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拍品专文
In 1924, Joan Miró’s art underwent a radical transformation. Fueled by the spirit of iconoclasm and radical thinking of the nascent group of Surrealists with whom he was surrounded, Miró broke free from the highly detailed, meticulously rendered realism that had defined his works of the previous years. Instead he began to paint with a newfound liberation, conceiving an entirely new realm of pictorial space, filled with a vocabulary of surreal, near-magical, mystical imagery distilled from his imagination.
Executed in Paris in the spring of 1924 in the midst of this burst of creativity, Portrait de Madame K. is one of a small series of ground-breaking works from this time. With this group of predominantly monochrome works, all of which share the same “gridded” structure over which an array of forms, shapes, and signs are arranged, Miró stripped away the conventional formal characteristics of painting, expunging color, as well as a sense of perspectival depth, to instead create a radically abstracted yet deeply personal vision of the world. Fusing desire, archetypal femininity, and a primal sense of eroticism with a lyrical free-form invention, Portrait de Madame K. embodies many of the leading preoccupations of the Surrealists at this pivotal moment—this same year that André Breton published his Manifeste du surréalisme, officially “launching” the movement. Fellow Surrealist and Miró’s neighbor of the time, Max Ernst was the first owner of Portrait de Madame K., a reflection of the shared spirit of discovery and camaraderie that defines this revelatory period of the artist’s career.
“I was producing once again,” Miró recalled of this time a few years later, in 1928, “and taking off from reality I was able to lose contact from reality… above all, in Portrait de Madame K. By detaching myself from all pictorial influence and from contact with nature, I painted with an absolute disdain for painting. The idea of painting has no spiritual value of any kind. I painted that way because I couldn’t reconcile myself to any other way. I felt a sprit of aggressivity, but of aristocracy at the same time… When I was painting Mme. K’s portrait (which she posed for) I proposed to do a realistic work and so I started eliminating, until I felt myself in this moment of my completely anti-cubist rebellion, to the extent of eliminating Cubism from my work” (quoted in Joan Miró, exh. cat., Fundació Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 182).
At this time, Miró was living and working in the Rue Blomet, a now-legendary address in the heart of Montparnasse that was for a time in the mid-1920s the crucible of Surrealist thought and activity in Paris. The artist had moved there from Barcelona in 1921. He took a studio next to André Masson, and over the following years, many of the leading poets, writers, and artists of Surrealism passed through, including Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Ernst and others. In this corner of Paris, one might find Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway visiting, hear heated debates about Friedrich Nietzsche, Dostoevsky or the Marquis de Sade, the much-revered heroes of this new generation of artists, or witness this group of poets and artists playing the surrealist drawing game, Cadavre exquis (“Exquisite Corpse”).
In various ways these artists and writers were united in their shared desire to break free from the bounds of convention and access a world in which dreams, primal desires, and the subconscious reigned supreme. “We were living in an atmosphere of extraordinary, drunken, complete and unforgettable liberty,” Masson remembered (quoted in M.A. Caws, Surrealism and the rue Blomet, exh. cat., Eykyn Maclean, New York, 2013, p. 15). “Then, being with all the poets opened new doors for me,” Miró likewise recalled, “helping me go past the plastic pictorial fact, to go beyond painting: that was very, very important. Rue Blomet, for me, that is something crucial in my life and in my work” (quoted in ibid., p. 15).
Miró now applied the same free-flowing automatic, unconscious, and dream-like approach that his new poet friends had shown him as a way to further energize and enrich the poetic sense of reality already hinted at in works such as La Ferme of 1921-1922 (Dupin, no. 81; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Miró was “not so much trying to escape from reality,” in these 1924 paintings, Jacques Dupin has written, as attempting “to escape into nature, that is, into all of nature, including the imaginary as well as the real which is revealed in the omnipotence of desire” (Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 96).
On 3 May 1924, Miró wrote from his Rue Blomet studio to his friend, the writer Sebastià Gasch, that he was “in the middle of working feverishly, maybe as never before, and with the wind favoring all my things” (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 29). It is likely that it was Portrait de Madame K. and the small series of closely related, mostly grisaille works to which Miró was referring (Dupin, nos. 91, 93-95 and a drawing, no. 197).
With these works, Miró enlisted a geometric gridded structure—heightened in Portrait de Madame K. with the proliferation of set squares. In his quest to rid himself of reality, he was exploring how to convey pictorial space without recourse to traditional techniques. As Jacques Dupin explained, “Color plays so muted a role in these works, because the painter has set out to solve problems of form with greater freedom than in the past; he is concentrating on organizing the kind of pictorial space he has just discovered. He still moves in the direction of the liberation of forms, but his primary concern is to invest his new forms with greater lyricism. A concern with analysis and schematization, with geometric division of the picture surface, as well as the absence of color and the use of letters, all superficially recall certain features of cubist paintings. But only superficially” (Miró, New York, 1962, p. 142).
The mysteriously titled protagonist, “Madame K.” is thought to have been the Polish artist and a friend of Miró, Dora Bianka. Born Dorota Kucembianka, she studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the years leading up to the First World War. After a period spent in London, she returned to Paris where she became immersed in the avant-garde art world centered around Montparnasse. Her work was first included in the 1925 Salon d’Automne and she regularly contributed to these shows thereafter. It is thought that Bianka was the model both for the present work and Portrait de Madame B. (Dupin, no. 98; Private collection) of the same year.
