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Lot Essay
Painted in vivid passages of high-keyed color, Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert is a powerful artistic statement by Joan Miró, proclaiming his profound connection to his homeland of Catalonia while living in exile in Paris during the Spanish Civil War. Drawing on his memories of the countryside around his family’s estate at Montroig, Miró conjures a strange, otherworldly desert landscape, using bold bands of color to represent the division of sky and earth in tones of golden yellow and deep, teal green. To the left of the composition, a biomorphic creature—the “fleur” of the title—appears to burst into bloom, throwing its limbs and appendages in the air, its form stretching and contorting as it responds to the flaming sun that crests the horizon. Filled with fluent brushwork, and rhythmic, sinuous lines, the composition offers a glimpse into Miró’s mindset during this turbulent period of his life, as he sought a way to remain connected to the land he loved so deeply, but was now separated from indefinitely.
When Miró left his home in Barcelona in October 1936, he did not realize it would be four years before he would return home. He had intended to embark on just a short trip, travelling to Paris to showcase some recent works from that summer, and to send several pieces to his dealer, Pierre Matisse, in New York. However, within a few weeks, the increasingly fraught and fast moving conflict in Spain led Miró to conclude that remaining in Paris was his safest option. He sent for his wife Pilar and young daughter Dolores to join him in France, and abandoned over a hundred works-in-progress at his family’s homes in Barcelona and Montroig. Writing to Pierre Matisse in January of the following year, Miró lamented this sudden turn of events: “I feel very uprooted here and am nostalgic for my country. But what can be done? We are living through a hideous drama that will leave deep marks in our mind” (letter to P. Matisse, 12 January 1937; quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 146). The artist and his family initially stayed in a series of hotels around the city, before moving to a modest apartment at 98, Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui in the 13th arrondissement, where Miró was able to adapt a small, turret room into his studio.
During this unexpected exile in Paris, Miró cast his mind back to his early career for inspiration. Seeking to reinvigorate his imagination after being cut-off so abruptly from his on-going works in Spain, he attended life drawing sessions once again at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Colarossi and Ranson academies, telling Pierre Matisse that this work allowed him to “plunge into the reality of things” (ibid.). Shortly thereafter, he embarked upon a visionary still-life composition, Nature morte au vieux soulier (Dupin, no. 557; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) which, in its depiction of traditional, quotidian objects in a kaleidoscopic array of colors, harked back to his cubist still lifes from 1916-1921. Similarly, following the completion of his grand mural for the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Exposition Internationale in Paris, Miró spent the winter months of 1937-1938 working on a richly detailed, figurative self-portrait, Autoportrait I (Dupin, no. 578; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), the artist’s first in almost two decades. Executed in pencil, crayon and thin washes of oil paint, he worked painstakingly on the composition for six months, filling the canvas with an anthology of cryptic signs and pictograms that held particular significance for him. Echoing the format and style of his 1919 self-portrait (Dupin, no. 72; Musée national Picasso, Paris), Autoportrait I looked simultaneously to the past and the artist’s present moment, as he searched for a new creative path forward during this intense period of disruption and uncertainty.
Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert and its pendant picture, Nocturne (Dupin, no. 581; Private collection), continued this trend. Painted in the spring of 1938, both works recall the vibrant landscapes inspired by the Catalonian countryside that had occupied the artist a decade prior, which Miró explained he had painted “to keep me in touch with Montroig” while living in Paris during the late 1920s (quoted in ibid., p. 207). As art historian and curator Anne Umland has noted, in these works, “the imagery looks back to the so-called animated landscape of 1926-1927, with broad fields of color, vast expanses of sky and earth, exploding volcanoes, fantastic creatures, and solitary trees sprouting sparse vegetation…” (Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008, p. 184).
In the present work, Miró seems to directly invoke the color scheme and topography of his 1926 painting Personnage lançant une pierre à un oiseau (Dupin, no. 216; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), altering the view so that the strip of sea is eliminated, and the vast, desert landscape now fills the majority of the picture plane. The powerful sun dominates Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert, the glowing, fire-like radiance of the star bursting outwards from its center as it appears along the horizon-line and bathes the landscape in its bright light. The flaming sun had appeared in both of Miró’s self-portraits from 1937-1938, placed directly over the artist’s heart in Autoportrait I, and appearing twice in his semi-abstract Autoportrait II (Dupin, no. 579; Detroit Institute of Arts). Here, it is unclear whether or not the sun is rising or setting, though Miró uses a carefully nuanced play of yellow tones across the board to differentiate where the light has touched, and which portions of the terrain it has yet to reach.
