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拍品專文
Miró's work, like that of Paul Klee or Cy Twombly, two other pre-eminent draughtsmen of the twentieth-century, is suffused with an irrepressible sense of music. ('Bach gives me a magnificent lecture in architecture. Mozart conjures up love with his purity, has magnanimity and his tenderness', Miró told Georges Duthuit.) Miró's elements, abstract or figurative, abstruse or literal, are carefully assembled across the canvas and sheet with attention - whether conscious or subsconcious - paid to rhythmic intervals, lines which offer melody and chords of colour, harmonious or otherwise. Indeed, Léonide Massine, among the supreme choreographers of the modern period, appropriately offered the following appraisal: 'Miró's art is like choreography: the immense power of the imagination in his forms and the persuasiveness of the lines and space in his paintings both enhance and emphasize the movement that takes place on their surfaces. Miró's colours are magnificent, and their harmony gives depth to the three-dimensional dynamics of choreography...When one looks at the harmonious relationship of colours and forms, one feels a spontaneous urge to dance for joy' (quoted in W. Erben, Joan Miró, The Man and His Work, Cologne, 1998, p. 227).
The subject of the present work, Femme, oiseaux (oiseaux dans la nuit), unites two of Miró's recurring motifs. 'When I am back in my studio', explained Miró in 1974, 'I will look at everything I have been doing, coldly and calmly. What subjects will I deal with next? Well, beside Queen Marie Louise, there will be the Women and Birds in the Night. Where does this theme come from? Good Lord! Perhaps the bird comes from the fact that I like space a lot and the bird makes one think of space. And I put it in front of the night; I situate it in relation to the ground. It's always the same kind of theme, my kind of theme' (quoted in M. Rowell (ed.) Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1986, p. 283).
The present work is redolent of the enlarged scale and increasingly gestural nature of Miró's later paintings. As has frequently been observed, in both these aspects his work corresponds with the contemporary developments of the American abstract expressionists. From Miró's first visit to the States in 1947, he had been exposed to the freedom and scale of American action painting - although, of course, the Americans in turn had themselves learnt much from the European surrealist exiles, Miró's erstwhile Parisian colleagues, during the Second World War. In an interview given in 1970, Miró touched on the impact on his art of his first US visit and of the subsequent Pollock show in Paris in 1952: 'It showed me a direction I wanted to take but which to then had remained at the stage of an unfulfilled desire. When I saw those paintings I said to myself, "You can do it, too; go to it, you see, it is OK!"' (see M. Rowell (ed.), ibid., p. 279).
In the years from 1950, Miró divided his main output between two galleries, namely Pierre Matisse in New York and Aimé Maeght in France. The present work was among those consigned to Pierre Matisse with whom Miró enjoyed his longest artist-dealer relationship, stretching all the way back to 1932 when Matisse had staged his first Miró exhibition in the year after his gallery opened. In the later stages of Miró's career, demand for his output steadily increased, particularly in the States. This prompted Matisse to hold no fewer than thirteen Miró shows in the years between 1970 and 1989 - more than any other artist in his stable, Chagall included.
The subject of the present work, Femme, oiseaux (oiseaux dans la nuit), unites two of Miró's recurring motifs. 'When I am back in my studio', explained Miró in 1974, 'I will look at everything I have been doing, coldly and calmly. What subjects will I deal with next? Well, beside Queen Marie Louise, there will be the Women and Birds in the Night. Where does this theme come from? Good Lord! Perhaps the bird comes from the fact that I like space a lot and the bird makes one think of space. And I put it in front of the night; I situate it in relation to the ground. It's always the same kind of theme, my kind of theme' (quoted in M. Rowell (ed.) Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1986, p. 283).
The present work is redolent of the enlarged scale and increasingly gestural nature of Miró's later paintings. As has frequently been observed, in both these aspects his work corresponds with the contemporary developments of the American abstract expressionists. From Miró's first visit to the States in 1947, he had been exposed to the freedom and scale of American action painting - although, of course, the Americans in turn had themselves learnt much from the European surrealist exiles, Miró's erstwhile Parisian colleagues, during the Second World War. In an interview given in 1970, Miró touched on the impact on his art of his first US visit and of the subsequent Pollock show in Paris in 1952: 'It showed me a direction I wanted to take but which to then had remained at the stage of an unfulfilled desire. When I saw those paintings I said to myself, "You can do it, too; go to it, you see, it is OK!"' (see M. Rowell (ed.), ibid., p. 279).
In the years from 1950, Miró divided his main output between two galleries, namely Pierre Matisse in New York and Aimé Maeght in France. The present work was among those consigned to Pierre Matisse with whom Miró enjoyed his longest artist-dealer relationship, stretching all the way back to 1932 when Matisse had staged his first Miró exhibition in the year after his gallery opened. In the later stages of Miró's career, demand for his output steadily increased, particularly in the States. This prompted Matisse to hold no fewer than thirteen Miró shows in the years between 1970 and 1989 - more than any other artist in his stable, Chagall included.