A creative force of destruction

''Rope and People I'' by Joan Miró is on display at MoMA.

NEW YORK - With the stock market and banking system in a state of rolling collapse, militarism on the rise, and the world rushing headlong toward disaster, Joan Miró busied himself trying to assassinate painting.

In letters, he spoke of "beating" his canvases "with hammer blows." He was trying to use, as he put it, "the most sordid and incongruous materials possible. I denied my own gifts and turned against my facility."

All this may come as a surprise to those who associate Miró with poetic reverie, childish whimsy, and an over-indulged penchant for primary colors. That, certainly, is how I tended to see him before a 2004 exhibition in Paris called "Joan Miró 1917-1934: La Naissance du Monde" set me straight.

Up to then, I knew Miró was important. I knew that his influence on the great postwar generation of American painters (Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Rothko, Motherwell) was huge, and largely underplayed. And I knew that he had the respect of 20th-century titans like Picasso.

But to me, those ubiquitous "signature" Mirós looked flimsy, his overall achievement a kind of free-floating anomaly. I especially hated the way his chest-thumping love for all things Catalonian caused him to be adopted in that part of the world as a favorite son, wrapping much of his later output in an atmosphere of kitsch.

Never mind. More and more I am starting to see Miró as an artist for our times.

Anne Umland, the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's current Miró show, subtitled "Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937," could not have known that her exhibition would open just as the world's financial systems self-immolated. But our world definitely looks different now, in ways that eerily echo the decade covered at MoMA.

The recent frenzy of selling on the stock market, not to mention the government's spectacular new embrace of debt, resonate particularly with an idea Miró and some of his cohorts - especially Georges Bataille, the Surrealist movement's self-declared "enemy from within" - became infatuated with in the late 1920s and '30s.

The idea was "potlatch." Originally a Chinook word for a form of socially competitive behavior which involved making increasingly lavish gifts to neighboring, rival tribes as a form of challenge (sometimes to the point of destroying the gifts in front of those rivals), potlatch was introduced to Europe by anthropologists such as Franz Boas. The concept was taken up by the sociologist Marcel Mauss, and then fixated on by avant-garde artists and writers in France.

For these thinkers, potlatch - an economic system based on giving and destroying rather than accumulating and consuming - not only functioned as a critique of production-oriented views of the world; it suggested a kind of aristocratic disdain for bourgeois values.

For Miró, then, destruction became an obsession. "I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting," he said in 1931.

Such rhetoric was in fact commonplace among the avant-garde of the 1920s and '30s. But for some reason the idea of "murdering painting" caught on as Miró's own formulation, and "from something everyone said in the studios in Paris in the 1920s, it became something Miró had said," writes Umland in the exhibition catalog. "It followed him like a trail of gunpowder in the years to come."

Illustrating the ways in which Miró went about trying to "murder" painting, the MoMA exhibition takes a systematic approach, which unfortunately drains much of the life out of Miró - one reason why this exhibition, though it may be more timely, feels inferior to the Pompidou's 2004 show.

Room by room, we are presented with a succession of moves, like a series of potentially suicidal piece exchanges in a game of chess (or orders to sell on the stock market!). All the while, Miró toys with the tension between symbols and illusions on the one hand and the base materiality - the thingness - of his ingredients on the other.

He goes from painting words and doodles on unprimed canvases in 1927 to making collages with roughly cut out pieces of paper (including tar paper), wire, fabric, and drawn lines in 1929.

In 1930 - his output dramatically slowed by now - he makes a series of huge, scruffy paintings employing pink, blue, yellow, and green scribbles against white grounds - surely some of the ugliest and most eye-catching paintings ever made.

Again and again, Miró disrupts the practice of painting to make constructions, using wood, nails, sequins, sand, shells, chains, rocks, bone, and even a cake tin. He pastes small images cut out of newspapers on sheets of blank white paper, and bases much larger paintings on the results. He then combines drawings with collage, using photographs of women in bathing costumes or 19th-century dresses, aluminum foil, and cardboard.

Exasperated with oil paint, he uses pastel - that most fragile and atmospheric of mediums - to make raucous figurative pictures of screaming cartoon figures that anticipate de Kooning's "Women," or some of the wilder imaginings of contemporary painters like Martin Kippenberger and George Baselitz.

He mixes paint with sand, cheesecloth, ball bearings, nails - whatever he can find. And in 1935-36, he makes a series of small paintings on Masonite and copper - brilliant inventions in which every brushstroke is visible and intensely felt.

In doing all this, was Miró destroying painting, or enlivening it?

The latter of course, and Miró himself, when pressed, was frank enough to say: "What can I say? I can't be anything other than a painter. Every challenge to painting is a paradox - from the moment that challenge is expressed in a work."

But all through these years, Miró was laying down the gauntlet, producing work in a kind of frenzy that became one of the most persuasive of modernism's many attempts to clear away stultifying conventions and arrive at a tabula rasa.

The frenzy, of course, was part of the point. There was something purging about it.

It hardly needs to be said that a more sinister urge to "purge" was at large in the political sphere in the 1930s. But whereas political purges were motivated by the dangerous and absurd ideal of "purity," Miró wanted to revel in everything that was base, abject, and impure. At his best in these years, Miró qualified as a one-man aesthetic meltdown. Sometimes, his work reminds us, destruction inspires hope.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.