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Lot Essay
"I escaped into the absolute of nature. I wanted my spots to seem open to the magnetic appeal of the void, to make themselves available to it. I was very interested in the void, in perfect emptiness. I put it into my pale and scumbled grounds and my linear gestures on top were the signs of dream progression" (Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Margit Rowell, London, 1987, pp. 264-5).
Formerly in the magnificent collection of the great American collector Katherine Dreier who throughout the 1920s bought many of the most important works of contemporary European art under the guidance of Marcel Duchamp, this untitled painting hung for a long time on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
One of Miró's highly celebrated 'dream' paintings that were executed in his rue Blomet studio in Paris between 1925 and 1927, this blue-ground painting is a typical example of Miró's remarkable transformation of the language of painting into a unique visual poetry. Conveyed with a delicate eloquence of style and a fierce simplictity of means, the forms in Miró's work are never abstract but imaginative extensions of figurative imagery which during his time in the rue Blomet had been suggested by hallucinations brought on by hunger. From the cracks in his wall and ceiling Miró would make imaginary sketches in notebooks, the most suggestive of which he would use as the basis for his paintings.
In the present painting, the images that Miró uses are suggestive of a bird in flight being observed by a yellow head. Images of flight were among Miró's most common images at this time and represented for the artist the possibility of escape and the sense of freedom that he enjoyed in painting in this new style. In its imagery Peinture is similar to, and perhaps a forerunner of, the well-known 1926 painting Person throwing a Stone at a Bird.
Formerly in the magnificent collection of the great American collector Katherine Dreier who throughout the 1920s bought many of the most important works of contemporary European art under the guidance of Marcel Duchamp, this untitled painting hung for a long time on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
One of Miró's highly celebrated 'dream' paintings that were executed in his rue Blomet studio in Paris between 1925 and 1927, this blue-ground painting is a typical example of Miró's remarkable transformation of the language of painting into a unique visual poetry. Conveyed with a delicate eloquence of style and a fierce simplictity of means, the forms in Miró's work are never abstract but imaginative extensions of figurative imagery which during his time in the rue Blomet had been suggested by hallucinations brought on by hunger. From the cracks in his wall and ceiling Miró would make imaginary sketches in notebooks, the most suggestive of which he would use as the basis for his paintings.
In the present painting, the images that Miró uses are suggestive of a bird in flight being observed by a yellow head. Images of flight were among Miró's most common images at this time and represented for the artist the possibility of escape and the sense of freedom that he enjoyed in painting in this new style. In its imagery Peinture is similar to, and perhaps a forerunner of, the well-known 1926 painting Person throwing a Stone at a Bird.