RETROSPECTIVE AT GUGGENHEIM IN NEW YORK : TAKING STOCK OF JOAN MIRO

With proper care and feeding, the reputation of an established artist can last a lifetime, even if his later works are pretty awful. The acid test for living icons such as Picasso, Calder, Moore and that Olympian lot comes after they die.

Fame’s buzzards sit hungrily on blasted branches of status waiting for that first big posthumous retrospective. Is the great man going to be immortalized or will the parching clay of time crack and fissure?

Masters such as Picasso, Matisse and Pollock entered Valhalla triumphant. Roualt, Dufy and Still fell into shadows of doubt. Now it is Joan Miro’s turn.

By the time the diminutive Catalan artist died in 1983, at the age of 91, he was ranked with the giants of classic modernism. His characteristic blob-form compositions were universally recognized and celebrated. Sometimes his squiggly personages had little dot eyes and antennae like cartoon characters, sometimes they were abstract, but no matter--a trademark Miro was unmistakable.

Now the first full-dress posthumous retrospective and the first major Miro show since 1959 is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum until Aug. 23. Even those who admire Miro’s art will have to admit that this exhibition has a lot going against it. They will be relieved to note that not all of it is Miro’s fault.

First, of course, there is Frank Lloyd Wright’s wonderful chambered-nautilus building. It is a work of architectural genius that can kill off all but the hardiest of artists. Miro has a struggle with it.

Then there is history. When Miro, Arp and others discovered the artistic uses of curved free-form shapes in the 1920s, it was an aesthetic bonanza. These kidney-cactus-amoeba forms solved the problems of abstract art’s coldness and obscurity because they suggested life. They solved the formal problems of figurative art because they can be distorted any old way without allowing J. Q. Public the luxury of saying they are “out of proportion.” And since nobody can say for sure whether a jabberwocky blob is as big as the moon or as tiny as a dust mote, they are the perfect way to illustrate the philosophical cliche of the identity of the Microcosm and Macrocosm.

It was almost too easy.

In fact, the biomorphic device is so effective that Miro’s progeny leeched and cannibalized it without restraint. The list of artists indebted to him would easily fill this column: Gorky, Motherwell, Baziotes, Matta, Gottlieb--and that only suggests the first generation. Neo-Expressionism has brought The Blob back so that it is impossible to visit a half-dozen galleries today without running into a Miro mutant.

And that’s only the fine-arts bunch. Commercial art has been drinking Miro’s blood at least since the charming WPA cartoons of the 1950s. By now, biomorphism has become part of the cliche vocabulary of animated television commercials, with big blobs eating little blobs so you can have a tidy bowl.

All of that is not Miro’s fault and in fact attests to the power of his aesthetic, but it does tend to make his work look mined out and sidestepped by time. That, however, is a trick of the clock that may well eventually right itself.

When we make an effort to see Miro’s art in its own context, he clearly accomplished much. It is also to the credit of this bedeviled installation that it reveals lesser-known sides of a very well-known artist.

In the teens of the century, for example, he painted portraits that put one in mind of the figurative-expressionist branch of the Russian avant-garde. By 1920 he had graduated to a sweet form of Cubism like that seen in “Horse, Pipe and Red Flower.” With its table-top combination of a metaphysical book and a toy horse, it looks like a Juan Gris painted by a bright child.

Miro passed through an interesting Duchampian phase in “The Carbide Lamp,” but was soon launched into those familiar fantasy landscapes, such as “Carnival of Harlequin,” where a cartoonlike sense of celebration alternates with ominous whiffs of hidden violence.

After that there is a slight sense of predictability as the work moves from more elegant and designlike motifs to the incorporation of written snippets of poetry to a series of ferocious devouring female monsters from the ‘30s. They parallel similar works by Picasso and leave us wondering what kind of awful relationship little Spanish boys must have had with their mothers back then.

That is interesting but it is not art. What is art are certain works by Miro that do not fit the mold. A wonderful assemblage, “Man With an Umbrella,” has an amiable originality and slapstick wit that is as universal as Charlie Chaplin’s films. A “Sculpture-Object” from 1931 is a toss-off as good as any Kurt Schwitters, and an assemblage topped by a stuffed parrot is as lyrical as any Joseph Cornell.

Miro kept on growing in his art right to the end with paintings of truly galactic spaces and ceramic walls, like something out of a Mesopotamia of the mind. But those brilliant, unpursued toss-offs are often better than the mainstream development of his art.

Nobody can say exactly where this retrospective is going to leave Miro. It is certainly not going to leave him out. But it does make one wonder how many points a great artist is docked for being a bit lazy.

You can almost see Miro being greeted by the Great Gym Teacher in the Sky, who says, “Joan, you always ran fast enough to win the race but you didn’t run as fast as you could.”