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Lot Essay
Towards the end of the 1940s, Miró began once again to add evocative, poetic titles to his works, returning to a practice he had explored sporadically across his oeuvre for almost two decades. As Margitt Rowell has noted, “In the late forties Miró showed a new interest in titles conceived as distinct poetic phrases. Again it would seem that Miró felt the need for a verbal accompaniment so that his motifs would be taken not at face value but as allusive poetic images” (M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 228). In the present La chanteuse mélancolique, the title gives life to the character painted by the artist—the singer wearing a checkerboard of bright colors for a dress, tilts her head to the side just above a star, her eyes looking in the distance, her shoulders raised. The poetry of the painting becomes apparent not only through the brushwork of the artist, but through the title he assigns as well.
As Miró explained in a 1959 interview with Yvon Tallandier, these titles transformed the artist’s own experience of the act of painting: ‘When I give it a title, it becomes even more alive. I find my titles in the process of working, as one thing leads to another on my canvas. When I have found the title, I live in its atmosphere. The title then becomes completely real for me, in the same way that a model, a reclining woman, for example, can become real for another painter. For me, the title is a very precise reality” (quoted in ibid., p. 249). However, Miró did not necessarily intend that his titles should be specifically descriptive, but rather that they stand on their own as a poetic analogue, serving as a point of departure from which the viewer may muse upon the configuration of signs before them, and the ambiguities therein.
The present work belongs to a small series of 11 paintings with similarly poetic titles—three of which are in museums, including the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Japan; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and The Art Institute of Chicago. It is also one of relatively few paintings that Miró executed while his elaborate new studio was being built on the island of Mallorca.
La chanteuse mélancolique was acquired by Arnold and Joan Saltzman in 1978, and has not been exhibited publicly since.
As Miró explained in a 1959 interview with Yvon Tallandier, these titles transformed the artist’s own experience of the act of painting: ‘When I give it a title, it becomes even more alive. I find my titles in the process of working, as one thing leads to another on my canvas. When I have found the title, I live in its atmosphere. The title then becomes completely real for me, in the same way that a model, a reclining woman, for example, can become real for another painter. For me, the title is a very precise reality” (quoted in ibid., p. 249). However, Miró did not necessarily intend that his titles should be specifically descriptive, but rather that they stand on their own as a poetic analogue, serving as a point of departure from which the viewer may muse upon the configuration of signs before them, and the ambiguities therein.
The present work belongs to a small series of 11 paintings with similarly poetic titles—three of which are in museums, including the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Japan; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and The Art Institute of Chicago. It is also one of relatively few paintings that Miró executed while his elaborate new studio was being built on the island of Mallorca.
La chanteuse mélancolique was acquired by Arnold and Joan Saltzman in 1978, and has not been exhibited publicly since.