FEATURE image: Joan Miró, Joan Miró’s Chicago (sometimes Miss Chicago), steel reinforced-concrete, colored ceramics, 1967, Brunswick Building Plaza, 69 W. Washington Street, Chicago. Joan Miró’s Chicago is the Spanish artist’s only monumental sculpture. It embodies the artist’s lifelong commitment to Dada-inspired experimentation, independence, and the transformation of ordinary forms into poetic, imaginative symbols. The sculpture translates Miró’s playful visual language into monumental scale while demonstrating how his art challenged conventional ideas of representation and accepted artistic rules. The sculpture also serves as a landmark expression of Miró’s unique artistic vision within Chicago’s civic landscape. Positioned near the Chicago Picasso, the work brings European modernism into a major American city while remaining distinctly Miró in its combination of female imagery, found-object associations, ceramic color, and dreamlike symbolism. July 2015. 7.04 mb. Author’s photograph.
Joan Miró (1893-1983) is a Catalan who is a major dadaist artist “Dada” is a nonsense word but its artistic movement that started around 1915 in Zürich, Switzerland, has brought into existence many famous artworks by a range of artists. As World War I raged on in Europe between 1914 and 1918, young artists and intellectuals reacted with art, performance, and poetry that was radically experimental, dissident and anarchic. These artists countered the horrors of the war and capitalist culture by moving past a degradation of art to contributing to an anti-art under the banner of “dada.” These ideas and ideals of dada quickly spread to the art capitals of Paris and New York – and beyond.
Joan Miró’s Chicago is the artist’s first monumental sculpture in the world.
Joan Miró’s Chicago is in this dada milieu as it sits in the Brunswick Building Plaza, directly across Washington Street from another Spanish artist’s 50-foot-tall Cor-Ten steel sculpture from the same time (1967): Chicago’s Picasso in Daley Plaza. Miró’s sculpture expresses the neck, bustline, and slim and wasp-waisted hips of a woman’s torso with outstretched arms and a simplified head. She is made of steel-reinforced concrete with brightly colored ceramics that are added to the scooped-out hem of her skirt. Like other of Miró’s sculptures of female figures from the 1950s, the shape of the skirt is that of an overturned broad-lipped cup or chalice. The bronze, crown-like headdress is like the dadaist found objects that populated Miró’s artwork whether paintings, sculptures, ceramics and more throughout his career. Joan Miró’s Chicago possesses qualities evocative of primitive fertility or earth goddesses similar to those found in the ancient Mediterranean world.
One of Dada’s major sculptural forms to emerge and which was masterly accomplished by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), was the “readymade” which used familiar mass-produced objects (i.e., ceramic urinals, household tools, etc.) for high art pieces. The dada expression of the readymade increasingly asked the viewer to take seriously these consumer items and found objects as high art on an equal platform with lofty traditional productions of a monied arts establishment.
Dadaists experimented boldly with new media such as collage (Jean Arp, 1886-1966), airbrushed photography (Man Ray, 1890-1976) and nonsensical poetry (Hugo Ball, 1886-1927). These art forms freely combined as well as crossed over its categories, i.e., nonsensical poetry interpreted in performance art.
Joan Miró, Barcelona, June 13, 1935, by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964). Public Domain. This work is from the Carl Van Vechten Photographs collection at the Library of Congress. According to the library, there are no known copyright restrictions on the use of this work. As the restrictions on this collection expired in 1986, the Library of Congress believes this image is in the public domain. The Carl Van Vechten estate has asked that use of Van Vechten’s photographs “preserve the integrity” of his work, i.e, that photographs not be colorized or cropped, and that proper credit is given to the photographer which is the photograph here.
Radical Independence: Miró’s Defiance of the Visible World
Miró’s art refuses to accept the world as it is, explicitly rejecting not only academic dogma but the corporate mechanics of an art market that demands commodified objects for dealers and rapid sales. In the 1930s and 1940s, he bypassed this commercial conveyor belt by constructing loose, playful assemblages from deliberately un-marketable materials like paper, twine, and toothbrushes, later incorporating organic objects such as stones and raw fruit. While many of these fragile compositions were lost to time or destruction, they established a vital philosophical foundation for his work. Miró chose not to transform or repurpose his found objects—whether bells, jars, or vases; instead, by leaving them entirely unaltered, he preserved what he termed their inherent “magical powers.” This deliberate randomness seamlessly filters into his more permanent creations across painting, ceramics, plaster, and bronze, calculated by the artist to reflect nature’s promiscuous progeny. By rejecting established aesthetic conventions, Miró pursued a fierce independence guided by intuition rather than a rigid, market-driven blueprint. His slow, deliberate creative process improbably marries disparate, recognizable forms into singular entities that transcend a single classification, ultimately birthing an artistic realm that does not always belong to this world.
Miró’s Chicago with Chicago’s columned City Hall in background. Author’s photograph. July 2015. 5.77mb DSC_0308 (1)
Though Miró completed a maquette of the sculpture in 1967 (called Project for a Monument for Barcelona), its production into a 40-foot sculpture was delayed until 1979. The hundreds of thousands of dollars for the production and installation of Joan Miró’s Chicago were provided by a private-public partnership in Chicago with the completed piece installed on April 20, 1981, the artist’s 88th birthday.
By translating his early, ephemeral anti-corporate assemblages into a massive, 40-foot public monument made of concrete, bronze, and vibrant ceramic tiles, Miró effectively dragged his intuitive, uncommercialized worldview out of the studio and private galleries and forced it into the heart of a corporate, concrete skyline. Instead of generating an elite luxury commodity to be traded by dealers, he donated his design to the people, erecting a monumental, cosmic earth-deity right on the pavement to ensure that nature’s untamed “promiscuous progeny” would directly disrupt the rigid architecture of the everyday financial world.
SOURCES:
Artland Magazine. “What Is Dadaism?” Accessed June 29, 2023. https://magazine.artland.com/what-is-dadaism/.
Bach, Ira J., and Mary Lackritz Gray. A Guide to Chicago Public Sculpture. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Mink, Janis. Joan Miró. Cologne: Taschen, 2006.
Weelen, Guy. Miró. Translated by Robert Erich Wolf. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989.
