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Lot Essay
Painted in Barcelona in 1918, Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) dates from a pivotal moment of explosive creativity in the early career of Joan Miró. Over the course of 1917 and 1918, Miró embraced portraiture in his quest to forge a distinctive artistic language, painting his friends—a number of whom were fellow artists—and acquaintances as he honed his dazzling new and unique painterly style. The present work is one of this rare group: of the eight portraits, including one self-portrait, that Miró painted at this time, the present work is one of only three to remain in private hands. The others are now in museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; and Folkwang Museum, Essen (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, nos. 48-50, 52-55, 58).
May our brush keep time with our vibrations. Joan Miró
With this seminal group, Miró unleashed color in his work. As Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) so boldly shows, the artist has pictured his friend, a goldsmith and jeweler, as the title implies, in front of a piece of bright yellow patterned wallpaper, and an ornate, floral print featuring a piece of jewelry, a reference to Sunyer’s occupation. This print was known as a llibre de pasantia, a drawing of a jewelry design that demonstrated a student’s mastery of their craft (R.S. Lubar, Joan Miró before “The Farm,” 1915-1922: Catalan Nationalism and the Avant-Garde, Ph.D. Diss., New York University, 1988, p. 125). These decorative elements are reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s famed portraits, works which likely influenced Miró at this time. Capturing Sunyer’s wide-eyed, intense stare, Miró has conveyed his face with a series of pastel-colored facets and planes, building up a sense of volume in a manner that recalls Paul Cezanne. Yet, Miró has fused these elements to create a vibrant and striking new language for capturing the human form that is entirely his own.
At this time, Sunyer worked with his father, a master jeweler, in their family workshop in Barcelona, before taking it over in 1925. He went on to receive the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice from Pope John XXIII in 1960 for his contribution to religious art. Passed down through generations, Joieria Sunyer still exists to this day.
“Approaching the human figure, Miró executed a series of portraits of magnificent vigor,” Jacques Dupin has described Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) and the series, “in which technical and aesthetic problems are overshadowed by the burning relationship established between the artist and his model. Here his fascination and original approach outweigh the purely pictorial concerns given expression in the still lifes and landscapes. We are struck by the… power of these faces, by the uncompromising stylization that brings out the essential in them—so that we grasp them in their very existence, so that we feel the intensity of their presence over and above any concern for particular expressions they bear” (Miró, Paris, 2004, p. 56).
Miró had completed his artistic training at the Galí Escola d’Art in Barcelona in 1915. From this point onwards he remained determined to pursue a career as an artist. He rented a small studio with his friend and fellow artist, Enric Cristòfol Ricart, another of his portrait subjects at this time (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 53; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). “I am very happy,” Miró wrote in the summer of 1916, “because I am working a lot and this is a very pure joy” (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 319).
Beginning in 1917, Miró began painting a series of portraits of his friends, many of whom were young artists that were part of his avant-garde circle, including Ricart, as well as architect and painter Josep F. Ràfols (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 48; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis), the horticulturalist Vicens Nubiola (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 54; Folkwang Museum, Essen), painter Heriberto Casany (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 49; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth), and the goldsmith Ramon Sunyer.
Even in my portraits, where I tried to capture the immobility of presence… I tried to get the vibration of the creative spirit into my work. Joan Miró
Barcelona at this time was a melting pot of creative and intellectual fervor. The artistic developments taking place in Paris were keenly followed by contemporary Catalan artists, seen in reviews that circulated in the city such as Nord-Sud and Les Soirées de Paris. At the heart of this cultural world was the Galerie Dalmau. Run by the dealer, José Dalmau, the gallery was the foremost place in the city to see the latest in avant-garde developments, including work by the Fauves and Cubists, Juan Gris, Fernande Léger, Albert Gleizes, and more. In 1917, a largescale exhibition of over 1,000 works of French art was held in the capital, exposing audiences to the work of Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Odilon Redon, Henri Matisse and many others. Miró later described the exhibition as a “coup de foudre” in his discovery of modern art (quoted in R. Lubar, “Miró’s Mediterranean: Conceptions of a Cultural Identity,” Joan Miró: 1893-1993, exh. cat., Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 34).
Miró immersed himself in these dynamic artistic circles, engaging in the aesthetic debates that were dominant in the city at this time and absorbing different visual languages, poetry and theories from the exhibitions he visited and the figures he encountered. Miró’s work at this time displayed a combination of influences that he absorbed from these contemporary sources, particularly his exposure to Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. “When I began,” Miró later recalled, “the painters who made a strong impression on me were Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Le Douanier Rousseau” (quoted in Y. Taillandier, ed., Joan Miró: I Work Like a Gardener, New York, 2017, p. 24).
However, Miró did not set out to work in the same styles as any of these artists and their respective movements, but rather took the necessary formal qualities of their art and combined them with his own vision to reach a new form of personal expression in his work. As he described to Ricart in the autumn of 1917, “I believe our ‘school’ will grasp the essentials of the painting of the future. It will be stripped of all concern for pictorial problems, it will vibrate in harmony with the pulse of the Spirit… I believe that after the grandiose achievement of the French Impressionist movement—a canticle to life and optimism—after the Post-Impressionist movement, the courageous Symbolists, the synthetism of the Fauves, and the dissections of the Cubists and the Futurists, after all that we have a free art, all interest in which will focus on the vibration of the creative spirit. These modern analytical movements will ultimately carry the spirit into the light of freedom” (quoted in J. Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, New York, 1961, p. 81).
Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) and the other works in this series present the sitters with bold color and a highly stylized manner, their faces angular and solid, as if sculpted from stone, lending their presence a strong visual power. While these works show some of the lessons that Miró had borrowed from his predecessors, they also reflect Miró’s knowledge of Romanesque art. The artist was well acquainted with the medieval frescoes that adorned Catalonian churches. The simplification of form, repeating patterns and lines, and the bold use of distortion that he uses to portray his sitters are all characteristic of Romanesque art. Fusing avant-garde influences with his native art, Miró succeeded in creating a form of unique portraiture, unlike anything that had come before.
Yet, while works such as Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) demonstrate Miró’s rapid and bold formal exploration at this time, they also show his desire to go beyond outward appearance and attain a deeper meaning in his work. “Miró rediscovered the deeper meaning of portraiture,” Dupin has described, “which is to express the inner life, what is eternal in a face, what transcends all passing animation or mere states of mind. Successively, in his portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, Miró succeeded in freeing his artistic individuality and in catching sober glimpses of the revelations the future will vouchsafe him” (ibid., p. 81).
This desire to reach for something beyond outward representation in his art would underpin Miró’s experimentation for the rest of his life. “Dig, dig deeply,” he implored a fellow artist in 1919, “…and digging deep inside will reveal new problems in all their splendor, problems to be resolved, and they will carry us along the escape route from deadly momentarily interesting work to really good painting” (quoted in R. Lubar, “Miró Before The Farm: A Cultural Perspective,” in Joan Miró: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1987, p. 20).
In February to March 1918, Miró’s first one man show took place at the Galerie Dalmau. Met with critical condemnation, Miró left Barcelona not long after, retreating to his home in Montroig. Having seen his work up to this point together in the exhibition, he began working in a dramatically different direction. In contrast to the chromatically explosive, boldly rendered works he had been making up until this point, his work from the summer of 1918, including La maison du palmier (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 64; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), debuted a new, highly meticulous, overtly defined style employed to render every detail of the landscape.
It would not be for another year and a half that Miró achieved his long-held desires to travel to Paris. He made his first visit in March 1920 and dived headlong into the nascent world of Surrealism. There he met Maurice Girardin, the owner of the Galerie Licorne. A year later, thanks to the continued support of Dalmau, Miró’s first solo show in Paris opened Girardin’s gallery, in which Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) was possibly included—Girardin was also the first owner of the work.
Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) was subsequently acquired by another legendary Parisian gallery, the Galerie Pierre. Founded by Pierre Loeb, this establishment became the foremost place for the exposition of Surrealist art in the 1930s. Furthering this esteemed provenance, this portrait crossed the Atlantic in 1939, when it was acquired by Lee Ault, an art publisher and collector, and his wife. The legendary dealer, Pierre Matisse, bought it from them in 1941, having included it in his exhibition of the artist’s work held in his New York gallery. Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) later featured in The Museum of Modern Art’s landmark Miró retrospective held in 1993-1994.
