Lot Essay
Soon after peace was declared in Europe, Miró wrote to his pre-War dealer, confidante and supporter, Pierre Loeb, "These past years have been very hard for me - Luckily, the War ended when it did - just at the moment when I had spent the last money I had left, when I had nearly exhausted all my resources. During these tragic years, I have continued working every day, and this has helped me keep my balance - my work has kept me on my feet; otherwise I would have gone under, it would have been a catastrophe.
"I am 52 years old, and I must look at things very seriously, in a clear and precise manner, with full awareness of the responsibilities I have in life. Allow me to tell you that I believe - from what I feel in the air - that this is the precise moment when my work should be launched in a truly serious way" (Letter to Pierre Loeb, Montroig, 30 Aug. 1945).
The War years saw Miró living in isolation, dividing his time between Barcleona, Montroig and Palma. The scarcity of materials during the War compelled him to work in a small scale on canvas or, primarily, to devote his output to gouaches or watercolours on paper. Perhaps the turning point for his entire oeuvre was the execution of the Constellations series consisting of 23 works produced between January 1940 and September 1941. Joan Texidor observes, "The forms and rhythms that were to mark all the rest of Miró's work can already be traced in it. Something of major importance began in those days; the Constellations saw the emergence of his total freedom and a pure, authentic style, unhampered by anything extraneous. The signs became definite and the colour acquired all its brilliance. The interrelation of the shapes, the subtle network of lines and the fusion of background and the forms traced over it were already wholly integrated. There is no doubt that this "invention of a writing", as Dupin calls it, had its origins in the series of Constellations." (Constellations, Paris, 1972, p. 41). Few other major works were executed during the War years as Miró devoted himself to noting down ideas and projects for future work in his notebooks. He did not take up painting again until 1944/1945 when the ideas and thought processes of the War years and the dynamics of the Constellations would finally burst forth in a series of large canvases executed in an assured and fully mature style.
The works on paper of 1942-1943 saw the genesis of the subjects which he was to paint in the 1945-1946 canvases. "These works on paper are all variations on a single theme, Woman-Bird-Star. This serves as title for a great many of them, while others are only slightly modified: instead of "woman", for example, we sometimes find "personnage"; for "star" we find "sun" etc. The variations on this extremely simple theme are all the richer, more complex and baffling, because the theme is so elementary. Woman, the stars, and a few animals provide subjects at once commonplace and fantastic, and lend themselves to endless imaginative combinations...The human and animal figures - there is no essential difference between them, so far as that goes - are the most flexible, the richest, the most diversified. The stars, suns, and moons, on the other hand, quickly take on the simplified forms they will have forever after in Miró's cosmology. Other insistent images now crystallise into signs, as we will meet them often again. Examples are "the escape ladder", four or six lines ending in knobs, the wavy line derived from the snake, the broken lines that sometimes have "knobs" on the ends, a simplification of the latter with knobs at each end making a shape we might call "dumb-bells", and finally a spiralling line which is occasionally developed out of a small disk." (Dupin, op. cit., pp. 372, 374-5).
Miró produced relatively few paintings (generally in a small scale) in 1944 and early 1945, indeed his energies during the latter year were taken up with innovatory collaborations on ceramics with Josep Artigas and the Barcelona Suite of prints. Autumn 1945 finally saw him break out with a series of large and magnificently rich canvases in which he elaborates the signs, personnages and his own "inventive writing" developed in the earlier works on paper. Dupin writes that, "his works of 1946 follow the lines established in the paintings of the two preceding years. Nothing essentially new is added; rather, we find the confirmation and continuing development of an art which becomes progressively less capricious, less anxious and more self-assured. All the paintings of this year are characterised by the abandonment of the purely rhythmic elements and signs that abounded in 1945. The artist concentrates on his figures and animals, now making them more and more unlike each other, ever odder and more humourous in character. It is as though he decreed a stepping up in the process of fantastic deformation. We meet again a partial use of watercolour and thinned oil paint with its very suggestive effects of stippling, as well as some use of charcoal lines and powdered pastel. This renewed passion for artistic materials produces grounds of great richness and animation, such as we did not find in the large canvases of 1945 (ibid, p. 382).
