Public Works - Miro

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Written by Marxo Grouch

Friday, 26 June 2009 21:02

I like to approach Joan Miro’s Moonbird from the direction of Sixth Avenue to the west, because when you do so, it becomes possible to imagine that the sculpture is gazing up in awe at the terrific view laid out before it. Facing the southern half of Grand Army Plaza, home to the tree-lined Pulitzer Memorial Fountain, it looks directly into the large well created by five buildings: the late medieval French baroque of the Bergdorf Goodman department store on the south side, the Art Deco of Bergdorf’s other building right across Fifth, the sterile International modernism of the GM building to the east, more Art Deco with the Sherry Netherland to the northeast, and more late medieval French baroque with the Plaza on the west, still an impressive and beautiful building despite all the internal meddling. This is undoubtedly one of my favorite public spaces, standing, along with the rest of the plaza to the north, as a kind of stately foyer to the open spaces of Central Park.

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The piece sits just aside Bergdorf’s, right next to the Paris Cinema on the ground floor (specializing in foreign art films, appropriately enough) and with the backside of 9 West 57th behind it, another striking bit of latter-20th Century International architecture the sloping façade of which I’ve wanted to slide down since I was a sprout. You’ll be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the bronze form as avian in nature – before learning the title, I assumed it was some sort of bull, probably because I was thinking more in line with Picasso – but those familiar with the Miro aesthetic will have an easier time. Considered one of the quintessential surrealists, despite a personal aversion to being lumped with any group, the Spanish artist’s abiding interest in depictions of nature through an abstract sensibility produced a veritable menagerie of beasts within which the Moonbird should feel right at home. Angular appendages reach out on all sides, continuing both the artist’s affinity for the confluence of geometric shapes and, in their indefinite connection to standard avian biology, his tendency to create figures that resist traditional form, suggesting instead something more raw and primal.

miro2
Additionally, despite, or again possibly because of, their abstract nature, Miro’s animals frequently give off a sense of movement or at least the prelude to it. So it is that the Moonbird can be viewed as not only looking out upon Grand Army Plaza but also splaying its wings in preparation to rise up and soar through it.