May our brush keep time with our vibrations. Joan Miró
With this seminal group, Miró unleashed color in his work. As Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) so boldly shows, the artist has pictured his friend, a goldsmith and jeweler, as the title implies, in front of a piece of bright yellow patterned wallpaper, and an ornate, floral print featuring a piece of jewelry, a reference to Sunyer’s occupation. This print was known as a llibre de pasantia, a drawing of a jewelry design that demonstrated a student’s mastery of their craft (R.S. Lubar, Joan Miró before “The Farm,” 1915-1922: Catalan Nationalism and the Avant-Garde, Ph.D. Diss., New York University, 1988, p. 125). These decorative elements are reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s famed portraits, works which likely influenced Miró at this time. Capturing Sunyer’s wide-eyed, intense stare, Miró has conveyed his face with a series of pastel-colored facets and planes, building up a sense of volume in a manner that recalls Paul Cezanne. Yet, Miró has fused these elements to create a vibrant and striking new language for capturing the human form that is entirely his own.
At this time, Sunyer worked with his father, a master jeweler, in their family workshop in Barcelona, before taking it over in 1925. He went on to receive the Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice from Pope John XXIII in 1960 for his contribution to religious art. Passed down through generations, Joieria Sunyer still exists to this day.
“Approaching the human figure, Miró executed a series of portraits of magnificent vigor,” Jacques Dupin has described Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) and the series, “in which technical and aesthetic problems are overshadowed by the burning relationship established between the artist and his model. Here his fascination and original approach outweigh the purely pictorial concerns given expression in the still lifes and landscapes. We are struck by the… power of these faces, by the uncompromising stylization that brings out the essential in them—so that we grasp them in their very existence, so that we feel the intensity of their presence over and above any concern for particular expressions they bear” (Miró, Paris, 2004, p. 56).
Miró had completed his artistic training at the Galí Escola d’Art in Barcelona in 1915. From this point onwards he remained determined to pursue a career as an artist. He rented a small studio with his friend and fellow artist, Enric Cristòfol Ricart, another of his portrait subjects at this time (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 53; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). “I am very happy,” Miró wrote in the summer of 1916, “because I am working a lot and this is a very pure joy” (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 319).
Beginning in 1917, Miró began painting a series of portraits of his friends, many of whom were young artists that were part of his avant-garde circle, including Ricart, as well as architect and painter Josep F. Ràfols (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 48; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis), the horticulturalist Vicens Nubiola (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 54; Folkwang Museum, Essen), painter Heriberto Casany (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 49; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth), and the goldsmith Ramon Sunyer.
Even in my portraits, where I tried to capture the immobility of presence… I tried to get the vibration of the creative spirit into my work. Joan Miró
Barcelona at this time was a melting pot of creative and intellectual fervor. The artistic developments taking place in Paris were keenly followed by contemporary Catalan artists, seen in reviews that circulated in the city such as Nord-Sud and Les Soirées de Paris. At the heart of this cultural world was the Galerie Dalmau. Run by the dealer, José Dalmau, the gallery was the foremost place in the city to see the latest in avant-garde developments, including work by the Fauves and Cubists, Juan Gris, Fernande Léger, Albert Gleizes, and more. In 1917, a largescale exhibition of over 1,000 works of French art was held in the capital, exposing audiences to the work of Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Odilon Redon, Henri Matisse and many others. Miró later described the exhibition as a “coup de foudre” in his discovery of modern art (quoted in R. Lubar, “Miró’s Mediterranean: Conceptions of a Cultural Identity,” Joan Miró: 1893-1993, exh. cat., Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 34).
