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Lot Essay
In Joan Miró’s 1925 painting Peinture (Les amants - Adam et Eve), an erotically charged moment between a pair of lovers plays out against an expansive, loosely brushed ground. Two amorphous personnages approach one another at the centre of the composition, drawn together by mutual desire, their ethereal white bodies flowing and morphing to reveal the primal, carnal urges that drive them. Filled with a heady tension and sense of anticipation, this evocative picture is one of a small group of early works from Miró’s revolutionary series known as the dream paintings, in which he openly explored the powerful forces of love, attraction, and sexuality (Dupin, nos. 128-132), themes that would take root in his imagination and continue to shape his art for decades to come. The artist granted each of these pictures from 1925 a subtitle that indicates their romantic subject matter, from Peinture (Coitus) and Peinture (Amour), to the present composition, Peinture (Les amants - Adam et Eve), which invokes the Biblical creation story of Adam and Eve.
The dream paintings were the visionary product of a period of crisis in Miró’s art. In 1924, the painter found that he had exhausted the painstakingly rendered realism that characterised his densely constructed compositions from the early 1920s, such as La ferme (Dupin, no. 81; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) or Le cheval, la pipe et la fleur rouge (Dupin, no. 76; The Philadelphia Museum of Art). Seeking to capture what he once described as ‘all the golden sparks of our souls,’ Miró instead began to delve into his subconscious, drawing from its depths a series of cryptic signs and symbols, shapes and forms, which he then translated on to his canvases (letter to J.F. Ràflos, 7 October 1923; in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 83). Instinctively rendered and filled with a mysterious play of lyrical forms that appear suspended upon open, ethereal grounds, these paintings mark the artist’s first extended thematic cycle of pictures, and are widely regarded as among the most important and revolutionary of Miró’s career. The deceptive simplicity of the resulting paintings shocked contemporary viewers, their austere aesthetic and enigmatic, elusive imagery securing Miró’s reputation as one of the most exciting artists within the bourgeoning Surrealist movement.
Miró’s first dream paintings had their roots in the intensely creative environment of the rue Blomet, in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, where the artist lived and worked during this formative period. Here, Miró was surrounded by a circle of pioneering artists and poets, including Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, and André Masson, who had a studio right next door to his own. Immersing himself in their theories, Miró spent long hours reading the poetry of his new acquaintances, conceived through the unmediated process of automatic writing in their attempts to cajole imagery from the depths of the unconscious mind. Their work set Miró’s imagination alight; as he later reminisced: ‘The poets Masson introduced me to interested me more than the painters I had met in Paris. I was carried away by the new ideas they brought and especially the poetry they discussed. I gorged myself on it all night long—poetry principally in the tradition of Jarry’s Surmâle’ (quoted in M. Rowell and R. Krauss, Joan Miró: Magnetic Fields, exh. cat., New York, 1983, p. 40).
‘The rue Blomet was a decisive place, a decisive moment for me,’ he later acknowledged. ‘It was there that I discovered everything I am, everything I would become’ (‘Memories of the rue Blomet,’ 1977, transcribed by J. Dupin; in op. cit., 1987, p. 100). Under the influence of the group’s techniques and the inspiration of his friends and neighbours, Miró’s canvases opened up, liberated from the extraordinary detail of his earlier work, to instead become ‘receptacles for dreams’ (J. Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 157). At this time, Miró existed in a precarious financial situation—often spending days on end without a full meal, he found he could survive on just a few sporadic dried figs. ‘I ate little and badly,’ he recalled. ‘I have already said that during this period hunger gave me hallucinations, and the hallucinations gave me ideas for paintings…’ (‘Memories of the rue Blomet’ in op. cit., 1987, p. 103). While in this state, Miró would sit on the floor of his studio, and stare at the roughly textured walls of the sparsely decorated room, captivated by the meandering paths of cracks in the plaster and mysterious marks on the ceiling.
These shapes filled his imagination with their fleeting forms, traces of an unknowable universe which suddenly flashed into being before his eyes, which he then attempted to capture on paper or burlap before they shifted and changed. Following these spontaneous impulses of his unconscious, Miró started to paint with a new, unplanned and unconstrained abstract imagery composed of graphic-like signs and forms, inspired by the sketches he created in this semi-lucid state. Describing the process, he explained: ‘I painted without premeditation, as if under the influence of a dream. I combined reality and mystery in a space that had been set free… no longer subjected to dream-dictation, I created my dreams through my paintings… I wanted my spots to seem to open to the magnetic appeal of the void. I was very interested in the void, in perfect emptiness. I put it into my pale and scumbled grounds, and my linear gestures on top were the signs of my dream progression’ (interview with D. Chevalier, in Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture, November 1962; quoted in ibid., p. 264).