After a period in which he favored succinct, descriptive titles that deliberately denied any elaboration or interpretation of his subject matter, poetry also returned to the fore of Miró’s creative imagination during the late 1930s. This may have been a response to the artist’s memories of the time he spent among the circles of Surrealist writers and poets that lived near his studio on the Rue Blomet during his first years in Paris. As well as writing poetry, Miró increasingly adopted evocative, lyrical titles for his paintings, the majority of which came to him while working on his canvases. In many ways, these titles were a verbal interpretation of the ideas that floated through the artist’s mind as the various forms and images poured forth from his brush, a reflection of his meandering imagination as he meditated upon his paintings. Art historian Margit Rowell has noted, “This parallel verbal poetry, which is never denotative or descriptive, enriches—in fact mythologizes—the iconography of the paintings” (op. cit., 1987, p. 169).
With Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert, Miró conjures a sense of the frenzied, frantic energy with which the biomorphic form reacts to the light and energy of the sun. The title first made its appearance in the artist’s notebook of poems and prose in May 1938, alongside a reference to “Nocturne,” reinforcing the connection between the two paintings. The magnetism of the life-giving force at the center of the solar system—its power to transform and alter the natural world, driving transformation and growth—is intriguingly invoked in Miró’s poetic phrasing, infusing the dynamic scene with a palpable sense of tension and emotion that shapes our understanding of the work.
The painting was purchased from the Pierre Matisse gallery in New York in late December 1938 by Eleanor Biddle Barnes Lloyd and her husband Horatio Gates Lloyd Jr. The daughter of a prominent lawyer from Philadelphia, Eleanor—known as “Lallie”—was a renowned collector and supporter of the arts from the 1930s onwards. A longtime chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and a trustee of several Philadelphia and Manhattan art institutions, Lallie was a founder of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1950. She met and developed connections with numerous contemporary artists through the years, including Alexander Calder, and in 1965 sponsored Andy Warhol’s first solo museum show at the ICA. A newspaper article from April 1960 noted that Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert was the first painting Lallie ever purchased for her collection, which would come to include works by Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Constantin Brancusi, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. The work held pride of place in her living room for many years, and was purchased by Robert and Patricia Weis in 1995.
When Miró left his home in Barcelona in October 1936, he did not realize it would be four years before he would return home. He had intended to embark on just a short trip, travelling to Paris to showcase some recent works from that summer, and to send several pieces to his dealer, Pierre Matisse, in New York. However, within a few weeks, the increasingly fraught and fast moving conflict in Spain led Miró to conclude that remaining in Paris was his safest option. He sent for his wife Pilar and young daughter Dolores to join him in France, and abandoned over a hundred works-in-progress at his family’s homes in Barcelona and Montroig. Writing to Pierre Matisse in January of the following year, Miró lamented this sudden turn of events: “I feel very uprooted here and am nostalgic for my country. But what can be done? We are living through a hideous drama that will leave deep marks in our mind” (letter to P. Matisse, 12 January 1937; quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 146). The artist and his family initially stayed in a series of hotels around the city, before moving to a modest apartment at 98, Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui in the 13th arrondissement, where Miró was able to adapt a small, turret room into his studio.
During this unexpected exile in Paris, Miró cast his mind back to his early career for inspiration. Seeking to reinvigorate his imagination after being cut-off so abruptly from his on-going works in Spain, he attended life drawing sessions once again at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Colarossi and Ranson academies, telling Pierre Matisse that this work allowed him to “plunge into the reality of things” (ibid.). Shortly thereafter, he embarked upon a visionary still-life composition, Nature morte au vieux soulier (Dupin, no. 557; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) which, in its depiction of traditional, quotidian objects in a kaleidoscopic array of colors, harked back to his cubist still lifes from 1916-1921. Similarly, following the completion of his grand mural for the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Exposition Internationale in Paris, Miró spent the winter months of 1937-1938 working on a richly detailed, figurative self-portrait, Autoportrait I (Dupin, no. 578; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), the artist’s first in almost two decades. Executed in pencil, crayon and thin washes of oil paint, he worked painstakingly on the composition for six months, filling the canvas with an anthology of cryptic signs and pictograms that held particular significance for him. Echoing the format and style of his 1919 self-portrait (Dupin, no. 72; Musée national Picasso, Paris), Autoportrait I looked simultaneously to the past and the artist’s present moment, as he searched for a new creative path forward during this intense period of disruption and uncertainty.
Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert and its pendant picture, Nocturne (Dupin, no. 581; Private collection), continued this trend. Painted in the spring of 1938, both works recall the vibrant landscapes inspired by the Catalonian countryside that had occupied the artist a decade prior, which Miró explained he had painted “to keep me in touch with Montroig” while living in Paris during the late 1920s (quoted in ibid., p. 207). As art historian and curator Anne Umland has noted, in these works, “the imagery looks back to the so-called animated landscape of 1926-1927, with broad fields of color, vast expanses of sky and earth, exploding volcanoes, fantastic creatures, and solitary trees sprouting sparse vegetation…” (Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008, p. 184).
In the present work, Miró seems to directly invoke the color scheme and topography of his 1926 painting Personnage lançant une pierre à un oiseau (Dupin, no. 216; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), altering the view so that the strip of sea is eliminated, and the vast, desert landscape now fills the majority of the picture plane. The powerful sun dominates Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert, the glowing, fire-like radiance of the star bursting outwards from its center as it appears along the horizon-line and bathes the landscape in its bright light. The flaming sun had appeared in both of Miró’s self-portraits from 1937-1938, placed directly over the artist’s heart in Autoportrait I, and appearing twice in his semi-abstract Autoportrait II (Dupin, no. 579; Detroit Institute of Arts). Here, it is unclear whether or not the sun is rising or setting, though Miró uses a carefully nuanced play of yellow tones across the board to differentiate where the light has touched, and which portions of the terrain it has yet to reach.
After a period in which he favored succinct, descriptive titles that deliberately denied any elaboration or interpretation of his subject matter, poetry also returned to the fore of Miró’s creative imagination during the late 1930s. This may have been a response to the artist’s memories of the time he spent among the circles of Surrealist writers and poets that lived near his studio on the Rue Blomet during his first years in Paris. As well as writing poetry, Miró increasingly adopted evocative, lyrical titles for his paintings, the majority of which came to him while working on his canvases. In many ways, these titles were a verbal interpretation of the ideas that floated through the artist’s mind as the various forms and images poured forth from his brush, a reflection of his meandering imagination as he meditated upon his paintings. Art historian Margit Rowell has noted, “This parallel verbal poetry, which is never denotative or descriptive, enriches—in fact mythologizes—the iconography of the paintings” (op. cit., 1987, p. 169).
With Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert, Miró conjures a sense of the frenzied, frantic energy with which the biomorphic form reacts to the light and energy of the sun. The title first made its appearance in the artist’s notebook of poems and prose in May 1938, alongside a reference to “Nocturne,” reinforcing the connection between the two paintings. The magnetism of the life-giving force at the center of the solar system—its power to transform and alter the natural world, driving transformation and growth—is intriguingly invoked in Miró’s poetic phrasing, infusing the dynamic scene with a palpable sense of tension and emotion that shapes our understanding of the work.
The painting was purchased from the Pierre Matisse gallery in New York in late December 1938 by Eleanor Biddle Barnes Lloyd and her husband Horatio Gates Lloyd Jr. The daughter of a prominent lawyer from Philadelphia, Eleanor—known as “Lallie”—was a renowned collector and supporter of the arts from the 1930s onwards. A longtime chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and a trustee of several Philadelphia and Manhattan art institutions, Lallie was a founder of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1950. She met and developed connections with numerous contemporary artists through the years, including Alexander Calder, and in 1965 sponsored Andy Warhol’s first solo museum show at the ICA. A newspaper article from April 1960 noted that Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert was the first painting Lallie ever purchased for her collection, which would come to include works by Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Constantin Brancusi, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. The work held pride of place in her living room for many years, and was purchased by Robert and Patricia Weis in 1995.