Lot Essay
In a letter of June 17, 1944, Joan Miró informed his New York dealer, Pierre Matisse: "I work as always a lot; if I've made ceramics and lithographs, as this summer I am going to make sculpture, it is not to abandon painting...on the contrary, it is to enrich it with new possibilities and to take it up with new enthusiasm." (exh. cat., Joan Miró, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 336) The letter is a kind of coda to the work of an artist at the crossroads of a long and illustrious career. Having achieved a degree of international prestige matched only by Picasso and Matisse, Miró now reflected on his career as a painter, charting the course for future projects in other media.
As early as 1941-1942, at the time of his first retrospective exhibition (mounted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York), Miró kept a journal of working notes with recipes for unorthodox and innovative techniques in sculpture, ceramics, printmaking (etching, lithography, linoleum block prints, woodcuts, monotypes), stained glass, pyrography, and, of course, painting. Sometime in 1943-1944, Miró began collaborating with his old friend and master Josep Llorens i Artigas, initiating a sustained period of work on ceramic vases, plates and sculpture.
Miró's exploration of new materials and techniques had a profound impact on the development of his painting. In a 1951 interview on French National Radio with Georges Charbonnier, Miró insisted that he had come "to a place beyond easel painting" in his career. When Charbonnier sought clarification, Miró replied: "...easel painting is an experimental thing. Valuable in itself, of course, but only as a kind of laboratory research. One must do it, but it must also lead us much further." (J. Miró, interview with G. Charbonnier, French National Radio, 1951; published in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1987, p. 217) Miró's comment suggests that he viewed painting as a heterogenous activity open to the full range of techniques at the artist's disposal.
Speaking generally of the heterogenous character of Miró's painting after 1950, Jacques Dupin perceptively writes:
Whenever he chose a material like cardboard or masonite, it was obviously in order to obtain different effects. Thus with a needle or chisel he might engrave signs that contrast with his painted signs, and the furrows they make let the texture of the cardboard or masonite show through. In this way he added to his range of provocative effects, to the play of the materials. Sudden changes of tools or media give the effect of a picture's suddenly "slipping out of gear." The frequent seesaw rhythms, a form of inscription at odds with itself, breaking off suddenly or suddenly wildly emphatic -- all this points to what was the artist's fondness for "commotion" as a mode of communication. (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 288)
This "play of materials," and the sense of brutal -- yet controlled -- energy, of lyricism and aggression, had long been an operative principle in Miró's work. In Les jasmins embaument de leur parfum doré la robe de la jeune fille and related works of this period (fig. 1), it resurfaces with particular force.
In this painting of 1952, a monstrous creature -- a cyclops of sorts -- is set against an acidic, yellow-green ground, its looming and threatening presence dwarfing the elegant personnages to its sides. The painting is an exercise in contrasts: the pasty surfaces and jagged edges of the monster are poised in tension with the precise and delicately drawn personnages. In keeping with Miró's interest in the dialectic matter and spirit, the texure of the monster's eye and the green knife-like sheath extending from its torso are rough and crusty, as if the creature has emerged from the depths of the earth, expelled by the convulsive force of a volcanic eruption. Miró's work in ceramics, particularly the artist's physical interaction with clay and the process through which it is fired, establishes some suggestive parallels. In contrast, the personnages float effortlessly across the yellow ground, weightless filaments borne aloft by magnificent wings and the effects of their own immateriality. Refugees from Miró's great series of Constellations of 1940-1941 (fig. 2), they are spiritual counterparts to the telluric physicality of the cyclops.
Miró's evocative title, transcribed on the back of the canvas, reveals his commitment to the idea of "peinture-poésie." As early as 1917-1918 Miró maintained close friendships with poets in Barcelona, collaborating on a range of Catalan literary journals. Over the course of 1922-1924, he participated in the activities of the Rue Blomet Group in Paris, engaging in a rich exchange of ideas with his neighbor André Masson, and the writers and poets Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Paul Eluard, Raymond Queneau and Armand Salacrou. In 1925, Miró's relation to poetry was complex. On the one hand, he was an avid reader of modern and contemporary poetry, devouring the works of Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy and his Catalan colleagues Josep Maria Junoy, Joan Slavat-Papasseit, and Josep Viçenc Foix. On the other hand, his particular conception of "peinture-poésie" was based on the reciprocity of visual and linguistic structures. Throughout the 1920's Miró explored the multiple functions of line as writing, surface structure, and surface inscription. In a well-known painting of 1927 (fig. 3), the poetic phrase "Un oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse" is configured so that the word "poursuit" traces the arc of the bird's movement as it pursues the bee. In other paintings, such as the majestic Tête de paysan catalan, III of 1925 (fig. 4), the facial attributes of the figure are reduced to cryptic signs -- a bright red cap, a snake-like beard and two resilient eyes casting a glance outward -- while the crossed horizontal and vertical lines that define the axis of the face echo the physical structure of the canvas-as-object, whose stretcher bars remain visible beneath the soft blue wash. Finally, in works like Les jasmins embaument de leur parfum doré la robe de la jeune fille [Jasmines Scent the Girl's Dress with Their Golden Perfume], the title is not so much descriptive as it is a poetic analogue to the figuration. Miró wrote poetry throughout his life, jotting down ideas and phrases in his notebooks. But the relation between the "content" of a painting and its poetic title remained, to paraphrase Baudelaire, a matter of fluid and open corréspondances.
