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Lot Essay
The long title of the present work can be roughly translated as "The poppy snake slithers in a field of violets inhabited by grieving lizards". Miró had always been fascinated by visionary verse, especially that of Blake and Rimbaud, and he wrote many poems filled with Surrealist and hallucinatory imagery (primarily between 1936 and 1939). Increasingly he saw poetry and painting as sister arts and parallel forms of expression.
Both as a poet and painter, Miró hoped to unveil a visionary, even mystical, understanding of the cosmos. As Miró stated, "Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvelous. But in order to recover it we have to recover the religious and magical sense of things that belong to primitive peoples" (J. Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 153). To do this, Miró sought to create pictures that inspired viewers to see the essential vitality of the natural world around them. Miró 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 depicts . . . as long as it reveals a world, something alive (ibid, p. 251).
The present work is one of dynamic equilibrium and playful imagery, its forms inspired by those he developed in his Constellations series of 1941. A lightness pervades here, and the subtle network of lines and fusion of background create a wholly integrated yet spontaneous surface.
Both as a poet and painter, Miró hoped to unveil a visionary, even mystical, understanding of the cosmos. As Miró stated, "Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvelous. But in order to recover it we have to recover the religious and magical sense of things that belong to primitive peoples" (J. Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 153). To do this, Miró sought to create pictures that inspired viewers to see the essential vitality of the natural world around them. Miró 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 depicts . . . as long as it reveals a world, something alive (ibid, p. 251).
The present work is one of dynamic equilibrium and playful imagery, its forms inspired by those he developed in his Constellations series of 1941. A lightness pervades here, and the subtle network of lines and fusion of background create a wholly integrated yet spontaneous surface.