Fixed Ecstasy: The Early Artistic Maturity of Joan Miro and Michel Leiris

My Dissertation, "Fixed Ecstasy: The Early Artistic Maturity of Joan Miro and Michel Leiris," examines the development of Miro's painting around the time of his breakthrough in the early 1920s and challenges the prevalent view of Miro as a prodigy of Surrealist painting by placing needed emphasis on his closer, earlier ties with the group of artists and writers gathered around Andre Masson's studio in the rue Blomet. The common impulse that manifests itself in Miro's paintings throughout the period of his breakthrough is that of the painter displaced into the space of the painting. During his early years, Miro's paintings allegorize his practice and, throughout his first years in Paris, those allegories assume a variety of new forms. In such works, the pictorial space becomes something like a second skin that marks Miro's contiguity with as well as his separation from the picture, while his painting emerges as an ongoing activity in a continual present moment. Among the most important members of the rue Blomet group is Michel Leiris, whose literary project is analogous to Miro's enterprise. In my dissertation, I draw on Leiris's criticism to understand Miro's breakthrough, which leads me to offer a new interpretation of Leiris's early work.