Lot Essay
The long title of the present work can be roughly translated as "She is stabbed by the sun while reciting poems fused in geometrical forms of musical flight of the bat spat out by the sea." Mir had always been fascinated by visionary verse, especially that of Blake and Rimbaud, and he wrote many poems filled with Surrealist and hallucinatory imagery between 1936 and 1939. Increasingly, he saw poetry and painting as sister arts and parallel forms of expression; in the late 1930s he even planned to make an illustrated book of his verse, in order to explore their interconnections further.
Both as a poet and painter, Mir hoped to unveil a visionary, even mystical, understanding of the cosmos. In 1939 he said, "Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvelous. But in order to recover it we have have to recover the religious and magical sense of things that belong to primitive peoples" (J. Mir, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 153). To do this, Mir sought to make pictures which inspired the viewer to see the essential vitality of the natural world around them. Mir said, "In a picture, it should be possible to discover new things everytime you see it It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem. It must have radiance, it must be like those stones which Pyrenean shepherds use to light their pipes. More than the picture itself, what counts is what it throws off, what it exhales A picture must be fertile. It must give birth to a world. It doesn't matter [what] it depictsas long as it reveals a world, something alive" (ibid., p. 251).
Quoting Kant, Mirsaid that the effect he sought in art was "'a sudden irruption of the infinite into the finite.' In my paintings, this translates into the sparklike forms that leap out of the frame, as though from a volcano. If he did not feel these movements in my painting, the viewer would be like an actor reading a poem that makes absolutely no sense to him... What I am looking for, in fact, is an immobile movement, something that would be the equivalent of what we call the eloquence of silence--or what Saint John of the Cross, I believe, called soundless music" (ibid., p. 248).
Both as a poet and painter, Mir hoped to unveil a visionary, even mystical, understanding of the cosmos. In 1939 he said, "Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvelous. But in order to recover it we have have to recover the religious and magical sense of things that belong to primitive peoples" (J. Mir, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 153). To do this, Mir sought to make pictures which inspired the viewer to see the essential vitality of the natural world around them. Mir said, "In a picture, it should be possible to discover new things everytime you see it It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem. It must have radiance, it must be like those stones which Pyrenean shepherds use to light their pipes. More than the picture itself, what counts is what it throws off, what it exhales A picture must be fertile. It must give birth to a world. It doesn't matter [what] it depictsas long as it reveals a world, something alive" (ibid., p. 251).
Quoting Kant, Mirsaid that the effect he sought in art was "'a sudden irruption of the infinite into the finite.' In my paintings, this translates into the sparklike forms that leap out of the frame, as though from a volcano. If he did not feel these movements in my painting, the viewer would be like an actor reading a poem that makes absolutely no sense to him... What I am looking for, in fact, is an immobile movement, something that would be the equivalent of what we call the eloquence of silence--or what Saint John of the Cross, I believe, called soundless music" (ibid., p. 248).