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拍品專文
‘Miró was synonymous with freedom – something more aerial, more liberated, lighter than anything I had seen before. In one sense he possessed absolute perfection. Miró could not put a dot on a sheet of paper without hitting square on the target. He was so truly a painter that it was enough for him to drop three spots of colour on the canvas, and it would come to life – it would be a painting.’
(A. Giacometti, quoted in P. Schneider, ‘Miró’, Horizon, no. 4, March 1959, pp. 70-81)
Painting IV/V is one of a series of five paintings that Joan Miró completed in one day, on 25th October 1960. Two days later, the artist embarked on a similar series of the same name, adding strokes of crayon to the radiant white canvas. This prolific period of impassioned and feverish production marked Miró’s exultant return to painting following a break of five years during which he had focused on ceramics and printmaking. Against a vaporous white surface, in Painting IV/V, two distinct spots of red and green emerge, dazzling against the light-filled canvas as their blurred edges gradually dissolve into the background. Reducing the composition to its barest, most essential components, Miró, in Painting IV/V created a pure and poetic union of colour and form, as he continued to push painting to its furthermost limits.
Four years before he painted Painting IV/V, Miró had finally found the ‘large studio’ that he had been dreaming about since the 1930s. Set on the hills overlooking the coast in Palma de Mallorca, his large, light-filled, white-painted studio fulfilled his wishes, yet left him feeling overwhelmed. Over the next two years, Miró collected driftwood from the beach, objects from the countryside, as well as things he found in village antique shops and pieces from the studios of local potters, filling the bare space of his studio with these various finds. Feeling more acclimatised to his new surroundings, in 1959 the artist began to paint once more with a newfound vigour. In this same year, Miró described how instinctive the act of painting was for him: ‘I work in a state of passion and excitement. When I begin a painting, I am obeying a physical impulse, a necessity to begin. It’s like receiving a physical shock’ (Miró, quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 249).
Miró’s move to his new studio also permitted him to evaluate and contemplate much of his life’s work. Unpacking hundreds of paintings, drawings and sketchbooks, some of which he had not seen since they were stored in Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War, Miró was able to look back and consider his artistic development across decades’ worth of work. ‘I went through a process of self-examination’, the artist recalled, ‘I “criticised” myself coldly and objectively… It was a shock, a real experience. I was merciless with myself. I destroyed many canvases…my current work comes out of what I learned during that period’ (Miró quoted in ibid., p. 257). After this phase of rigorous self-reflection and cathartic purging, Miró wanted to start afresh, leaving his past achievements behind and instead advance forward to explore the unknown. In the words of Jacques Dupin, Miró, ‘resisted tested formulas, the endless rehashing of discoveries already made, and liked to take chances. He returned to the iconoclastic fury of his youth, but it was now against himself that this rage was to be directed’ (J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1993, p. 303).
With its minimal simplicity, Painting IV/V encapsulates the artist’s rejuvenated and liberated approach to painting. Miró has stripped the composition to its essential elements, leaving only two flashes of colour that emerge from, and simultaneously blend into the textured white canvas. ‘My desire’, Miró stated in 1959, a year before he painted the present work, ‘is to attain a maximum intensity with a minimum of means. That is why my painting has gradually become more spare’ (Rowell, op. cit., p. 251). In contrast to the dynamic gestures and bold colours that characterise much of Miró’s work of this period, Painting IV/V and the other paintings of the series resonate with an intense purity and complete simplicity. Gone are the personages and idiosyncratic signs that populate so much of Miró’s work. Instead, the artist has focused on the expressive materiality of the paint itself. White paint has been layered, brushed, splashed and dripped onto the canvas, creating a multi-faceted surface, which has glimmers and tints of red paint coming through above the circle of red. In places soft and powdery, in others, gestural and dynamic, the white pigment has a tactile quality as Miró clearly relished in the very act of painting itself.
Miró had used white, monochrome grounds in the final conception of his ‘dream’ or ‘oneiric’ paintings of the mid-1920s. In these paintings, the whimsical lines, signs and ciphers of Miró’s distinct pictorial language mark the flattened white background, seemingly floating within a limitless, infinite and dream-like space. In Painting IV/V, the surface is, by contrast, painterly and enlivened, evoking a more earthly quality. Jacques Dupin described Painting IV/V and the accompanying white series of 1960: ‘…these white background canvases present us with a radiant diurnal space, a fluid matter suggestive of a more earthly reality. Above all, the light is natural, utterly unlike the obscure light of the oneiric paintings. This void [of the canvas] does not evoke the vertigo or the temptation of nothingness; rather, it is a haze of light, a field of infinite possibilities, a scattering of imperceptible germinations of life’ (Dupin, ibid., p. 304).
Painted the year after Miró’s second seminal trip to New York, Painting IV/V shows the affinities between the Spaniard’s work and that of the Abstract Expressionists. The first retrospective of Miró’s work had been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1941. His highly individual artistic language had an enormous impact on the group of young artists who were beginning to make their reputations in New York: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffmann, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. Just as Miró’s work had, many years earlier, exerted a deep and pivotal influence on this group of artists, after this second visit, Miró was left profoundly moved by their radical painting. Inspired by the dramatically large-scale, gestural style of painting by the likes of Pollock, Motherwell and Franz Kline, Miró returned to his own work with a renewed intensity and freedom, revelling in the expressive power that colour and gesture could exert when applied without restraint to the canvas. Recalling the powerful influence of Abstract Expressionism, Miró stated, ‘It showed me the liberties we can take, and how far we could go, beyond the limits. In a sense, it freed me’ (Dupin, ibid., p. 303).
