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Lot Essay
Miró made his first trip from Barcelona to Paris in early March 1920 and stayed until the end of June. He met Picasso, visited the Louvre, admired the work of the Impressionists, and tried to work in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, but the experience of the city was overwhelming, and he returned to Barcelona not having done a single painting or even a sketch. Nevertheless, having followed the Dada movement from periodicals in Barcelona, Miró realized that Paris was the place to be.
Miró returned to Paris the following spring, this time for a lengthy stay. His friend the sculptor Pablo Gargallo lent him use of a studio at 45 rue Blomet. André Masson worked next door. He met the poets Michel Leiris, Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos and Jacques Prévert. Miró saw works by Paul Klee at the Vavin-Raspail gallery. Miró's first one-man show in Paris opened at the end of April at the Galerie La Licorne. It proved to be a complete failure, but this did not deter the artist during the summer of 1921 from commencing work on his most important painting to date, La Ferme (fig. 1), which he completed sometime around early May 1922.
The barnyard animals, equipment and buildings from Miró's family farm in Montroig (near Barcelona) are rendered in La Ferme with a cleanly polished objective realism. The accumulation of detail is so striking that the picture transcends the sum of its many parts to a level of 'magic' realism. The influence of Cubism is relatively slight, serving more of an organizational than perceptual function, and is evident in the geometrical structure that underlies the composition.
La Ferme displays a synthesis of Miró's work up to this point, and is an intensely experienced reflection on growing up in Montroig. But it became clear to the artist that the future of his work was not in Cubism, or in realism. "It is certain that the 'climate' at 45 rue Blomet, with reliable friends around who were also engaged in original experiments no less intense or exacting than his own, greatly helped Miró surmount the obstacles to his true development. Miró had carried realistic painting to its furthest extreme. The crisis of expression he was undergoing, which had brought his development to a standstill, left him one last chance if he was not to give up painting altogether: he could try to revolutionize the very foundation of his art" (ibid., p. 95).
La Terre labourée, painted in Montroig from July 1923 to the early months of 1924 (fig. 2), shows the artist again recreating his family farm, but on this occasion the realistic, objective space of La Ferme yields to a more subjective treatment, and the objects become heavily stylized forms. Miró wrote to his friend Josep Réfols, "I have already managed to break absolutely free from nature and the landscapes have nothing to do with outer reality. I know that I am following very dangerous paths, and I confess that at times I am seized with a panic like that of the hiker who finds himself on paths never before explored, but this doesn't last, thanks to the discipline and seriousness with which I am working and, a moment later, confidence and optimism push me onward once again" (quoted in ibid., p. 96).
Miró also began Le Chasseur (Paysage catalan; fig. 3) in Montroig in July 1923 and finished it around the same time as La Terre labourée. The artist's imagery is here even more fantastic. Specific description of objects has now given way to the generalities of metaphor; attributes become emblematic of the subject. The hunter is reduced to a stick figure, but the viewer will quickly spot his beret, moustache, beard, pipe and beating heart; the black funnel-shaped object is his gun. However, other creatures of a kind that were strongly stylized but immediately recognizable in La Ferme and La Terre labourée are more difficult to decipher here. The elongated form across the bottom is a sardine, the hunter's lunch. The artist has also achieved liberation from conventional space. There is still a sense of receding distance in La Terre labourée, while in Le Chasseur the hilly horizon is more a symbol of the landscape in flux than a representation of actual space, and the artist's characters and objects float weightlessly on the flat picture plane.
The disintegration of the subject into emblematic components spread across a grid-like space is plainly evident in Portrait de Mme K., the present work. Moreover, the sexuality of Miró's subject is blatantly overt, placing this painting in a long line of frightening twentieth century female portraits, from Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to de Kooning's glaring women. Miró, having spent the early months of 1924 in Montroig, returned to Paris and worked on the Portrait de Mme K., along with three other monochrome paintings, including Danseuse espagnole (see lot 116), around March to June 1924. In each of these works the artist combined painting and drawing techniques, and, in order to heighten the sharpness and immediacy of his fetishistic forms, curtailed the application of strong color.