"In 1948, Miró said to James Johnson Sweeney: "Nowadays I rarely start a picture from a hallucination, as I did in the twenties, or, as later, from collages. What is most interesting to me today is the material I am working with. It supplies the shock which suggests the form just as cracks in a wall suggest shapes to Leonardo". Nevertheless, there is a decided quality of trance in many of Miró's works, an impetuous spontaneity and innocence which make him one of the freshest and most beguiling painters of our time." (J. T. Soby, Joan Miró, New York, 1959, p. 7)
"I am 52 years old, and I must look at things very seriously, in a clear and precise manner, with full awareness of the responsibilities I have in life. Allow me to tell you that I believe - from what I feel in the air - that this is the precise moment when my work should be launched in a truly serious way" (Letter to Pierre Loeb, Montroig, 30 Aug. 1945).
The War years saw Miró living in isolation, dividing his time between Barcleona, Montroig and Palma. The scarcity of materials during the War compelled him to work in a small scale on canvas or, primarily, to devote his output to gouaches or watercolours on paper. Perhaps the turning point for his entire oeuvre was the execution of the Constellations series consisting of 23 works produced between January 1940 and September 1941. Joan Texidor observes, "The forms and rhythms that were to mark all the rest of Miró's work can already be traced in it. Something of major importance began in those days; the Constellations saw the emergence of his total freedom and a pure, authentic style, unhampered by anything extraneous. The signs became definite and the colour acquired all its brilliance. The interrelation of the shapes, the subtle network of lines and the fusion of background and the forms traced over it were already wholly integrated. There is no doubt that this "invention of a writing", as Dupin calls it, had its origins in the series of Constellations." (Constellations, Paris, 1972, p. 41). Few other major works were executed during the War years as Miró devoted himself to noting down ideas and projects for future work in his notebooks. He did not take up painting again until 1944/1945 when the ideas and thought processes of the War years and the dynamics of the Constellations would finally burst forth in a series of large canvases executed in an assured and fully mature style.
The works on paper of 1942-1943 saw the genesis of the subjects which he was to paint in the 1945-1946 canvases. "These works on paper are all variations on a single theme, Woman-Bird-Star. This serves as title for a great many of them, while others are only slightly modified: instead of "woman", for example, we sometimes find "personnage"; for "star" we find "sun" etc. The variations on this extremely simple theme are all the richer, more complex and baffling, because the theme is so elementary. Woman, the stars, and a few animals provide subjects at once commonplace and fantastic, and lend themselves to endless imaginative combinations...The human and animal figures - there is no essential difference between them, so far as that goes - are the most flexible, the richest, the most diversified. The stars, suns, and moons, on the other hand, quickly take on the simplified forms they will have forever after in Miró's cosmology. Other insistent images now crystallise into signs, as we will meet them often again. Examples are "the escape ladder", four or six lines ending in knobs, the wavy line derived from the snake, the broken lines that sometimes have "knobs" on the ends, a simplification of the latter with knobs at each end making a shape we might call "dumb-bells", and finally a spiralling line which is occasionally developed out of a small disk." (Dupin, op. cit., pp. 372, 374-5).
Miró produced relatively few paintings (generally in a small scale) in 1944 and early 1945, indeed his energies during the latter year were taken up with innovatory collaborations on ceramics with Josep Artigas and the Barcelona Suite of prints. Autumn 1945 finally saw him break out with a series of large and magnificently rich canvases in which he elaborates the signs, personnages and his own "inventive writing" developed in the earlier works on paper. Dupin writes that, "his works of 1946 follow the lines established in the paintings of the two preceding years. Nothing essentially new is added; rather, we find the confirmation and continuing development of an art which becomes progressively less capricious, less anxious and more self-assured. All the paintings of this year are characterised by the abandonment of the purely rhythmic elements and signs that abounded in 1945. The artist concentrates on his figures and animals, now making them more and more unlike each other, ever odder and more humourous in character. It is as though he decreed a stepping up in the process of fantastic deformation. We meet again a partial use of watercolour and thinned oil paint with its very suggestive effects of stippling, as well as some use of charcoal lines and powdered pastel. This renewed passion for artistic materials produces grounds of great richness and animation, such as we did not find in the large canvases of 1945 (ibid, p. 382).
"In 1948, Miró said to James Johnson Sweeney: "Nowadays I rarely start a picture from a hallucination, as I did in the twenties, or, as later, from collages. What is most interesting to me today is the material I am working with. It supplies the shock which suggests the form just as cracks in a wall suggest shapes to Leonardo". Nevertheless, there is a decided quality of trance in many of Miró's works, an impetuous spontaneity and innocence which make him one of the freshest and most beguiling painters of our time." (J. T. Soby, Joan Miró, New York, 1959, p. 7)