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Lot Essay
Sold with a photo-certificate from Jaques Dupin, dated Paris, 22 novembre 89.
To Miró, there were many things which evoked magic and poetry, such as women, birds, the stars, moon, the sun and night and dusk. They are a recurrent theme in his work. The nocturnal presence of women and birds is a favourite of Miró's. For Miró however, the night is not associated with notions of fear, the unknown, or darkness. On the contrary, his romantic, poetic notion of night is revealed in a brilliant display of colour. A master of both colour and line, Miró used these means in various constellations. While some of his works can be covered in a sea of colour, others exhibit contrasting compositions of drawing and a more economic use of chromatic contrasts. As in the present work, colour can be pure, as pure in fact as a red splash of pigment, thrown in the middle, creating also an experiment of texture. Keenly sensitive to the role of each colour, Miró often used yellow, as he did here, as the source of light in a picture and gave it a major importance. It is striking how pictures of this period, including the present work, are more spontaneous and simple, when compared to Miró's earlier work from the 30s, 40s and even 50s, more detailed and calculated, in their fixed forms and symbols. The artist himself explained that he felt '... the need to achieve maximum intensity with minimal means. That's what led me to give my painting an ever sparer character... My tendency toward sparness, simplification, has manifested itself in three areas: shading, colours and the representation of figures' (quoted in: Joan Miró 1893-1993, Barcelona, 1993, p. 427).
Henri Matisse, once asked whom he considered a true painter apart from Picasso, amongst contemporary artists, answered: 'Miró... because it doesn't matter what he represents on his canvas, but if, in a certain place, he has put a red spot, you can be sure that it had to be there and not elsewhere.... take it away and the painting collapses' (L. Aragon, Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, p. 147).
To Miró, there were many things which evoked magic and poetry, such as women, birds, the stars, moon, the sun and night and dusk. They are a recurrent theme in his work. The nocturnal presence of women and birds is a favourite of Miró's. For Miró however, the night is not associated with notions of fear, the unknown, or darkness. On the contrary, his romantic, poetic notion of night is revealed in a brilliant display of colour. A master of both colour and line, Miró used these means in various constellations. While some of his works can be covered in a sea of colour, others exhibit contrasting compositions of drawing and a more economic use of chromatic contrasts. As in the present work, colour can be pure, as pure in fact as a red splash of pigment, thrown in the middle, creating also an experiment of texture. Keenly sensitive to the role of each colour, Miró often used yellow, as he did here, as the source of light in a picture and gave it a major importance. It is striking how pictures of this period, including the present work, are more spontaneous and simple, when compared to Miró's earlier work from the 30s, 40s and even 50s, more detailed and calculated, in their fixed forms and symbols. The artist himself explained that he felt '... the need to achieve maximum intensity with minimal means. That's what led me to give my painting an ever sparer character... My tendency toward sparness, simplification, has manifested itself in three areas: shading, colours and the representation of figures' (quoted in: Joan Miró 1893-1993, Barcelona, 1993, p. 427).
Henri Matisse, once asked whom he considered a true painter apart from Picasso, amongst contemporary artists, answered: 'Miró... because it doesn't matter what he represents on his canvas, but if, in a certain place, he has put a red spot, you can be sure that it had to be there and not elsewhere.... take it away and the painting collapses' (L. Aragon, Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, p. 147).