In Portrait de Mme K. Miró dissects his subject with the clinical coolness of a mad, sadistic surgeon, and pins the various body parts and organs to the background grid as if he were mounting specimens for display. The subject's head is a de-personalized silhouette shaped like a wig-stand; strands of hair radiate outward like the snakes on a Gorgon's head, and an immensely long cigarette holder protrudes from her lips. Her beating heart, similar to that seen in the figure of the hunter, pumps flames of blood. Her breasts appear as if severed from her torso, which is depicted as a simple linear armature. The deltoid shapes, wavy, flame-like pubic hair and tubular elements also declare her aggressive sexuality and fertility. In La Famille (fig. 4), a large drawing which Miró executed on 16 May 1924 while working Portrait de Mme K., the figure's labia are almost as large as her head.
"The extraordinary Portrait of Mademoiselle K. [sic] ceases to be an automaton or a toy [Danseuse espagnole], it is rather a veritable metaphysical and poetic description of woman. Here, the geometricism of the forms has the function of rigorously ritualistic magic; it organizes them and controls the intensely vital arabesques that express the symbolic attributes of woman. The obsessive images of set square and triangle, the bird-stem, the heart of flames and roots, seem to incarnate the successive steps of some ritual initiation. The sky delegates a butterfly, the earth the stem of a plant, and hell a snake, in this occult celebration of the mystery of woman" (J. Dupin, op. cit., pp. 101 and 103).
Please note this painting has been requested for the following upcoming exhibitions: Joan Miró: 1918-1945 to be held at the Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, July-September 2002 and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, October-December 2002; Joan Miró: Snail Woman Flower Star to be held at the Museum Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf, July-October 2002; and Rétrospective Joan Miró to be held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, 2004.
Bill of sale to René Gaffé from Max Ernst for the present work, dated 14 August 1926.
Preparatory drawing for Portrait de Mme K.
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona.
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
(fig. 1) Joan Miró, La Ferme, circa 1921-1922.
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, La Terre labourée, 1924.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (formerly in the collection of René Gaffé).
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
(fig. 3) Joan Miró, Le Chasseur, Paysan catalan, 1923-1924.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
(fig. 4) Joan Miró, La Famille, 1924.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
Miró returned to Paris the following spring, this time for a lengthy stay. His friend the sculptor Pablo Gargallo lent him use of a studio at 45 rue Blomet. André Masson worked next door. He met the poets Michel Leiris, Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos and Jacques Prévert. Miró saw works by Paul Klee at the Vavin-Raspail gallery. Miró's first one-man show in Paris opened at the end of April at the Galerie La Licorne. It proved to be a complete failure, but this did not deter the artist during the summer of 1921 from commencing work on his most important painting to date, La Ferme (fig. 1), which he completed sometime around early May 1922.
The barnyard animals, equipment and buildings from Miró's family farm in Montroig (near Barcelona) are rendered in La Ferme with a cleanly polished objective realism. The accumulation of detail is so striking that the picture transcends the sum of its many parts to a level of 'magic' realism. The influence of Cubism is relatively slight, serving more of an organizational than perceptual function, and is evident in the geometrical structure that underlies the composition.
La Ferme displays a synthesis of Miró's work up to this point, and is an intensely experienced reflection on growing up in Montroig. But it became clear to the artist that the future of his work was not in Cubism, or in realism. "It is certain that the 'climate' at 45 rue Blomet, with reliable friends around who were also engaged in original experiments no less intense or exacting than his own, greatly helped Miró surmount the obstacles to his true development. Miró had carried realistic painting to its furthest extreme. The crisis of expression he was undergoing, which had brought his development to a standstill, left him one last chance if he was not to give up painting altogether: he could try to revolutionize the very foundation of his art" (ibid., p. 95).
