Lot Essay
This painting has been requested for an exhibition of works by Miró and Calder to be held at the Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York, June-Sept., 1998.
The paintings of the mid-1940s came at a moment of great change and consolidation in Miró's work. Between 1939 and 1941, he made an extraordinary series of gouaches known as Constellations. He lived in relative seclusion in Varengeville in 1940, until the onset of World War II forced him to flee France; he first returned to Palma, Majorca and then moved to Barcelona in 1946. He completed the Constellations in Palma, during a period of intense solitude in which he spent much of his time in the Gothic cathedral there reading the Spanish mystics, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. Miró told James Johnson Sweeney in 1948, "It was an ascetic existence: only work."
Miró constructed the Constellations with great precision and control, developing a language of signs to convey his religious and emotional sentiment. Jacques Dupin describes them as a "mountain peak of accomplishment" from which Miró could reconsider his whole method of working:
He took stock of his forms, meditated on ways to reanimate them, restore their mobility, preserve their imperfections (without which there is no life). From now on the artist would tolerate no intermediaries between himself and the source; he would never lose sight of the source, which was in himself. To find afresh the elementary language which had always haunted him, he had no further need of the model, of the provocations of the unconscious surrender to dreams, of the urgings of destructive instincts... There was no outside world anymore; it had been entirely swallowed up, internalized. What would be expressed in their entirety in every sign, every line, every brush stroke from now on would be the messages received from this terra incognita and they alone--at once fabulous and familiar, unheard of yet without surprises. (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, pp. 258-259)
The paintings that Miró made following his move to Barcelona, La nuit among them, incorporate the precise forms of the Constellations, but combine them with groups of free, almost accidental, gestures, and the monochrome backgrounds of the pictures are made active by scumbled paint (fig. 2). Miró said at this time that he:
...now felt the need to work more freely, more gaily--to proliferate...just as I worked very carefully in the Palma series, controlling everything, now I worked with the least control possible... In the various paintings I have done since my return from Palma to Barcelona there have always been these three stages--first, the suggestion, usually from the material; second, the conscious organization of these forms; the third, the compositional enrichment. (Quoted in ed. M. Rowell, Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, pp. 210-211)
After preparing a canvas, Miró would wait for an "accident" to serve as the beginning of the work; he even once used a splash of jam he happened to see as the inspiration for the first stage of a painting. He would then leave the canvas untouched for some time before returning to it. Discussing this method of working, he stated:
For this reason I always work on several canvases at once. I start a canvas, or a drawing, without a thought of what it may eventually become. I put it aside after the first fire has abated. I may not look at it again for months. Then I take it out and work at it coldly like an artisan, guided strictly by rules of composition after the first shock of suggestion has cooled. (Quoted in ibid., p. 209)
And he told Sweeney:
Even a few casual wipes of my brush in cleaning it may suggest the beginning of a picture. The second stage, however is carefully calculated. The first stage is free, unconscious; but after that the picture is controlled throughout, in keeping with that desire for disciplined work I have felt from the beginning. (Quoted in J.T. Soby, op. cit., p. 121)
A photograph by Joaquin Gomis shows the present canvas in an early stage (fig. 1), where the "wavery, unpremeditated smears" that Sweeney identified at its center form the basis for the composition (ibid., p. 120). Three of the forms in the painting come, Miró said, from his memory of paintings by Urgell, his early teacher: "a red circle, the moon, and a star. They keep coming back, each time slightly different. But for me it is always a story of recovering: one does not discover in life" (quoted in M. Rowell, op. cit., p. 208). In addition to these elements, Miró incorporates the figure of a woman, possibly inspired by prehistoric Iberian paintings that he had also used as a source for the Constellations.
Sidra Stich describes the skills that Miró had developed by this completely mature phase of his career:
The primal dot and line grow, contort and proliferate to create a panoply of evocative sign figurations. Here Miró has also suggested that the same visual language evolves regardless of whether its roots are very free (as in the painterly color spots and broad brush figures) or very controlled (as in the finely contoured shapes and linear markings). The integration of both modes in a single composition proclaims that it is not a question of conscious or unconscious creation, of pure abstraction or figuration, but rather the basis of pictorial expression itself which is the real issue. (S. Stich, Joan Miró: The Development of a Sign Language, exh. cat., Washington University, St. Louis, 1980, pp. 55-56)
Regarding Miró's works of this time, Jacques Dupin has written:
We find the confirmation and continuing development of an art
which becomes progressively less capricious, less anxious, and
more self-assured... It is as though he decreed a stepping up in
the process of fantastic deformation. (J. Dupin, op. cit., p. 272)
La nuit is offered by the heirs of LeRoy Makepeace (fig. 3), who acquired the picture just two years after its execution. As a young foreign service officer in Barcelona in 1946, Makepeace helped Joan Miró apply for a visa to visit the United States to undertake the commission of a mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati (since transferred to the Cincinnati Art Museum). Makepeace recognized the artist from photographs and remembered works that he had seen in The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Their friendship developed and Makepeace visited Miró's studio in the autumn of 1946 where he saw, for the first time, La nuit, a painting made earlier that year. Makepeace bought the work in 1948 through the Pierre Matisse Gallery, where it had been exhibited in 1947. Makepeace had fallen in love with the painting in Barcelona and was delighted to have the opportunity to purchase it later. Miró had told him, "I would be delighted and honored if you had one of my paintings," and Makepeace sold his car and motorcycle in order to help pay for it.
(fig. 1) La nuit in its first stage
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, Personnages et étoile, 1949
Provate Collection (Christie's, New York, May 10, 1995)
(fig. 3) Joan Miró and LeRoy Makepeace at Miró's farm at Montroig, 1947
The paintings of the mid-1940s came at a moment of great change and consolidation in Miró's work. Between 1939 and 1941, he made an extraordinary series of gouaches known as Constellations. He lived in relative seclusion in Varengeville in 1940, until the onset of World War II forced him to flee France; he first returned to Palma, Majorca and then moved to Barcelona in 1946. He completed the Constellations in Palma, during a period of intense solitude in which he spent much of his time in the Gothic cathedral there reading the Spanish mystics, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. Miró told James Johnson Sweeney in 1948, "It was an ascetic existence: only work."
Miró constructed the Constellations with great precision and control, developing a language of signs to convey his religious and emotional sentiment. Jacques Dupin describes them as a "mountain peak of accomplishment" from which Miró could reconsider his whole method of working:
He took stock of his forms, meditated on ways to reanimate them, restore their mobility, preserve their imperfections (without which there is no life). From now on the artist would tolerate no intermediaries between himself and the source; he would never lose sight of the source, which was in himself. To find afresh the elementary language which had always haunted him, he had no further need of the model, of the provocations of the unconscious surrender to dreams, of the urgings of destructive instincts... There was no outside world anymore; it had been entirely swallowed up, internalized. What would be expressed in their entirety in every sign, every line, every brush stroke from now on would be the messages received from this terra incognita and they alone--at once fabulous and familiar, unheard of yet without surprises. (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, pp. 258-259)
The paintings that Miró made following his move to Barcelona, La nuit among them, incorporate the precise forms of the Constellations, but combine them with groups of free, almost accidental, gestures, and the monochrome backgrounds of the pictures are made active by scumbled paint (fig. 2). Miró said at this time that he:
...now felt the need to work more freely, more gaily--to proliferate...just as I worked very carefully in the Palma series, controlling everything, now I worked with the least control possible... In the various paintings I have done since my return from Palma to Barcelona there have always been these three stages--first, the suggestion, usually from the material; second, the conscious organization of these forms; the third, the compositional enrichment. (Quoted in ed. M. Rowell, Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, pp. 210-211)
After preparing a canvas, Miró would wait for an "accident" to serve as the beginning of the work; he even once used a splash of jam he happened to see as the inspiration for the first stage of a painting. He would then leave the canvas untouched for some time before returning to it. Discussing this method of working, he stated:
For this reason I always work on several canvases at once. I start a canvas, or a drawing, without a thought of what it may eventually become. I put it aside after the first fire has abated. I may not look at it again for months. Then I take it out and work at it coldly like an artisan, guided strictly by rules of composition after the first shock of suggestion has cooled. (Quoted in ibid., p. 209)
And he told Sweeney:
Even a few casual wipes of my brush in cleaning it may suggest the beginning of a picture. The second stage, however is carefully calculated. The first stage is free, unconscious; but after that the picture is controlled throughout, in keeping with that desire for disciplined work I have felt from the beginning. (Quoted in J.T. Soby, op. cit., p. 121)
A photograph by Joaquin Gomis shows the present canvas in an early stage (fig. 1), where the "wavery, unpremeditated smears" that Sweeney identified at its center form the basis for the composition (ibid., p. 120). Three of the forms in the painting come, Miró said, from his memory of paintings by Urgell, his early teacher: "a red circle, the moon, and a star. They keep coming back, each time slightly different. But for me it is always a story of recovering: one does not discover in life" (quoted in M. Rowell, op. cit., p. 208). In addition to these elements, Miró incorporates the figure of a woman, possibly inspired by prehistoric Iberian paintings that he had also used as a source for the Constellations.
Sidra Stich describes the skills that Miró had developed by this completely mature phase of his career:
The primal dot and line grow, contort and proliferate to create a panoply of evocative sign figurations. Here Miró has also suggested that the same visual language evolves regardless of whether its roots are very free (as in the painterly color spots and broad brush figures) or very controlled (as in the finely contoured shapes and linear markings). The integration of both modes in a single composition proclaims that it is not a question of conscious or unconscious creation, of pure abstraction or figuration, but rather the basis of pictorial expression itself which is the real issue. (S. Stich, Joan Miró: The Development of a Sign Language, exh. cat., Washington University, St. Louis, 1980, pp. 55-56)
Regarding Miró's works of this time, Jacques Dupin has written:
We find the confirmation and continuing development of an art
which becomes progressively less capricious, less anxious, and
more self-assured... It is as though he decreed a stepping up in
the process of fantastic deformation. (J. Dupin, op. cit., p. 272)
La nuit is offered by the heirs of LeRoy Makepeace (fig. 3), who acquired the picture just two years after its execution. As a young foreign service officer in Barcelona in 1946, Makepeace helped Joan Miró apply for a visa to visit the United States to undertake the commission of a mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati (since transferred to the Cincinnati Art Museum). Makepeace recognized the artist from photographs and remembered works that he had seen in The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Their friendship developed and Makepeace visited Miró's studio in the autumn of 1946 where he saw, for the first time, La nuit, a painting made earlier that year. Makepeace bought the work in 1948 through the Pierre Matisse Gallery, where it had been exhibited in 1947. Makepeace had fallen in love with the painting in Barcelona and was delighted to have the opportunity to purchase it later. Miró had told him, "I would be delighted and honored if you had one of my paintings," and Makepeace sold his car and motorcycle in order to help pay for it.
(fig. 1) La nuit in its first stage
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, Personnages et étoile, 1949
Provate Collection (Christie's, New York, May 10, 1995)
(fig. 3) Joan Miró and LeRoy Makepeace at Miró's farm at Montroig, 1947