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拍品專文
In 1936 General Franco crossed from Morocco into Spain with his fascist legions, signaling the start of an uprising against the leftist Spanish Republican government. Joan Miró's 'savage paintings' of 1934-1935 carried portents of the chaos and bloodshed of the ensuing civil war. With his republican sentiments Miró knew he was a marked man, and he fled from his home in Montroig, Catalonia, crossing into France and arriving in Paris as a refugee at the age of forty-four. Living in hotel rooms without a studio, he sat elbow-to-elbow with young art students at the Académie da la Grande Chaumière, where he drew from the model for the first time in many years. He made about a hundred drawings in which he stretched, distorted and distended the forms of the female nude.
Miró's interest in observing the figure led to the 'tragic realism' of his Self-Portrait I (Dupin, no. 578; coll. The Museum of Modern Art, New York), a large drawing on canvas done in late 1937-early 1938, in which suns, stars and flames swirl around the head and shoulders of the artist. Miró's Self-Portrait II (Dupin, no. 579; coll. The Detroit Institute of Art) marks the artist's return to depicting these elements as flat abstract color shapes, which he sets down on a black ground.
Miró spent the summer of 1938 in the small town of Varenge-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, a guest in the home of the architect Paul Nelson. The artist returned the favor by painting directly on the cement walls of Nelson's house a four-section mural. The three surviving panels show a circular black star, a vertical female figure with a large head, and an elongated, undulating female form (Dupin, no. 605), executed with strict economy of form and color.
The present work was painted around the same time that Miró executed the murals for Nelson. It shares with Self-Portrait II a preference for a dark ground, which dramatizes the vivid colors painted over it, and hints at darkly ominous meanings. Miró also uses dotted lines in both pictures. The black star in Nelson's mural becomes the red sun in the present painting, and is repeated in the shape of the woman's skirt. The figure of the woman echoes the fluid, feminine forms in the murals. Miró transforms the woman's arms into a strange hybrid creature, with a fishtail on the right, and the twisting head of a serpent on the left. The symbols of serpent and sun are ancient signs of knowledge and magical power; the woman, like a goddess from an ancient culture, embraces night and day, darkness and light, and draws her powers from both sources.
Miró's interest in observing the figure led to the 'tragic realism' of his Self-Portrait I (Dupin, no. 578; coll. The Museum of Modern Art, New York), a large drawing on canvas done in late 1937-early 1938, in which suns, stars and flames swirl around the head and shoulders of the artist. Miró's Self-Portrait II (Dupin, no. 579; coll. The Detroit Institute of Art) marks the artist's return to depicting these elements as flat abstract color shapes, which he sets down on a black ground.
Miró spent the summer of 1938 in the small town of Varenge-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, a guest in the home of the architect Paul Nelson. The artist returned the favor by painting directly on the cement walls of Nelson's house a four-section mural. The three surviving panels show a circular black star, a vertical female figure with a large head, and an elongated, undulating female form (Dupin, no. 605), executed with strict economy of form and color.
The present work was painted around the same time that Miró executed the murals for Nelson. It shares with Self-Portrait II a preference for a dark ground, which dramatizes the vivid colors painted over it, and hints at darkly ominous meanings. Miró also uses dotted lines in both pictures. The black star in Nelson's mural becomes the red sun in the present painting, and is repeated in the shape of the woman's skirt. The figure of the woman echoes the fluid, feminine forms in the murals. Miró transforms the woman's arms into a strange hybrid creature, with a fishtail on the right, and the twisting head of a serpent on the left. The symbols of serpent and sun are ancient signs of knowledge and magical power; the woman, like a goddess from an ancient culture, embraces night and day, darkness and light, and draws her powers from both sources.