La Terre labourée, painted in Montroig from July 1923 to the early months of 1924 (fig. 2), shows the artist again recreating his family farm, but on this occasion the realistic, objective space of La Ferme yields to a more subjective treatment, and the objects become heavily stylized forms. Miró wrote to his friend Josep Réfols, "I have already managed to break absolutely free from nature and the landscapes have nothing to do with outer reality. I know that I am following very dangerous paths, and I confess that at times I am seized with a panic like that of the hiker who finds himself on paths never before explored, but this doesn't last, thanks to the discipline and seriousness with which I am working and, a moment later, confidence and optimism push me onward once again" (quoted in ibid., p. 96).
Miró also began Le Chasseur (Paysage catalan; fig. 3) in Montroig in July 1923 and finished it around the same time as La Terre labourée. The artist's imagery is here even more fantastic. Specific description of objects has now given way to the generalities of metaphor; attributes become emblematic of the subject. The hunter is reduced to a stick figure, but the viewer will quickly spot his beret, moustache, beard, pipe and beating heart; the black funnel-shaped object is his gun. However, other creatures of a kind that were strongly stylized but immediately recognizable in La Ferme and La Terre labourée are more difficult to decipher here. The elongated form across the bottom is a sardine, the hunter's lunch. The artist has also achieved liberation from conventional space. There is still a sense of receding distance in La Terre labourée, while in Le Chasseur the hilly horizon is more a symbol of the landscape in flux than a representation of actual space, and the artist's characters and objects float weightlessly on the flat picture plane.
The disintegration of the subject into emblematic components spread across a grid-like space is plainly evident in Portrait de Mme K., the present work. Moreover, the sexuality of Miró's subject is blatantly overt, placing this painting in a long line of frightening twentieth century female portraits, from Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to de Kooning's glaring women. Miró, having spent the early months of 1924 in Montroig, returned to Paris and worked on the Portrait de Mme K., along with three other monochrome paintings, including Danseuse espagnole (see lot 116), around March to June 1924. In each of these works the artist combined painting and drawing techniques, and, in order to heighten the sharpness and immediacy of his fetishistic forms, curtailed the application of strong color.
In Portrait de Mme K. Miró dissects his subject with the clinical coolness of a mad, sadistic surgeon, and pins the various body parts and organs to the background grid as if he were mounting specimens for display. The subject's head is a de-personalized silhouette shaped like a wig-stand; strands of hair radiate outward like the snakes on a Gorgon's head, and an immensely long cigarette holder protrudes from her lips. Her beating heart, similar to that seen in the figure of the hunter, pumps flames of blood. Her breasts appear as if severed from her torso, which is depicted as a simple linear armature. The deltoid shapes, wavy, flame-like pubic hair and tubular elements also declare her aggressive sexuality and fertility. In La Famille (fig. 4), a large drawing which Miró executed on 16 May 1924 while working Portrait de Mme K., the figure's labia are almost as large as her head.
"The extraordinary Portrait of Mademoiselle K. [sic] ceases to be an automaton or a toy [Danseuse espagnole], it is rather a veritable metaphysical and poetic description of woman. Here, the geometricism of the forms has the function of rigorously ritualistic magic; it organizes them and controls the intensely vital arabesques that express the symbolic attributes of woman. The obsessive images of set square and triangle, the bird-stem, the heart of flames and roots, seem to incarnate the successive steps of some ritual initiation. The sky delegates a butterfly, the earth the stem of a plant, and hell a snake, in this occult celebration of the mystery of woman" (J. Dupin, op. cit., pp. 101 and 103).
Please note this painting has been requested for the following upcoming exhibitions: Joan Miró: 1918-1945 to be held at the Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, July-September 2002 and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, October-December 2002; Joan Miró: Snail Woman Flower Star to be held at the Museum Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf, July-October 2002; and Rétrospective Joan Miró to be held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, 2004.
Bill of sale to René Gaffé from Max Ernst for the present work, dated 14 August 1926.
Preparatory drawing for Portrait de Mme K.
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona.
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
(fig. 1) Joan Miró, La Ferme, circa 1921-1922.
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, La Terre labourée, 1924.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (formerly in the collection of René Gaffé).
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
(fig. 3) Joan Miró, Le Chasseur, Paysan catalan, 1923-1924.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001
(fig. 4) Joan Miró, La Famille, 1924.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ADAGP, Succession Joan Miró, 2001