Joan Mir\u00f3 1911-1945.<\/em> Editorial Barcino\/Fundaci\u00f3 Joan Mir\u00f3, 2009<\/p>\n \u00ab\u00a0A Joan Miro pour son anniversaire\u00a0\u00bb dins d\u2019Andr\u00e9 Masson, Le rebelle du surr\u00e9alisme.<\/em> Ecrits, Collection Savoir<\/p>\n ROWELL, Margit (ed.). Selected Writings and Interviews. <\/em>New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.<\/p>\n LEIRIS, Michel \u201c45 Rue Blomet\u201d [1982]<\/em>, in Los Cuadernos del Norte<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/LlibresMir\u00f3-656x455.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n\u00a9 Fundaci\u00f3 Joan Mir\u00f3,\u00a0Barcelona. Photo: Jaume Blassi<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/le-corps-de-ma-brune-340x455.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Sense-t\u00edtol_24.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/la-migdiada_2-dibuixos-preparatoris-800x347.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/La-sieste.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Peinture-Po\u00e8me-48-356x455.jpg\")
<\/p>\n