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Lot Essay
Executed in 1942, Joan Miró’s Femmes devant le soleil marks a period of creative triumph for the artist. Two years prior, in 1940, he and his family fled France to escape the advancing German army, opting to return to Spain, and eventually settling in Palma de Mallorca, where his wife had grown up. The three years spent on the small island were crucial to the development of the Miró’s work, and it was there that he completed the last of his celebrated Constellations. In 1941, Miró’s first major retrospective opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The following year, he returned to Barcelona, painting Femmes devant le soleil that November, while working at his family’s home at 4 Passatge del Crèdit.
While the Constellations were defined by their dense concentration of imagery, in his subsequent cycle of work, Miró began to embrace a more improvisatory approach. Jacques Dupin described these images as “explorations undertaken with no preconceived idea—effervescent creations in which the artist perfected a vast repertory of forms, signs, and formulas… The artist’s sole concern has been for life…for the living pulse and movement of life” (Miró: Life and Work, New York, 1962, p. 372). During this period, Miró worked almost exclusively on paper, exploring several recurrent motifs, which he depicted in seemingly infinite and imaginative combinations to conjure strange, extraordinary scenes that defy a singular reading.
In Femmes devant le soleil, the women are almost monstrous, perhaps reflecting the horror of the world outside the artist’s studio, their faces dominated by gaping mouths and wide eyes. As Roland Penrose noted, “[Miró’s] monsters delight us by their fascinating absurdity and the black humor of the nightmare they convey” (“Enchantment and Revolution—Joan Miró,” Artforum, vol. 22, no. 3, November 1983). In the painting, the sun burns brightly in the sky, its yolky orange pigment standing in stark contrast to the black form of the largest figure. The smoky, variegated ground gives way to passages of gossamer, almost translucent color, suggesting an incomprehensible depth, at once profound and immediate, astral and earthly, which invites the viewer’s eye to wander across its expanse without any spatial or narrative reading.
Yet despite the blend of heady phantasmagoria, the title of the present work underscores Miró’s enduring interest in the beauty of the real world, and throughout his career, he sought to represent an intimacy between humanity and nature. The title of the present work, Femmes devant le soleil, evokes an eternal, geological time as well as a harmony between the body and the earth. Growing up in Catalonia, Miró lived in close proximity to the countryside, and he understood that his art belonged to and was nourished by the trees, birds, and stars, and there is a sense of “wonder and delight” that imbue works such as Femmes devant le soleil, even as they summon otherworldly associations (ibid.). Here, the painting seems to say, the world is simultaneously beautiful and demanding, a place, above all, of great and endless amazement. Against a backdrop of war and political upheaval, Miró’s intermingling of whimsical, personal, and arcane symbols took on a new vitality, allowing the artist to cultivate a private and wholly individual visual poetics.
While the Constellations were defined by their dense concentration of imagery, in his subsequent cycle of work, Miró began to embrace a more improvisatory approach. Jacques Dupin described these images as “explorations undertaken with no preconceived idea—effervescent creations in which the artist perfected a vast repertory of forms, signs, and formulas… The artist’s sole concern has been for life…for the living pulse and movement of life” (Miró: Life and Work, New York, 1962, p. 372). During this period, Miró worked almost exclusively on paper, exploring several recurrent motifs, which he depicted in seemingly infinite and imaginative combinations to conjure strange, extraordinary scenes that defy a singular reading.
In Femmes devant le soleil, the women are almost monstrous, perhaps reflecting the horror of the world outside the artist’s studio, their faces dominated by gaping mouths and wide eyes. As Roland Penrose noted, “[Miró’s] monsters delight us by their fascinating absurdity and the black humor of the nightmare they convey” (“Enchantment and Revolution—Joan Miró,” Artforum, vol. 22, no. 3, November 1983). In the painting, the sun burns brightly in the sky, its yolky orange pigment standing in stark contrast to the black form of the largest figure. The smoky, variegated ground gives way to passages of gossamer, almost translucent color, suggesting an incomprehensible depth, at once profound and immediate, astral and earthly, which invites the viewer’s eye to wander across its expanse without any spatial or narrative reading.
Yet despite the blend of heady phantasmagoria, the title of the present work underscores Miró’s enduring interest in the beauty of the real world, and throughout his career, he sought to represent an intimacy between humanity and nature. The title of the present work, Femmes devant le soleil, evokes an eternal, geological time as well as a harmony between the body and the earth. Growing up in Catalonia, Miró lived in close proximity to the countryside, and he understood that his art belonged to and was nourished by the trees, birds, and stars, and there is a sense of “wonder and delight” that imbue works such as Femmes devant le soleil, even as they summon otherworldly associations (ibid.). Here, the painting seems to say, the world is simultaneously beautiful and demanding, a place, above all, of great and endless amazement. Against a backdrop of war and political upheaval, Miró’s intermingling of whimsical, personal, and arcane symbols took on a new vitality, allowing the artist to cultivate a private and wholly individual visual poetics.