Miró immersed himself in these dynamic artistic circles, engaging in the aesthetic debates that were dominant in the city at this time and absorbing different visual languages, poetry and theories from the exhibitions he visited and the figures he encountered. Miró’s work at this time displayed a combination of influences that he absorbed from these contemporary sources, particularly his exposure to Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. “When I began,” Miró later recalled, “the painters who made a strong impression on me were Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Le Douanier Rousseau” (quoted in Y. Taillandier, ed., Joan Miró: I Work Like a Gardener, New York, 2017, p. 24).
However, Miró did not set out to work in the same styles as any of these artists and their respective movements, but rather took the necessary formal qualities of their art and combined them with his own vision to reach a new form of personal expression in his work. As he described to Ricart in the autumn of 1917, “I believe our ‘school’ will grasp the essentials of the painting of the future. It will be stripped of all concern for pictorial problems, it will vibrate in harmony with the pulse of the Spirit… I believe that after the grandiose achievement of the French Impressionist movement—a canticle to life and optimism—after the Post-Impressionist movement, the courageous Symbolists, the synthetism of the Fauves, and the dissections of the Cubists and the Futurists, after all that we have a free art, all interest in which will focus on the vibration of the creative spirit. These modern analytical movements will ultimately carry the spirit into the light of freedom” (quoted in J. Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, New York, 1961, p. 81).
Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) and the other works in this series present the sitters with bold color and a highly stylized manner, their faces angular and solid, as if sculpted from stone, lending their presence a strong visual power. While these works show some of the lessons that Miró had borrowed from his predecessors, they also reflect Miró’s knowledge of Romanesque art. The artist was well acquainted with the medieval frescoes that adorned Catalonian churches. The simplification of form, repeating patterns and lines, and the bold use of distortion that he uses to portray his sitters are all characteristic of Romanesque art. Fusing avant-garde influences with his native art, Miró succeeded in creating a form of unique portraiture, unlike anything that had come before.
Yet, while works such as Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) demonstrate Miró’s rapid and bold formal exploration at this time, they also show his desire to go beyond outward appearance and attain a deeper meaning in his work. “Miró rediscovered the deeper meaning of portraiture,” Dupin has described, “which is to express the inner life, what is eternal in a face, what transcends all passing animation or mere states of mind. Successively, in his portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, Miró succeeded in freeing his artistic individuality and in catching sober glimpses of the revelations the future will vouchsafe him” (ibid., p. 81).
This desire to reach for something beyond outward representation in his art would underpin Miró’s experimentation for the rest of his life. “Dig, dig deeply,” he implored a fellow artist in 1919, “…and digging deep inside will reveal new problems in all their splendor, problems to be resolved, and they will carry us along the escape route from deadly momentarily interesting work to really good painting” (quoted in R. Lubar, “Miró Before The Farm: A Cultural Perspective,” in Joan Miró: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1987, p. 20).
In February to March 1918, Miró’s first one man show took place at the Galerie Dalmau. Met with critical condemnation, Miró left Barcelona not long after, retreating to his home in Montroig. Having seen his work up to this point together in the exhibition, he began working in a dramatically different direction. In contrast to the chromatically explosive, boldly rendered works he had been making up until this point, his work from the summer of 1918, including La maison du palmier (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, no. 64; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), debuted a new, highly meticulous, overtly defined style employed to render every detail of the landscape.
It would not be for another year and a half that Miró achieved his long-held desires to travel to Paris. He made his first visit in March 1920 and dived headlong into the nascent world of Surrealism. There he met Maurice Girardin, the owner of the Galerie Licorne. A year later, thanks to the continued support of Dalmau, Miró’s first solo show in Paris opened Girardin’s gallery, in which Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) was possibly included—Girardin was also the first owner of the work.
Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) was subsequently acquired by another legendary Parisian gallery, the Galerie Pierre. Founded by Pierre Loeb, this establishment became the foremost place for the exposition of Surrealist art in the 1930s. Furthering this esteemed provenance, this portrait crossed the Atlantic in 1939, when it was acquired by Lee Ault, an art publisher and collector, and his wife. The legendary dealer, Pierre Matisse, bought it from them in 1941, having included it in his exhibition of the artist’s work held in his New York gallery. Portrait de Ramon Sunyer (L’Orfèvre) later featured in The Museum of Modern Art’s landmark Miró retrospective held in 1993-1994.