Peinture

Peinture belongs to a group of seven paintings subtly executed on the gently roughed surface of celotex (a kind of fibreboard) that Miró made in September 1937. The year 1937 marked a dramatic change in Miró's work as, partially in response to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he began to paint in what he referred to as his 'return' to a 'realist' style. The traumatic news pouring in daily from Spain, along with the many refugees who flooded to Paris at this time prompted in Miró a long series of dark and disturbing paintings in which his dream-like imagery often took on the form of traumatic nightmares filled with terrified and terrifying creatures. It was at this time that Miró created his nightmarish Still life with an old shoe and began work on the giant portrait of a Catalan Peasant in Revolt (also on celotex) for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair. The naked aggression and foreboding of these and many other images in Miró's work, such as the series of paintings he made on masonite that immediately preceded the group to which Peinture belongs, is completely absent in the series of seven paintings on celotex that he subsequently painted.

In these seven charming works, it is as if Miró, who famously stated at this time that in the face of the terrible news coming from Spain, he would 'confine himself exclusively to the realm of painting', was attempting to concentrate solely on the lyrical poetics of his art as a way of denying or overcoming the ugly reality of the outside world. As Jaques Dupin has pointed out about these works, 'It is amazing that in the same years he produced so many works of genuine ferocity, he could have produced, as well, works that express tenderness, grace, and surrender to the surface of things' (J. Dupin, Joan Miró, Paris, 1993, p. 216). The titles of the works in this series, Birdsong In Autumn, Smoke, Poetic Landscape, Circus, Hirondelle (Swallow), also clearly convey his mood.

Of all of these works, Peinture is perhaps the most subtle and spectral. With its spidery lines and astral-like blotches of radiant colour, it generates a light, fanciful and suggestively cosmic atmosphere that seems to anticipate the Constellation series which Miró began three years later. Miró's starting point for the subtle but extremely graphic imagery of this series of celotex paintings seems to have once again been the scratches and scrawls of graffiti that adorned the streets of Paris. Responding to the fine pressed straw-like surface of the celotex ground, Miró clearly indulged his hand with these works creating a series of fine lyrical lines that seem to articulate a flow of movement, such as the flight of a swallow or the wind blowing through the trees. Punctuated by misty splodges and concentrations of colour seeming to emerge from the grainy surface of the work, the finely scratched lines of Peinture seem to combine to create the constellation of an earthy figure set against the infinite expanse of the universe.