Art review: Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape

In THE early 1970s, Joan Mir was given a high- profile commission to make a sculpture for La Dfense, the vast and hideous complex of skyscrapers that glares back misanthropically at central Paris from beyond the Seine. He was taken in a cavalcade of VIPs to see the site. As they stepped out of the limousine and he saw its full horror, so his assistant, Joan Gardy Artigas, told me, he whispered, "Il faut ecraser cet endroit!" - "We must smash this place!" And indeed he did. His sculpture Two Lovers Beneath a Flowering Almond Tree, two gigantic, brilliantly coloured creatures surging up out of the concrete in an amorous dance, has brought delight and a sense of irrepressible life to confound its stark inhumanity.

What would Mir have thought of Tate Modern? It is a grim place too. With its inhuman scale and prison lighting, it is like a cross between a Piranesi nightmare and some ghastly Orwellian vision of modernity. in The Ladder of Escape, billed as his first major exhibition for 40 years, Mir's spirit is almost crushed by it. Alas, poor Mir! And he has no chance to fight back as he did at La Dfense.

There are marvellous paintings here, of course. How could there not be? He was constantly inventive, and there is more sheer delight in his art than that of almost any of his contemporaries. Here are his wonderful, childlike early paintings of the family farm and nearby village of Montroig. It was where his roots were, he said, and after he went to Paris in 1919, he returned each summer to refresh himself there. In The Ploughed Field of 1923-4, the elements of this landscape take on a life of their own and you recognise the metamorphic shapes and some of the themes of his later work.

The Catalan flag is flying in several of these early paintings and he then went on to paint a wonderful series of Catalan peasants, reduced to an elemental diagram - hat, eyes, pipe, moustache, all against scumbled blue - that conveys his idea of the peasantry themselves as somehow elemental. When the Spanish Civil War war broke out and he could not return home, he adapted this image on a truly monumental scale for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair of 1937. His picture hung alongside Picasso's Guernica but, sent to be exhibited in Spain, it was lost, presumably destroyed by the Fascists. Mir always felt it unfair that Picasso got all the glory for Guernica when his lost picture was its equal.Now he is woefully undersold again, for this story is not enough to uphold the tendentious thesis that has skewed this whole exhibition: that Mir was a political artist. Shaped by this thesis, the selection is patchy. Chronologically it peters out. There is very little of his wonderfully inventive later work, nothing of his ceramics and only a token group of his sculptures huddled together under the dingy lighting like refugees in some hostile no man's land. Among the handful of late works that are included is a series of burnt canvases that he did in 1973 following the arrest and condemnation of an anti-Franco activist, Salvador Puig Antich. A response to the fate of one man, these fierce, even violent works are exceptional and certainly not enough to justify the wider thesis. Mir was politically significant of course, extraordinarily so, but it totally misrepresents him to say that politics drove him. There can be no doubt he was a Catalan patriot and, indeed, it was because of the position he occupied in Catalonia that I went to interview him in Majorca in advance of the first Scottish referendum in 1979. It was a rare privilege. I found him conscious of his role as more like that of Burns in Scotland, giving quiet poetic inspiration to a whole people, than as an artist overtly engaged with politics. Above all, the most important thing for him was, he said, his grands projts, his big public works like the sculpture at La Dfense. They are not confrontational at all. He hoped rather that they would touch the collective consciousness subliminally, transform it by a kind of unconscious poetic irrigation. There is hardly any reference to them here, however.

Apart from his monumental peasant, Mir's most compelling reaction to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War was his Still Life with an Old Shoe. His choice of still-life for such a picture also seems pointedly apolitical. Beneath a black sky, a bottle, an apple, a piece of bread, a fork and the eponymous shoe are lit by a lurid light. It is as though a frugal peasant's lunch at some field's edge had been overtaken by the apocalypse. The picture expresses rage and despair at the horror of war and its dislocation of life's ordinary rhythms, and of the artistic life that Mir saw as rooted in those things, but that is a universal human position to take, not a narrowly political one.

Then in 1940 as the tide of war swept across Europe and he escaped with his family, first to western France and then, taking his life in his hands - for he was persona non grata to Franco's Fascists - to Catalonia, Mir started on his most magical series of pictures, his Constellations. In these small brilliant paintings, women, stars, birds and other strange creatures are linked by intricate patterns of line and colour in a perpetual dance of the imagination. Following his flight from Hitler, Mir spent the war in internal exile in Majorca.He had few materials, but he did manage to create a series of 50 black-and-white lithographs that continue directly from the Constellations. The inadequacy of the selectors' approach is illustrated by their label, however. It states that these lithographs "apparently relate to Mir's interest in Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry's coruscating satire on dictatorship". That word "apparently" reveals that whoever wrote this label has not looked at the pictures. Here again are women, children and stars. There are threatening creatures too, certainly. There is anxiety and sometimes an ominous sense of danger in them, but there is no Ubu Roi.

Pure poetry created at a time of great crisis, the Constellations and these lithographs that follow them could not be further from simple politics. Rather they are about the need to preserve innocence in the face of the cruelty and dislocation of war and somehow, miraculously, that is what Mir did. That was why he was such a powerful influence. Like his hero Gaud, by his transparent integrity, even a kind of innocence, he came to personify the aspirations of the Catalan people at a level much deeper than politics. Indeed he demonstrated that politics is a function of culture. It is not the other way around, as our politicians seem to think. Foster a healthy culture and the politics will follow. The exhibition proposes almost the opposite, but Mir's true message is very topical still.

Talking to Mir I was astonished to realise he was putting forward ideas about the place of art in our lives that originated with William Morris and Walter Crane in the Arts and Crafts Movement. These two men also feature largely in the V&A's splendid show, The Cult of Beauty, about the Aesthetic Movement in the late 19th century and how, under its influence, the idea of the transformative power of beauty penetrated everything from painting, through interior decoration to high fashion. Here, as well as Morris and Crane, are Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones, Whistler, William de Morgan and many other artists and craftsmen and women. Some were famous, some anonymous, but collectively, as my conversation with Mir demonstrated, they were very influential, not only in this country, but beyond it too.

• Mir until 11 September; The Cult of Beauty until 17 July

Art review: Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape | The Cult of Beauty