Wichita State’s resident Bird People have joyously flitted about their home territory for 33 years now. And while the extremes of their Kansas habitat may not have downed their exuberant spirits, it has certainly faded their colorful plumage and damaged their campus aerie. In remedy, they are set to go on a five-year journey of renewal — and return as clean and sparkly bright as they ever were in their fledgling days.
Joan Miró never saw his Personnages Oiseaux in situ, in person. The great Spanish-born surrealist painter was 85 years old when the massive mosaic mural designed by him and put together from some million pieces of vividly colored Venetian glass and white and gray marble by artisans at the Ateliers de Jacques Loire in Chartres, France, was installed on the southern façade of WSU’s Ulrich Museum of Art in September and early October 1978. Miró certainly wanted to be at the mural’s dedication and unveiling ceremony, says Martin Bush, the former WSU vice president for academic resources and Ulrich founding director who talked the artist into doing the project. Bush told newspaper reporters back in 1978, “I last saw him in January in Barcelona, and we drank a toast. ‘To Wee-chita!’ he said.”
As it turned out, Miró was represented at the Oct. 31 dedication by his dealer, Pierre Matisse, the son of modern artist Henri Matisse, and Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s art editor and critic. “I suppose the reaction of others when they heard of the mural in Wichita was envy,” Hughes said at the ceremony. “This is the second largest mural Miró has ever done. There’s the one at Barcelona, which is tile, and then this, which is mosaic.” Matisse, whose gallery in New York was set to open a major exhibition of Miró’s work in November, remarked, “Certainly this mural is one of his most important works.” Matisse added that one of the considerations that prompted Miró to accept the WSU commission was that the mural would be part of a university, “where it is going to be in contact with young people. That’s where an artist wants to be known, to the young people, who are growing and learning. He wants to bring something new, to open new perspectives through this medium.”
The student-university-connection was indeed key, says Bush during a phone conversation from his home in New York City. Bush came to WSU in 1970 from Syracuse University after being recruited by WSU President Clark Ahlberg. Ahlberg had a mission for him: to help make art an integral part of university life – at the very highest artistic level, and Bush took up the challenge gladly. His biggest coup was the Miró commission. Bush, who met with the artist a number of times before, during and after the production and installment of the mural, recalls that Miró told him: “I hope my work will influence your students.”
Until Miró’s death in 1983 at the age of 90, Bush never quite gave up trying to entice the artist to a campus visit. Miró almost made it twice.
“I saw him after the dedication,” Bush says. “It was December 1978, and I was traveling with my daughter, Lisa. We flew to Palma on the island of Majorca, where Miró had his studio. We talked about plans for a Wichita visit – we expected him to come in the spring.” But, Bush explains, Miró later suffered a fall on the cement steps that led to his hillside studio. The travel plans were off.
It was an East Coast snow storm that thwarted Miró’s next attempt to see his Bird People at their campus home. “Baltimore was playing in the World Series,” Bush recalls. “A storm postponed the opening game (the Orioles versus the Pittsburgh Pirates; Oct. 9, 1979) and delayed many flights, including Miró’s. The storm frightened him from flying on to Wichita.”
Disappointed still that Miró himself never made it to WSU, Bush is as excited today about Miró’s monumental 26-by-52-foot mural as the day it was unveiled. Personnages Oiseaux is, he says simply, “my number-one contribution to the university. It is spectacular.”
Patricia McDonnell, who has been the director of the Ulrich since her arrival on campus in 2007 from the Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, Wash., is no less enthusiastic: “Its significance is – it is a world masterpiece and the single most important work of art in the state of Kansas.”
Counted among Miró’s largest two-dimensional works in North America, the mural is also a singular first for the artist: it is the only one of his creations to have been executed primarily in glass. “Miró was best known as a painter,” McDonnell reports, “but he was also an enthusiastic experimenter. Wichita State’s mural is unique. It’s the only mosaic he ever did chiefly in glass and marble. Yet it still contains all the core ingredients of his art: Colorful elements float freely across an expansive field. Perspective and modeling are absent. The bold colors and fantastical bird characters seem to express the joy of life – a special joie de vivre.”
Miró’s joyous take on life, as reflected in his “brilliantly colored birds and stars and people,” McDonnell notes, is particularly meaningful because it was so hard-won. Born in Barcelona in 1893, he was profoundly affected by the great upheavals of the 20th century – its two world wars, most especially the second, as well as the Spanish civil war (1936-39) and, as he was approaching the late period of his work, the social radicalism of the 1960s.
The young Miró, after a failed stint at working as an accountant, was drawn in the early 1920s to visit and then settle in Paris, where he was introduced to surrealism. Although Miró continued to annually spend time at his parents’ farm in Mont-roig del Camp in Catalonia, his life away from Spain seemed to help him better understand his Catalan roots. It was in Paris, for example, that he finished his first surrealist masterpiece, The Farm (1921), which Ernest Hemingway bought in installments, completing the purchase of the painting only after borrowing money for the last payment.
Miró married in 1929; his daughter was born the following year, and he determined to spend more time in his native Spain. In 1934, well before the outbreak of civil war, he wrote, “I had this unconscious feeling of impending disaster. Like before it rains, a heavy feeling in the head, aching bones, an asphyxiating dampness.”
