Lot Essay
During the early 1920's, Miró associated with a group of poets who were later to join the Surrealist movement. Miró and André Masson occupied a studio at 45 rue Blomet in Paris, where they were neighbors of this Surrealist group, but by 1927, the year that Le cheval de cirque was painted, Miró had moved to another studio in the Cité des Fusains in Montmartre. Once again a group of Surrealist artists and poets -- notably Ernst, Magritte, Arp, Breton and Eluard -- lived nearby.
Between 1925 and 1927, Miró executed over 100 works employing a monochromatic background and simplified forms, each maintaining a clear relationship between line and color. Referred to as "dream paintings," these works drew their inspiration from the subconscious and were executed with a spontaneity comparable to the automatic writings of his fellow Surrealists. Miró often said that he did not distinguish between paintings and poetry, and claimed that his imagination was frequently fired by the poetry of Apollinaire, Lautreaumont, Rimbaud and Jarry. The "dream paintings" may also have been the product of hallucination generated by hunger, overwork and exaltation.
From the Surrealists, Miró learned of automatism and of the exploitation of accident as a major vehicle of expression. Commenting upon Miró's paintings of this period, Breton said, "Joan Miró cherishes perhaps one single desire -- to give himself up utterly to painting...to that pure automatism which for my part I have never ceased to invoke, but whose profound value and significance Miró unaided has, I suspect, verified in very summary fashion." (D. Ades, Dada and Surrealism reviewed, London, 1978, p. 218) For Miró, automatism was not only a tool to explore the unconscious; it also gave him marvelous freedom in the act of painting, which was to become increasingly abstract.
Miró often spoke of the periods of heightened receptiveness when he would stare at cracks in the walls, spots on the ceiling, or the texture of the floor:
I was drawing almost entirely from hallucinations. Hunger was a
great source of these hallucinations and I would sit for long periods looking at the bare walls of my studio trying to capture those shapes on paper or burlap.
Often, Miró's circus horse paintings replicate sketches made in his notebooks while contemplating his studio wall, drawings in which he appears to have allowed his pencil to move across the paper with a minimum of control. There are about ten canvases from 1927 that develop the theme of the circus horse. This group explores a major obsession for Miró: the movement and tension created by a fixed axis and something that revolves around it -- such as a man whose whip makes the horse move around the ring. The present work, Le cheval de cirque, is one of the more refined and pure of this series, allowing the viewer's mind and eye to stray across the vast expanse of ethereal blue, only occasionally interrupted by a patch of another color or by a line.
Discussing these dream paintings, Roland Penrose concluded:
Miró's originality was sufficiently strong to make his "dream
paintings" a new and revolutionary form of expression. This
happened chiefly because of his ability to eliminate elaborations and additions introduced by conscious control; suppressing even the symbols that were later to reappear with new significance, he arrived occasionally at pictures which, stripped of all irrelevances, relied on a small spot of color against an atmospheric background to give a sensation of infinite depth. (R. Penrose,
Miró, London, 1970, pp. 48-49)
Between 1925 and 1927, Miró executed over 100 works employing a monochromatic background and simplified forms, each maintaining a clear relationship between line and color. Referred to as "dream paintings," these works drew their inspiration from the subconscious and were executed with a spontaneity comparable to the automatic writings of his fellow Surrealists. Miró often said that he did not distinguish between paintings and poetry, and claimed that his imagination was frequently fired by the poetry of Apollinaire, Lautreaumont, Rimbaud and Jarry. The "dream paintings" may also have been the product of hallucination generated by hunger, overwork and exaltation.
From the Surrealists, Miró learned of automatism and of the exploitation of accident as a major vehicle of expression. Commenting upon Miró's paintings of this period, Breton said, "Joan Miró cherishes perhaps one single desire -- to give himself up utterly to painting...to that pure automatism which for my part I have never ceased to invoke, but whose profound value and significance Miró unaided has, I suspect, verified in very summary fashion." (D. Ades, Dada and Surrealism reviewed, London, 1978, p. 218) For Miró, automatism was not only a tool to explore the unconscious; it also gave him marvelous freedom in the act of painting, which was to become increasingly abstract.
Miró often spoke of the periods of heightened receptiveness when he would stare at cracks in the walls, spots on the ceiling, or the texture of the floor:
I was drawing almost entirely from hallucinations. Hunger was a
great source of these hallucinations and I would sit for long periods looking at the bare walls of my studio trying to capture those shapes on paper or burlap.
Often, Miró's circus horse paintings replicate sketches made in his notebooks while contemplating his studio wall, drawings in which he appears to have allowed his pencil to move across the paper with a minimum of control. There are about ten canvases from 1927 that develop the theme of the circus horse. This group explores a major obsession for Miró: the movement and tension created by a fixed axis and something that revolves around it -- such as a man whose whip makes the horse move around the ring. The present work, Le cheval de cirque, is one of the more refined and pure of this series, allowing the viewer's mind and eye to stray across the vast expanse of ethereal blue, only occasionally interrupted by a patch of another color or by a line.
Discussing these dream paintings, Roland Penrose concluded:
Miró's originality was sufficiently strong to make his "dream
paintings" a new and revolutionary form of expression. This
happened chiefly because of his ability to eliminate elaborations and additions introduced by conscious control; suppressing even the symbols that were later to reappear with new significance, he arrived occasionally at pictures which, stripped of all irrelevances, relied on a small spot of color against an atmospheric background to give a sensation of infinite depth. (R. Penrose,
Miró, London, 1970, pp. 48-49)