Miro

Was just thinking to myself the other day about how lucky I've been over the last few years. I've seen El Greco in New York (when I should have seen Jackson P); Goya in Madrid, the fantastic 'black paintings'; Constable's small sketches at the V&A; Bonnington at the Wallace Collection; icons from a monastery at the Courtauld, Frank Auerbach at the RA; and can't even remember what in Venice. Titian, yes! All very good (not to forget Poussin at the National). But if anything stands out, something that will stay with me for a long time, it's:

1. Rembrandt's Jewish Bride in Amsterdam.

2. Miro at the Tate (today)

3. The sublime Rothko, also at the Tate, a few years ago.

4. Lucio Fontana's Harlequin at the Hayward

5. Treasures of the Ark (Armenian music) at the British Library.

Looking at these pictures, actually experiencing them, is so different from seeing prints of them in a book. There simply is no comparison. Which is why I was reluctant to put up one by Miro for this post. Perhaps purists will say the same about listening to live music. Not sure.

Miro was such an utter and complete surprise. Nothing can prepare you for that Catalan blue, for the landscapes suffused with light. Lyrical and poetical. Some of the faint lines in one made you think: the last thoughts of a dying man: clear, reduced to the essential, a dream-vision already. You'd always thought of Miro as if he was looking down, taking a snapshot of disjointed, fragmentary beings in the sand. Squirls and flat, horizontal, lifeless backgrounds. What struck you was, though, the verticality of them, in the sense of heaven being linked to earth, to the everyday things in one's life. Secondly, the Catalan blue, surreal, unimaginable, or just about. Dream-visions that bind. There's something of the mythical desert here, the shaman, the first cave painters: immersion, connections. Everything is connected to everything else-at least in memory or a dream.

More than anything there's exuberance, sheer joy. I caught myself smiling as I looked at some of them, as if the flow of lines re-enacted some primeval symbol of our humanity: the curve. The fantastic 'head' right at the end, as if to say: we must look in the heart of darkness for signs of life or that despite everything something will survive if, that is, one concentrates hard enough, if we learn to look in the right way. And more, even away from the eye there's the faintest smudge of red in the black, totally unscripted. Humanity can be found everywhere. Red, as an infinite task.

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Took little r to her first gallery. Doubt she'll ever remember it and it makes me sad to think that kids don't have that exposure to beautiful and surprising things back in the land of the pure. The first artistic works she saw, the first room we walked into, by chance: Diane Arbus's stunningly weird photographs (yes, even the Jewish Giant). Which reminds me: must get Thesiger's Visions of a Nomad before I go.