Lot Essay
In 1952 and 1953, Miró painted about 60 pictures ranging from the very small to larger compositions such as the present work. Jacques Dupin terms them, "Works, which, by their importance and the new development of Miró's art to which they testify, may be taken as characteristic of this period. Their dominant feature consists in what I shall call their "expansion tendency". In them Miró turns his back on the charms and refinements of his "elaborate" handwriting, on a style he had himself carried to perfection and enormous popularity. Now he becomes more adventurous again, setting out once more to explore the unknown. Calling upon all his powers for direct, uncompromising expressiveness, he achieves a kind of improvisaton, at once grandiose and rigorous; he will even go so far as to do without figures and signs entirely...The ground served to create a storm-tossed atmosphere, generating sufficient electricity to put the painter in a hypnotic state in which he was able to transmit directly on the canvas a fund of inner energies notable for their crude, raw, expressiveness.
"To study the forms, their distribution and their composition, to elucidate the rhythms and the distribution of the colors, is to get nowhere. Precisely because the artist has not "elaborated", but has let us come face to face with the pure creative act itself, our instruments of investigation are useless. Instinct alone can judge what instinct has created. And yet the brutal forms thus projected are neither arbitrary nor are they mere products of some automatism. They are always related to Miró's vocabulary of signs and the other elements of his language, but they are spontaneous; they are not "worked-up" emanations of this language, but a deliberate simplification of it. Hence their expressive power is all the greater; their energy has been caught at the source and let go at once, the sign being the condensed vehicle of a subterranean energy that otherwise would be dispersed and lost. For the painter must see to it not only that this energy circulates but that it circulates as he ordains it to; the contradiction is resolved by giving us the organic, living sign in its raw state. The two elements - active energy and recognizable signs - are what constitute the magic of Miró's art, capable of acting in depth upon the unconscious of individuals and crowds alike, of acting upon them without the aid of rhetoric or anecdote, without recourse to any more elaborate handwriting than this, which necessitates no particular information on the part of the viewer. Thus Miró achieves his wish to reach a larger public, thus his tendency to expansion already mentioned, is realized." (Joan Miró, New York, 1962, pp. 434-6).
In an interview with Yvan Taillandler in 1959 Miró himself observed, "In my paintings, the forms are both immobile and mobile. They are immobile because of the cleanness of their contours and because of the kind of framing that sometimes encloses them. But precisely because they are immobile, they suggest motion.
"Because there is no horizon line or any indications of depth, they shift in depth. They also move across the surface, because a colour or a line inevitably leads to a change in the angle of vision. Inside there are small forms that move around. And when you look at the painting as a whole, the large forms become mobile. You could even say that although they keep their autonomy, they push each other around.... In my painting there is a kind of circulatory system. If even one form is out of place, the circulation stops; the balance is broken."
"I find my titles in the process of working, as one thing leads to another on my canvas. When I have found the title, I live in it atmosphere. The title then becomes completely real for me, in the same way that a model, a reclining woman, for example, can become real for another painter. For me, the title is a very precise reality."
Margit Rowell writes, "Miró's use of evocative poetic titles became more systematic in the late forties and early fifties. The Constellations of 1940-41 marked the beginning of the use of long poetic titles as an accompaniment, like words to music, perhaps inspired by the poetry the artist had been writing in the late 1930s or perhaps inspired by music itself.
"In the late forties, Miró showed a new interest in titles conceived as distinct poetic phrases. Again it would seem that Miró felt the need for a verbal accompaniment so that his motifs would be taken not at face value but as allusive poetic images." (Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1986, p. 228).
"To study the forms, their distribution and their composition, to elucidate the rhythms and the distribution of the colors, is to get nowhere. Precisely because the artist has not "elaborated", but has let us come face to face with the pure creative act itself, our instruments of investigation are useless. Instinct alone can judge what instinct has created. And yet the brutal forms thus projected are neither arbitrary nor are they mere products of some automatism. They are always related to Miró's vocabulary of signs and the other elements of his language, but they are spontaneous; they are not "worked-up" emanations of this language, but a deliberate simplification of it. Hence their expressive power is all the greater; their energy has been caught at the source and let go at once, the sign being the condensed vehicle of a subterranean energy that otherwise would be dispersed and lost. For the painter must see to it not only that this energy circulates but that it circulates as he ordains it to; the contradiction is resolved by giving us the organic, living sign in its raw state. The two elements - active energy and recognizable signs - are what constitute the magic of Miró's art, capable of acting in depth upon the unconscious of individuals and crowds alike, of acting upon them without the aid of rhetoric or anecdote, without recourse to any more elaborate handwriting than this, which necessitates no particular information on the part of the viewer. Thus Miró achieves his wish to reach a larger public, thus his tendency to expansion already mentioned, is realized." (Joan Miró, New York, 1962, pp. 434-6).
In an interview with Yvan Taillandler in 1959 Miró himself observed, "In my paintings, the forms are both immobile and mobile. They are immobile because of the cleanness of their contours and because of the kind of framing that sometimes encloses them. But precisely because they are immobile, they suggest motion.
"Because there is no horizon line or any indications of depth, they shift in depth. They also move across the surface, because a colour or a line inevitably leads to a change in the angle of vision. Inside there are small forms that move around. And when you look at the painting as a whole, the large forms become mobile. You could even say that although they keep their autonomy, they push each other around.... In my painting there is a kind of circulatory system. If even one form is out of place, the circulation stops; the balance is broken."
"I find my titles in the process of working, as one thing leads to another on my canvas. When I have found the title, I live in it atmosphere. The title then becomes completely real for me, in the same way that a model, a reclining woman, for example, can become real for another painter. For me, the title is a very precise reality."
Margit Rowell writes, "Miró's use of evocative poetic titles became more systematic in the late forties and early fifties. The Constellations of 1940-41 marked the beginning of the use of long poetic titles as an accompaniment, like words to music, perhaps inspired by the poetry the artist had been writing in the late 1930s or perhaps inspired by music itself.
"In the late forties, Miró showed a new interest in titles conceived as distinct poetic phrases. Again it would seem that Miró felt the need for a verbal accompaniment so that his motifs would be taken not at face value but as allusive poetic images." (Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1986, p. 228).