Femme nue

In a letter dated 20 January 1932, Joan Miró eagerly described to Christian Zervos his plans for the next steps in his creative journey: “I am working with great enthusiasm on a new series of objects, and as soon as they are finished I shall make small paintings as concentrated as possible which express and sum up, as best as my strength will allow, my latest research...” (letter to C. Zervos, quoted in A. de la Beaumelle, ed., Joan Miró, 1917-1934, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004, p. 357). Though not realized until a summer sojourn in Montroig later that year, the resulting “small” works—twelve exquisitely painted, intimately sized, experimental oil on panel paintings (Dupin, nos. 396-407)—represented a distinctive shift in Miró’s approach. Executed in bright, glowing colors, these compositions boldly explored the dynamics between abstraction and figuration, biomorphism and linear geometry, and offered not only a condensed synthesis of the theories and ideas which had occupied him for much of the previous two years, but also the path which lay ahead.

Executed in August 1932, Femme nue is a key example from this celebrated series, which emerged at a pivotal moment in Miró’s career, following several years marked by what the artist termed a “crisis of personal consciousness” (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 266). Miró had been plagued by doubts and dissatisfaction with his work as early as 1928, following the completion of his “Dutch Interiors” series. As a result, the late 1920s and early 1930s have often been collectively described as a period of “anti-painting” within the artist’s oeuvre, during which time he temporarily stepped away from oil painting in an effort to find a new direction in his art. During this turbulent phase, Miró experimented intensely with various media, incorporating found objects into his compositions, creating collages and sculptural assemblages from items plucked from the sandy shores of the beach, the busy pavements of the metropolis, or found scattered around his studio. Nevertheless, painting remained an important means of expression—as he later admitted, “What can I say, I can’t be anything other than a painter. Every challenge to painting is a paradox” (quoted in ibid., p. 266).

These explorations of sculpture and non-conventional media opened Miró’s eyes to different forms and a sense of space, allowing him to return to his easel with a renewed vigor and refreshed outlook. However, this burst of creativity also coincided with a period of financial difficulty for the artist—forced to abandon his apartment in rue François-Mouthon in Paris, Miró returned to Barcelona, settling with his wife and young daughter at number 4, Passtage del Crèdit, his childhood home where his mother still lived. In his letter to Zervos, Miró described his new studio and the oddness he felt upon his return: “I just have to tell you that the room which will from now on be my studio is the room where I was born. This, after an eventful life and the experience of a reasonable success, feels very strange…” (quoted in A. de la Beaumelle, exh. cat., op. cit., 2004, p. 357). It was here that the first ideas for these new paintings took root. Miró then devoted the summer months to painting, producing this focused series of brightly-hued, jewel-like compositions, which take as their subject the distorted bodies of a collection of mysterious, biomorphic figures.

In Femme nue, the titular female protagonist gazes out from the composition wearing an expression of mild surprise, her head tilted slightly as she considers the viewer. Her body is made up of mellifluous, organic contours that flow, undulate and stretch into a series of interconnected, color-filled planes, with certain features enlarged and exaggerated in the process, drawing our focus to the curvature of her legs, her hips, her breasts. The elasticity of her form suggests an inherent capacity for metamorphosis, as if the woman’s profile may shift and change at any moment as she moves through the world. The interplay of deep, rich pigment across her body is complemented by the linear bands of color that fill the background, stacked atop one another and arranged at varying angles to create a dynamic sense of space and recession behind her form. As Jacques Dupin has noted, this nuanced, inventive use of color was an essential element in the success of this series, and reveals the artist’s distinctive skill and painterly precision: “All these paintings are highly colored, with vibrant resonances and acid flavors conforming closely to the treatment of the forms, in highly refined harmonies” (op. cit., 1962, p. 249).

Miró clearly believed he had reached a key breakthrough with Femme nue and its companion paintings, and exhibited several examples from the series at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris in December 1932, and then in London at the Mayor Gallery the following summer. Looking to further expand his audience, Miró wrote to Pierre Matisse in November 1933 about the possibility of staging an exhibition of his recent work in Matisse’s Manhattan gallery. Lamenting his inability to travel to New York himself, Miró explained “the Ballets Russes of Monte Carlo will be in New York in December and January. I have done the scenery for a ballet called Jeux d’enfants, with music by Bizet. It might be—as was the case in London—a good time to show my work” (quoted in J. Russell, Matisse: Father & Son, New York, 1999, pp. 112-113). With just over a month’s notice, Joan Miró: Paintings opened on 29 December, and included these jewel-like compositions alongside a series of larger-scale, oil paintings which had their origins in paper collages. Femme nue, which appears in an installation photograph of the show, was purchased from the Matisse exhibition by the Philadelphia-based collectors R. Sturgis Ingersoll and his wife Marion, and remained in their collection until 1974, at which point it was acquired by Robert and Patricia Weis.