(fig. 1) Joan Miró, L'oiseau Boom-Boom fait sa prière à la tête pelure d'oignon, 1952
Private Collection, New York
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, Chiffres et constellations amoureux d'une femme, 1941
The Art Institute, Chicago (Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman)
(fig. 3) Joan Miró, "Un oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse", 1927
Private Collection
(fig. 4) Joan Miró, Tête de paysan catalan, III, 1925
Private Collection, on loan to Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
As early as 1941-1942, at the time of his first retrospective exhibition (mounted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York), Miró kept a journal of working notes with recipes for unorthodox and innovative techniques in sculpture, ceramics, printmaking (etching, lithography, linoleum block prints, woodcuts, monotypes), stained glass, pyrography, and, of course, painting. Sometime in 1943-1944, Miró began collaborating with his old friend and master Josep Llorens i Artigas, initiating a sustained period of work on ceramic vases, plates and sculpture.
Miró's exploration of new materials and techniques had a profound impact on the development of his painting. In a 1951 interview on French National Radio with Georges Charbonnier, Miró insisted that he had come "to a place beyond easel painting" in his career. When Charbonnier sought clarification, Miró replied: "...easel painting is an experimental thing. Valuable in itself, of course, but only as a kind of laboratory research. One must do it, but it must also lead us much further." (J. Miró, interview with G. Charbonnier, French National Radio, 1951; published in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1987, p. 217) Miró's comment suggests that he viewed painting as a heterogenous activity open to the full range of techniques at the artist's disposal.
Speaking generally of the heterogenous character of Miró's painting after 1950, Jacques Dupin perceptively writes:
Whenever he chose a material like cardboard or masonite, it was obviously in order to obtain different effects. Thus with a needle or chisel he might engrave signs that contrast with his painted signs, and the furrows they make let the texture of the cardboard or masonite show through. In this way he added to his range of provocative effects, to the play of the materials. Sudden changes of tools or media give the effect of a picture's suddenly "slipping out of gear." The frequent seesaw rhythms, a form of inscription at odds with itself, breaking off suddenly or suddenly wildly emphatic -- all this points to what was the artist's fondness for "commotion" as a mode of communication. (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 288)
This "play of materials," and the sense of brutal -- yet controlled -- energy, of lyricism and aggression, had long been an operative principle in Miró's work. In Les jasmins embaument de leur parfum doré la robe de la jeune fille and related works of this period (fig. 1), it resurfaces with particular force.
In this painting of 1952, a monstrous creature -- a cyclops of sorts -- is set against an acidic, yellow-green ground, its looming and threatening presence dwarfing the elegant personnages to its sides. The painting is an exercise in contrasts: the pasty surfaces and jagged edges of the monster are poised in tension with the precise and delicately drawn personnages. In keeping with Miró's interest in the dialectic matter and spirit, the texure of the monster's eye and the green knife-like sheath extending from its torso are rough and crusty, as if the creature has emerged from the depths of the earth, expelled by the convulsive force of a volcanic eruption. Miró's work in ceramics, particularly the artist's physical interaction with clay and the process through which it is fired, establishes some suggestive parallels. In contrast, the personnages float effortlessly across the yellow ground, weightless filaments borne aloft by magnificent wings and the effects of their own immateriality. Refugees from Miró's great series of Constellations of 1940-1941 (fig. 2), they are spiritual counterparts to the telluric physicality of the cyclops.
Miró's evocative title, transcribed on the back of the canvas, reveals his commitment to the idea of "peinture-poésie." As early as 1917-1918 Miró maintained close friendships with poets in Barcelona, collaborating on a range of Catalan literary journals. Over the course of 1922-1924, he participated in the activities of the Rue Blomet Group in Paris, engaging in a rich exchange of ideas with his neighbor André Masson, and the writers and poets Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Paul Eluard, Raymond Queneau and Armand Salacrou. In 1925, Miró's relation to poetry was complex. On the one hand, he was an avid reader of modern and contemporary poetry, devouring the works of Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy and his Catalan colleagues Josep Maria Junoy, Joan Slavat-Papasseit, and Josep Viçenc Foix. On the other hand, his particular conception of "peinture-poésie" was based on the reciprocity of visual and linguistic structures. Throughout the 1920's Miró explored the multiple functions of line as writing, surface structure, and surface inscription. In a well-known painting of 1927 (fig. 3), the poetic phrase "Un oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse" is configured so that the word "poursuit" traces the arc of the bird's movement as it pursues the bee. In other paintings, such as the majestic Tête de paysan catalan, III of 1925 (fig. 4), the facial attributes of the figure are reduced to cryptic signs -- a bright red cap, a snake-like beard and two resilient eyes casting a glance outward -- while the crossed horizontal and vertical lines that define the axis of the face echo the physical structure of the canvas-as-object, whose stretcher bars remain visible beneath the soft blue wash. Finally, in works like Les jasmins embaument de leur parfum doré la robe de la jeune fille [Jasmines Scent the Girl's Dress with Their Golden Perfume], the title is not so much descriptive as it is a poetic analogue to the figuration. Miró wrote poetry throughout his life, jotting down ideas and phrases in his notebooks. But the relation between the "content" of a painting and its poetic title remained, to paraphrase Baudelaire, a matter of fluid and open corréspondances.
(fig. 1) Joan Miró, L'oiseau Boom-Boom fait sa prière à la tête pelure d'oignon, 1952
Private Collection, New York
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, Chiffres et constellations amoureux d'une femme, 1941
The Art Institute, Chicago (Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman)
(fig. 3) Joan Miró, "Un oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse", 1927
Private Collection
(fig. 4) Joan Miró, Tête de paysan catalan, III, 1925
Private Collection, on loan to Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh