.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Jacques Dupin has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
In 1966, Miró produced a series of paintings and a related group of lithographs based on the Perseids, an astronomical meteor shower occurring in July and August of every year. The bold arrows pushing upwards in the present work, a study for the series of lithographs, evoke the sheer dynamism of meteors racing through the atmosphere during this annual phenomenon.
The palette of Les Perséides, reduced to the essentials of red, yellow, green and blue, augmented by strokes of black and white, reflects the reductive color vocabulary Miró had employed since the 1940s. Red, very often seen in circular form as in the present work, represents fire, power or the sun. Yellow, in addition to its natural role as an optical complement to blue, signifies joy, while blue offers a window into the spiritual.
Miró conspicuously ignored the tension between Surrealism and abstraction, exploiting the disparities between them in delicate, tautly poised compositions such as the present work. In all media, Miró sought to convey the energies of life through rhythmically organized amoeboid and ambiguous forms--sometimes humorous, sometimes alarming, but always original and suggestive. The present work is rife with meteorological and stellar references taken from the artist's own visual lexicon of forms. Miró declared, "I make no distinction between poetry and painting" (quoted in J. Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993). Indeed, his life's work was dedicated to the concept of peinture-poésie, in which the artist's pictorial imagination is inseparable from other creative faculties of the mind.
In 1966, Miró produced a series of paintings and a related group of lithographs based on the Perseids, an astronomical meteor shower occurring in July and August of every year. The bold arrows pushing upwards in the present work, a study for the series of lithographs, evoke the sheer dynamism of meteors racing through the atmosphere during this annual phenomenon.
The palette of Les Perséides, reduced to the essentials of red, yellow, green and blue, augmented by strokes of black and white, reflects the reductive color vocabulary Miró had employed since the 1940s. Red, very often seen in circular form as in the present work, represents fire, power or the sun. Yellow, in addition to its natural role as an optical complement to blue, signifies joy, while blue offers a window into the spiritual.
Miró conspicuously ignored the tension between Surrealism and abstraction, exploiting the disparities between them in delicate, tautly poised compositions such as the present work. In all media, Miró sought to convey the energies of life through rhythmically organized amoeboid and ambiguous forms--sometimes humorous, sometimes alarming, but always original and suggestive. The present work is rife with meteorological and stellar references taken from the artist's own visual lexicon of forms. Miró declared, "I make no distinction between poetry and painting" (quoted in J. Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993). Indeed, his life's work was dedicated to the concept of peinture-poésie, in which the artist's pictorial imagination is inseparable from other creative faculties of the mind.