Miró: Theatre of Dreams

More old TV, and something you might call Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. Miró: Theatre of Dreams is a documentary about the Spanish (or as he might have preferred, Catalan) artist Joan Miró. This was broadcast by the BBC in 1978, and again in 1984, but it’s one I hadn’t seen until now. Robin Lough’s film was the first television profile of the artist in which Miró talks at length with his British friend, Roland Penrose, an artist and writer who did much to champion Surrealism in its ea...

Some brief reflections on canon and genius

Among the many bees in my professional bonnet is the issue of canon formation: how some works become singled out as being of particular value and worthy of preservation and perpetuation through subsequent generations. The mechanisms of canon formations are usually shared by whatever type of art we are talking about, whether it is pictorial art, the art of writing, or the art of music. There are several factors that can contribute to a work's entry into a given canon, and there are also severa...

Tide and Time - in Search of Lost Boats - and on James Joyce