In Peinture (Les amants - Adam et Eve) this sense of the void is conveyed through the enigmatic umber ground, which transforms the canvas into a boundless, infinite plane. This particular type of ground is rare, used primarily by Miró at the very beginning of this period of fervent, all-encompassing creativity. Shadow-like passages of semi-transparent black pigment drift across the surface, appearing like an ethereal smoky vapour that stands in bold contrast to the notes of intense primary colour and opaque pigment used elsewhere in the canvas.
Peinture (Les amants - Adam et Eve) immerses the viewer not only into the mysterious recesses of Miró’s imagination, but also provides a glimpse into his life at this time. In his early thirties and unmarried, the artist admitted to having romance very much on his mind at this time—he wrote to Picasso in 1923 that he was then ‘in pursuit of a Mme Miró, a studio, and a dealer!’ (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 322). Love and sexuality were central topics in the rue Blomet circle and Surrealism as a whole, and therefore unsurprisingly these themes came to pervade many of Miró’s dream paintings, themselves vehicles for the unimpeded, unmediated expressions of the artist’s innermost desires and primal impulses. As Jacques Dupin has noted: ‘All these oneiric paintings possess great erotic power. Connected with subjective obsessions and realized at the dictation of the unconscious, they simultaneously unmask and mask, set down and erase, the infinitely varied phantasms of the libido’ (op. cit., 1962, pp. 164-166).
Here, an abstracted male figure coalesces from the amorphous white form on the right hand side of the composition—seen in profile, his identity is indicated only by the curve of his black moustache towards the top of his spindly body, and the protrusion of his erection, further emphasised by the curve of red paint below. This spectral male figure, clearly caught in the throes of passion, moves towards the curvaceous form of his female partner, the bright spot of blue delineating her eye as she gazes across the space at him. In a flowing stream of white paint, her figure is revealed, from the swell of her breasts down to her bare foot, enlarged to extreme portions. A series of abstract signs and symbols are conveyed through strokes of vibrant blue and black pigment, encircling the lovers as they float through the void, directing the eye to different aspects of the canvas. Lust, passion and eroticism fill every corner of this enigmatic composition, capturing the heady, all-consuming effect they have on the mind, the soul and the body. ‘Painting and poetry are done in the same way you make love,’ Miró proclaimed, ‘it’s an exchange of blood, a total embrace—without caution, without any thoughts of protecting yourself’ (quoted in G. Duthuit, ‘Where are you going, Miró?’, Cahiers d’Art, Paris, nos. 8-10, in M. Rowell, op. cit., 1987, p. 150).
The dream paintings were the visionary product of a period of crisis in Miró’s art. In 1924, the painter found that he had exhausted the painstakingly rendered realism that characterised his densely constructed compositions from the early 1920s, such as La ferme (Dupin, no. 81; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) or Le cheval, la pipe et la fleur rouge (Dupin, no. 76; The Philadelphia Museum of Art). Seeking to capture what he once described as ‘all the golden sparks of our souls,’ Miró instead began to delve into his subconscious, drawing from its depths a series of cryptic signs and symbols, shapes and forms, which he then translated on to his canvases (letter to J.F. Ràflos, 7 October 1923; in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 83). Instinctively rendered and filled with a mysterious play of lyrical forms that appear suspended upon open, ethereal grounds, these paintings mark the artist’s first extended thematic cycle of pictures, and are widely regarded as among the most important and revolutionary of Miró’s career. The deceptive simplicity of the resulting paintings shocked contemporary viewers, their austere aesthetic and enigmatic, elusive imagery securing Miró’s reputation as one of the most exciting artists within the bourgeoning Surrealist movement.
Miró’s first dream paintings had their roots in the intensely creative environment of the rue Blomet, in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, where the artist lived and worked during this formative period. Here, Miró was surrounded by a circle of pioneering artists and poets, including Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, and André Masson, who had a studio right next door to his own. Immersing himself in their theories, Miró spent long hours reading the poetry of his new acquaintances, conceived through the unmediated process of automatic writing in their attempts to cajole imagery from the depths of the unconscious mind. Their work set Miró’s imagination alight; as he later reminisced: ‘The poets Masson introduced me to interested me more than the painters I had met in Paris. I was carried away by the new ideas they brought and especially the poetry they discussed. I gorged myself on it all night long—poetry principally in the tradition of Jarry’s Surmâle’ (quoted in M. Rowell and R. Krauss, Joan Miró: Magnetic Fields, exh. cat., New York, 1983, p. 40).
