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Lot Essay
"For me a form is never something abstract; it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never form for form's sake." (Joan Miró cited in: 'Interview with James Johnson Sweeney', Partisan Review, New York, February 1948, reproduced in: ed. M. Rowell, Selected Writings and Interviews, London 1987, p. 207).
Executed in 1946 at a time when Miró had settled in Barcelona, Vers la fin de la journée (Towards the End of the Day) is a marvelous example of the new freedom and energy with which Miró approached his art after the many years of austerity and isolation that he had endured during the war. Invigorated by a sense of optimism, Miró sought to develop a more lyrical sense on the visual poetry that he had employed in his celebrated 'Constellation' series betweem 1940 and 1942 through a number of freer and more spontaneous paintings.
Inspired by some of the many Paleolithic cave paintings that can be found in Spain at places like Castillo and Altamira, this development began with a conscious exploration of the unconscious movements of his hand and brush. Having been excited during the war years by the raw and spontaneous marks he had made with his brushes on a new paper pad he had bought that was designed for cleaning them, Miró started cleaning his brushes on the next canvas he intended to paint, hoping to find in the unconscious marks he made, a ground or starting point for the new painting.
Attaching what he described as, "a great deal of importance to the initial shock", Miró developed a technique where any unconscious mark, even on one occasion some spilled blackberry jam, could form the genesis of a painting.
"Forms take reality for me as I work. In other words, rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself... . The form becomes the sign for a woman or a bird as I work... . The first stage is free, unconscious; but after that the picture is free throughout, in keeping with that desire for disciplined work I have always felt from the beginning. The Catalan character is not like Malaga or other parts of Spain, it is very much down to earth. We Catalans believe you must always plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump up into the air. The fact that I come down to earth from time to time makes it possible for me to jump all the higher."
As Jacques Dupin has pointed out, the present work is a seminal example of this new approach to his work. "The use of the large tachiste graphisms," he wrote, "gives rise to great formal daring when he reaches the stage of precise figuration. A canvas such as Towards the End of the Day well illustrates how dynamic his art has become, although these are still the elements of a vocabulary elaborated during the preceeding years." (J. Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London 1965, p. 384)
In this remarkable canvas, Miró combines free, gestural marks made with a thick brush with the sinuous flowing lines of his "controlled" graphic style to create a dancing mirage of creatures against a subtle and delicate pastel ground. All the experiments of the last few years come together to create a mystical frieze of poetic, calligraphic life. The heavier black forms bleed onto the canvas to form the shadows of mythical creatures while the more consciously controlled figures with their carefully delineated features convey a sense of magic and subtlety organise the pictorial space into an organised whole. In this way Vers la fin de la journée presents a fantastical array of dream-like personnages seemingly emerging into full focus from the infinite space of the background. They are magic figures that have emerged from the cosmic void of Miró's unconscious imagination to be given life solely through the whimsical mastery of his brush.
Executed in 1946 at a time when Miró had settled in Barcelona, Vers la fin de la journée (Towards the End of the Day) is a marvelous example of the new freedom and energy with which Miró approached his art after the many years of austerity and isolation that he had endured during the war. Invigorated by a sense of optimism, Miró sought to develop a more lyrical sense on the visual poetry that he had employed in his celebrated 'Constellation' series betweem 1940 and 1942 through a number of freer and more spontaneous paintings.
Inspired by some of the many Paleolithic cave paintings that can be found in Spain at places like Castillo and Altamira, this development began with a conscious exploration of the unconscious movements of his hand and brush. Having been excited during the war years by the raw and spontaneous marks he had made with his brushes on a new paper pad he had bought that was designed for cleaning them, Miró started cleaning his brushes on the next canvas he intended to paint, hoping to find in the unconscious marks he made, a ground or starting point for the new painting.
Attaching what he described as, "a great deal of importance to the initial shock", Miró developed a technique where any unconscious mark, even on one occasion some spilled blackberry jam, could form the genesis of a painting.
"Forms take reality for me as I work. In other words, rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself... . The form becomes the sign for a woman or a bird as I work... . The first stage is free, unconscious; but after that the picture is free throughout, in keeping with that desire for disciplined work I have always felt from the beginning. The Catalan character is not like Malaga or other parts of Spain, it is very much down to earth. We Catalans believe you must always plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump up into the air. The fact that I come down to earth from time to time makes it possible for me to jump all the higher."
As Jacques Dupin has pointed out, the present work is a seminal example of this new approach to his work. "The use of the large tachiste graphisms," he wrote, "gives rise to great formal daring when he reaches the stage of precise figuration. A canvas such as Towards the End of the Day well illustrates how dynamic his art has become, although these are still the elements of a vocabulary elaborated during the preceeding years." (J. Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London 1965, p. 384)
In this remarkable canvas, Miró combines free, gestural marks made with a thick brush with the sinuous flowing lines of his "controlled" graphic style to create a dancing mirage of creatures against a subtle and delicate pastel ground. All the experiments of the last few years come together to create a mystical frieze of poetic, calligraphic life. The heavier black forms bleed onto the canvas to form the shadows of mythical creatures while the more consciously controlled figures with their carefully delineated features convey a sense of magic and subtlety organise the pictorial space into an organised whole. In this way Vers la fin de la journée presents a fantastical array of dream-like personnages seemingly emerging into full focus from the infinite space of the background. They are magic figures that have emerged from the cosmic void of Miró's unconscious imagination to be given life solely through the whimsical mastery of his brush.