(A. Giacometti, quoted in P. Schneider, ‘Miró’, Horizon, no. 4, March 1959, pp. 70-81)
Painting IV/V is one of a series of five paintings that Joan Miró completed in one day, on 25th October 1960. Two days later, the artist embarked on a similar series of the same name, adding strokes of crayon to the radiant white canvas. This prolific period of impassioned and feverish production marked Miró’s exultant return to painting following a break of five years during which he had focused on ceramics and printmaking. Against a vaporous white surface, in Painting IV/V, two distinct spots of red and green emerge, dazzling against the light-filled canvas as their blurred edges gradually dissolve into the background. Reducing the composition to its barest, most essential components, Miró, in Painting IV/V created a pure and poetic union of colour and form, as he continued to push painting to its furthermost limits.
Four years before he painted Painting IV/V, Miró had finally found the ‘large studio’ that he had been dreaming about since the 1930s. Set on the hills overlooking the coast in Palma de Mallorca, his large, light-filled, white-painted studio fulfilled his wishes, yet left him feeling overwhelmed. Over the next two years, Miró collected driftwood from the beach, objects from the countryside, as well as things he found in village antique shops and pieces from the studios of local potters, filling the bare space of his studio with these various finds. Feeling more acclimatised to his new surroundings, in 1959 the artist began to paint once more with a newfound vigour. In this same year, Miró described how instinctive the act of painting was for him: ‘I work in a state of passion and excitement. When I begin a painting, I am obeying a physical impulse, a necessity to begin. It’s like receiving a physical shock’ (Miró, quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 249).
Miró’s move to his new studio also permitted him to evaluate and contemplate much of his life’s work. Unpacking hundreds of paintings, drawings and sketchbooks, some of which he had not seen since they were stored in Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War, Miró was able to look back and consider his artistic development across decades’ worth of work. ‘I went through a process of self-examination’, the artist recalled, ‘I “criticised” myself coldly and objectively… It was a shock, a real experience. I was merciless with myself. I destroyed many canvases…my current work comes out of what I learned during that period’ (Miró quoted in ibid., p. 257). After this phase of rigorous self-reflection and cathartic purging, Miró wanted to start afresh, leaving his past achievements behind and instead advance forward to explore the unknown. In the words of Jacques Dupin, Miró, ‘resisted tested formulas, the endless rehashing of discoveries already made, and liked to take chances. He returned to the iconoclastic fury of his youth, but it was now against himself that this rage was to be directed’ (J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1993, p. 303).
With its minimal simplicity, Painting IV/V encapsulates the artist’s rejuvenated and liberated approach to painting. Miró has stripped the composition to its essential elements, leaving only two flashes of colour that emerge from, and simultaneously blend into the textured white canvas. ‘My desire’, Miró stated in 1959, a year before he painted the present work, ‘is to attain a maximum intensity with a minimum of means. That is why my painting has gradually become more spare’ (Rowell, op. cit., p. 251). In contrast to the dynamic gestures and bold colours that characterise much of Miró’s work of this period, Painting IV/V and the other paintings of the series resonate with an intense purity and complete simplicity. Gone are the personages and idiosyncratic signs that populate so much of Miró’s work. Instead, the artist has focused on the expressive materiality of the paint itself. White paint has been layered, brushed, splashed and dripped onto the canvas, creating a multi-faceted surface, which has glimmers and tints of red paint coming through above the circle of red. In places soft and powdery, in others, gestural and dynamic, the white pigment has a tactile quality as Miró clearly relished in the very act of painting itself.
Miró had used white, monochrome grounds in the final conception of his ‘dream’ or ‘oneiric’ paintings of the mid-1920s. In these paintings, the whimsical lines, signs and ciphers of Miró’s distinct pictorial language mark the flattened white background, seemingly floating within a limitless, infinite and dream-like space. In Painting IV/V, the surface is, by contrast, painterly and enlivened, evoking a more earthly quality. Jacques Dupin described Painting IV/V and the accompanying white series of 1960: ‘…these white background canvases present us with a radiant diurnal space, a fluid matter suggestive of a more earthly reality. Above all, the light is natural, utterly unlike the obscure light of the oneiric paintings. This void [of the canvas] does not evoke the vertigo or the temptation of nothingness; rather, it is a haze of light, a field of infinite possibilities, a scattering of imperceptible germinations of life’ (Dupin, ibid., p. 304).
Painted the year after Miró’s second seminal trip to New York, Painting IV/V shows the affinities between the Spaniard’s work and that of the Abstract Expressionists. The first retrospective of Miró’s work had been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1941. His highly individual artistic language had an enormous impact on the group of young artists who were beginning to make their reputations in New York: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffmann, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. Just as Miró’s work had, many years earlier, exerted a deep and pivotal influence on this group of artists, after this second visit, Miró was left profoundly moved by their radical painting. Inspired by the dramatically large-scale, gestural style of painting by the likes of Pollock, Motherwell and Franz Kline, Miró returned to his own work with a renewed intensity and freedom, revelling in the expressive power that colour and gesture could exert when applied without restraint to the canvas. Recalling the powerful influence of Abstract Expressionism, Miró stated, ‘It showed me the liberties we can take, and how far we could go, beyond the limits. In a sense, it freed me’ (Dupin, ibid., p. 303).