‘The rue Blomet was a decisive place, a decisive moment for me,’ he later acknowledged. ‘It was there that I discovered everything I am, everything I would become’ (‘Memories of the rue Blomet,’ 1977, transcribed by J. Dupin; in op. cit., 1987, p. 100). Under the influence of the group’s techniques and the inspiration of his friends and neighbours, Miró’s canvases opened up, liberated from the extraordinary detail of his earlier work, to instead become ‘receptacles for dreams’ (J. Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 157). At this time, Miró existed in a precarious financial situation—often spending days on end without a full meal, he found he could survive on just a few sporadic dried figs. ‘I ate little and badly,’ he recalled. ‘I have already said that during this period hunger gave me hallucinations, and the hallucinations gave me ideas for paintings…’ (‘Memories of the rue Blomet’ in op. cit., 1987, p. 103). While in this state, Miró would sit on the floor of his studio, and stare at the roughly textured walls of the sparsely decorated room, captivated by the meandering paths of cracks in the plaster and mysterious marks on the ceiling.
These shapes filled his imagination with their fleeting forms, traces of an unknowable universe which suddenly flashed into being before his eyes, which he then attempted to capture on paper or burlap before they shifted and changed. Following these spontaneous impulses of his unconscious, Miró started to paint with a new, unplanned and unconstrained abstract imagery composed of graphic-like signs and forms, inspired by the sketches he created in this semi-lucid state. Describing the process, he explained: ‘I painted without premeditation, as if under the influence of a dream. I combined reality and mystery in a space that had been set free… no longer subjected to dream-dictation, I created my dreams through my paintings… I wanted my spots to seem to open to the magnetic appeal of the void. I was very interested in the void, in perfect emptiness. I put it into my pale and scumbled grounds, and my linear gestures on top were the signs of my dream progression’ (interview with D. Chevalier, in Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture, November 1962; quoted in ibid., p. 264).
In Peinture (Les amants - Adam et Eve) this sense of the void is conveyed through the enigmatic umber ground, which transforms the canvas into a boundless, infinite plane. This particular type of ground is rare, used primarily by Miró at the very beginning of this period of fervent, all-encompassing creativity. Shadow-like passages of semi-transparent black pigment drift across the surface, appearing like an ethereal smoky vapour that stands in bold contrast to the notes of intense primary colour and opaque pigment used elsewhere in the canvas.
Peinture (Les amants - Adam et Eve) immerses the viewer not only into the mysterious recesses of Miró’s imagination, but also provides a glimpse into his life at this time. In his early thirties and unmarried, the artist admitted to having romance very much on his mind at this time—he wrote to Picasso in 1923 that he was then ‘in pursuit of a Mme Miró, a studio, and a dealer!’ (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 322). Love and sexuality were central topics in the rue Blomet circle and Surrealism as a whole, and therefore unsurprisingly these themes came to pervade many of Miró’s dream paintings, themselves vehicles for the unimpeded, unmediated expressions of the artist’s innermost desires and primal impulses. As Jacques Dupin has noted: ‘All these oneiric paintings possess great erotic power. Connected with subjective obsessions and realized at the dictation of the unconscious, they simultaneously unmask and mask, set down and erase, the infinitely varied phantasms of the libido’ (op. cit., 1962, pp. 164-166).
Here, an abstracted male figure coalesces from the amorphous white form on the right hand side of the composition—seen in profile, his identity is indicated only by the curve of his black moustache towards the top of his spindly body, and the protrusion of his erection, further emphasised by the curve of red paint below. This spectral male figure, clearly caught in the throes of passion, moves towards the curvaceous form of his female partner, the bright spot of blue delineating her eye as she gazes across the space at him. In a flowing stream of white paint, her figure is revealed, from the swell of her breasts down to her bare foot, enlarged to extreme portions. A series of abstract signs and symbols are conveyed through strokes of vibrant blue and black pigment, encircling the lovers as they float through the void, directing the eye to different aspects of the canvas. Lust, passion and eroticism fill every corner of this enigmatic composition, capturing the heady, all-consuming effect they have on the mind, the soul and the body. ‘Painting and poetry are done in the same way you make love,’ Miró proclaimed, ‘it’s an exchange of blood, a total embrace—without caution, without any thoughts of protecting yourself’ (quoted in G. Duthuit, ‘Where are you going, Miró?’, Cahiers d’Art, Paris, nos. 8-10, in M. Rowell, op. cit., 1987, p. 150).