Miró's Chicago

In 1963 the Brunswick corporation commissioned Spanish artist Joan Miró to design a sculpture for their new skyscraper in downtown Chicago. Unfortunately, the Brunswick corporation suffered sticker-shock at the prestigious bill they received from Miró and decided to cancel the order. The original plaster Maquette entitled The Sun, the Moon and One Star is currently owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. A full twenty years after the original design the city decided to revive the plans and place the work in its originally intended location. Miró was so proud of the work that he never bothered to name it so it was named Miró's Chicago. Not really a good set of working conditions by any stretch. The finished piece is a towering 40 foot concrete and iron monster with colorful ceramic insets in various, 80's styled, shapes. Organic shapes of the concrete base are offset by harsh linear lines of the iron crown.

In the final decades of Miró's life he had begun to explore daring color schemes and ceramic as a medium making his work much more subjective. This is in sharp contrast to some of his earlier works like the elegant Moonbird (1966) sculpture in New York, which was designed a year after Chicago and is generally viewed as one of his best works. In contrast, you might make comments about the Chicago piece like: “It looks like a bird with a fork in it's head” or “Is it supposed to be a woman?”. Those people probably don't fully appreciate the finely-tuned aesthetic language Miró worked his entire life to create. Regardless of the intentions of the artist, Miró's Chicago is one of his least aesthetically pleasing and confounding sculptural pieces on display in any large city. Houston's Persona of Birds has us beat fair-and-square for the number one spot, but Chicago certainly lacks the grace of Spain's Dona i Ocell (woman with Bird), which was finished around the same time as Chicago. Ultimately, the sculpture that almost wasn't is an interesting piece of Chicago lore, but ultimately fails to evoke the sort of passion we hope to see from our public landmarks.