During the years of Spain’s civil war and World War II’s beginning turbulence, Miró lived in exile in Paris and for a while in Normandy. His artwork during this period, including the Ulrich’s Signes et Symbols (1938), is, McDonnell says, “a product of this disturbing time in world history and in the artist’s life. Holed up in a cramped Paris studio, watching his homeland fall prey to fascist aggression, he poured his anxieties into his art. Miró had been among the first artists to tap the psyche directly as a creative resource. Now, that practice yielded art that reflected immense inner turmoil.”
In 1939 as Nazi forces were advancing into France, Miró immersed himself in work on the series of paintings he called the Constellations. These works plumb the depths of his interior landscape and mirror his sense of connections between things, what he described as “the underlying magic.” Eventually forced to flee with his wife and daughter, they – and his Constellations – were on the last train out of Paris for Spain.
Through it all, he continued to cultivate a sense of wonder at the world, which he said he could find “wherever you see the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists sometimes of staying close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters.”
That determined spirit of delight was recognized in Personnages Oiseaux the moment its huge veil was pulled away and fell to the ground Oct. 31, 1978. As art critic Rushworth Kidder later wrote in the March 12, 1979 issue of the Christian Science Monitor, “The Spanish artist Joan Miró, the greatest living legacy of an age that produced Picasso, Chagall and a host of other innovators, has chosen a marvelously apt subject. ‘Personnages oiseaux,’ he calls it: bird characters. Birds … are, quite nicely, themselves, And quite happily. Which is what Miró’s work captures, with its stained-glass-window colors and its flowing figures set in an airy landscape full of empty space and spidery lines. Here are the qualities that make Miró, in public and private, himself: an ebullient sense of humor and a warm sense of life. This 17-yard section of experience is arbitrarily, even wittily, cut off at the bottom and right edges, as though it could go on forever, could wrap around the world it portrays and enclose us in its childlike freshness.”
Exposed to the elements for more than three decades, the élan of Miró’s grand mural – constructed of 80 5-by-3-foot lacquered, marine-grade particleboard panels, each of which holds thousands of individual mosaic tiles (tesserae) of glass and marble affixed with an epoxy – is as strong as ever. But the mural itself is falling apart. “The particleboard substrate has deteriorated,” McDonnell explains. “In some places it resembles pipe tobacco. The epoxy resin used to adhere the glass-and-marble tiles is now brittle and cracking. The mosaic is raining tesserae. In 2010 alone, 400 pieces fell.”
The Ulrich director, not long after taking up her position at WSU, initiated a comprehensive analysis of the mural. Russell-Marti Conservation Services, which had been providing routine maintenance on the mosaic since 1996, was contracted to carry out a thorough study and, after more than two years of research, proposed conservation methods and options.
“But, like having surgery, we wanted to be sure we had the best plan of action,” McDonnell says. “We got a second opinion – and a third.”
The Ulrich Museum contacted two leading conservators, Martin Radecki, retired director of conservation for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, a museum with a significant conservation laboratory and a national reputation for excellence, and Thomas Learner, senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute of the Getty Trust in Los Angeles. Both experts gave the thumbs up to Russell-Marti’s treatment plan. Learner, for example, wrote, “Following careful study, the proposed methods of conservation treatment are a sound plan for this very unique situation that should prove a lasting solution to this important work of art.”
The approved plan will replace the deteriorating particleboard panels with perforated stainless steel panels. Silicone adhesive that can withstand hurricane-force winds will be used to adhere the mosaic tiles to the steel backing – and that brief description, McDonnell says, summarizes a detailed conservation treatment plan nearly 100 pages in length.
Russell-Marti’s conservation efforts, which are slated to begin in earnest Sept. 27 with the de-installation of the mural, will take five years to complete and will cost an estimated $3 million. The campaign to fund the conservation project is under way.
“Helping lead the fundraising efforts of the Ulrich Museum’s Miró conservation campaign, which is the university’s number-one capital priority, is an honor,” says Elizabeth King, president and CEO of the WSU Foundation. “It is of the utmost importance to preserve this world masterpiece – one of the most iconic pieces of art on the Wichita State campus, in Wichita and throughout Kansas. We greatly appreciate everyone’s support to date and sincerely value volunteer chairmen Mike Michaelis and Chris Shank ’69, as well as lead gifts from the S.M. & Laura H. Brown Charitable Trust, Kelly and Jon Callen, the Barry & Paula Downing Foundation and Fidelity Bank.”
Serving with Michaelis and Shank on the Preserve Every Piece: A Campaign to Conserve an Icon committee are Robert Bubp, WSU associate professor of art; artist Chris Brunner; Kelly Callen, co-owner of Edmiston Oil Co.; Sonia Greteman, founder and president of Greteman Group; Nancy Martin, COO of Emergency Services PA; and Jim Rhatigan, WSU dean emeritus of students and consultant, WSU Foundation.
The public outpouring of support for the renewal of his fantastical Bird People is sure to have pleased Miró, who even in the last years of his life explored new directions in art, writing about the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting, for example. And he continued to receive and complete commissions for public art. He finished Woman and Bird, a public sculpture for the city of his birth, just a year before his death.
One test of public art, Kidder wrote in his Christian Science article, “is that it be, to a great extent, unavoidable.” Miró’s Personnages Oiseaux is just that, unavoidable. It provokes us into a response, a feeling, a thought. It’s bold and big – and you just can’t miss it.
Except we will, for five long years.