Overlaid upon the soft linear outlines that form the protagonist of Portrait de Madame K. is an array of visual allusions and representational signs that create this bold vision of femininity and eroticism. Over the rich surface filled with amorphous passages of pastel, white chalk, and charcoal are two strong black vertical lines that serve as the figure's body. Her breasts appear on opposite sides of the canvas: on the left, rendered in a realistic style, on the right, as a simplified circle, joined by a single, horizontal line. In the middle, below what could be read as a cupid’s arrow, her heart floats, alight perhaps with flames of passion. Her head, as in the closely related, Danseuse espagnole (Dupin, no. 94; Private collection), as well as Maternité from later in the year (Dupin, no. 99; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) is rendered as a black hat-like form, adorned with snake-like tendrils, while her sex is constructed from a triangle, the realistically rendered hairs appearing as if engulfed by flames. There is a pencil study that Miró made for this portrait, titled Portrait of Mlle. K. (FJM 650A; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona). Just as the reason for Miró’s decision to change his protagonist from Mademoiselle to Madame will remain a mystery, so too is the full meaning of this floating vision of femininity unknowable.
“Here,” Jacques Dupin wrote of Portrait de Madame K., “the geometricization of the forms has the function of ritual 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 with flames and roots, seem to incarnate the successive steps of some ritual initiation. The enormous black head with tentacles, the ambiguity of the flakes of fire that are plastered over the triangle at the bottom, the way the female breasts have been evoked… dominate this diagram of amorous knowledge. 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” (ibid., p. 144).
In late June 1924, after this period of intense work in Paris, Miró returned to Montroig for the summer months. He described the works he had just completed in a letter to Leiris. “My latest canvases are conceived like a bolt from the blue, absolutely detached from the outer world.” He went on to discuss what is a tantalizingly close, but not exact description of Portrait de Madame K. revealing his surrealist thought process, steeped in eroticism and desire, in the creation of this radical painting. “Figuration of one of my latest x’s (I can’t find the word for it here; I don’t want to say either canvas or painting). Portrait of a charming lady friend from Paris—I begin with the idea of touching her body very chastely, beginning with her side and going up to her head. Profile drawn in charcoal. A vertical line for the breasts… On the other side, an apple being pecked at by a bird. Sparks fly out of the wound caused by this pecking. Below, going across the sex (I insist on my very chaste and respectful intentions) a comet with its luminous tail blonde hair; one hand holds a flower with a butterfly circling around it; the other hand is trying to take hold of an egg that is turning, a luminous circle around it. In the upper corner of canvas are stars. This is hardly painting, but I don’t give a damn” (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, pp. 86-87). Margit Rowell notes that many works of the period contain one or several of the described motifs but a work corresponding exactly to this image has not been found.
Woman as a symbol would remain one of the central elements around which Miró’s art orbited for the rest of his life. With Portrait de Madame K., Miró conceived an elemental, near magical visual shorthand to convey the figure of a woman. In the closely related work on paper La Famille (Dupin, no. 197; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), he employed some of the same signs to depict the mother in his mythical family trio—in particular the cipher of the woman’s heart, similarly adorned with little flames, can be seen again. From the present work, an erotically-charged evocation of a woman, to a depiction of motherhood in Maternité and La Famille, woman is omnipresent in Miró’s work of this time, feeding his surrealist imagery as he liberated himself from the portrayal of reality.
Portrait de Madame K. was first owned by Miró’s fellow Surrealist, Ernst. In the summer of 1926, Ernst sold this painting, as well as La Famille, to the pioneering Belgian collector, René Gaffé, who was among the first major supporters of Miró. A journalist and publisher, he later became a perfume magnate, which enabled him to turn to collecting. Throughout the 1920s, Gaffé acquired works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, as well as Miró. “In this century made of speculations, complications, crises,” Gaffé wrote in 1939, “this painter can be found to be paradoxical. He has created a simple mystery on the abstract level. He comes out of everyday life, to always bring us back to purity… He succeeded in giving his characters, his animals and his objects, a power of anxiety, surprise, supernatural, which unsettles us without taking away our hopes… For me, who loved his work right away and was most likely his first buyer, I owe him the thrill of having been called a mad man by very respectable people. To live with canvases, is to stay young and optimistic. I give out for free, this advice for those who see their sideburns get covered with snow. Thank you, Miró, for your continuous beneficial action: bringing so much grace, in these darkening times” (“Joan Miró” in Cahiers d'Art, vol. 9, nos. 1-4, 1934, pp. 30-33).
Executed in Paris in the spring of 1924 in the midst of this burst of creativity, Portrait de Madame K. is one of a small series of ground-breaking works from this time. With this group of predominantly monochrome works, all of which share the same “gridded” structure over which an array of forms, shapes, and signs are arranged, Miró stripped away the conventional formal characteristics of painting, expunging color, as well as a sense of perspectival depth, to instead create a radically abstracted yet deeply personal vision of the world. Fusing desire, archetypal femininity, and a primal sense of eroticism with a lyrical free-form invention, Portrait de Madame K. embodies many of the leading preoccupations of the Surrealists at this pivotal moment—this same year that André Breton published his Manifeste du surréalisme, officially “launching” the movement. Fellow Surrealist and Miró’s neighbor of the time, Max Ernst was the first owner of Portrait de Madame K., a reflection of the shared spirit of discovery and camaraderie that defines this revelatory period of the artist’s career.
“I was producing once again,” Miró recalled of this time a few years later, in 1928, “and taking off from reality I was able to lose contact from reality… above all, in Portrait de Madame K. By detaching myself from all pictorial influence and from contact with nature, I painted with an absolute disdain for painting. The idea of painting has no spiritual value of any kind. I painted that way because I couldn’t reconcile myself to any other way. I felt a sprit of aggressivity, but of aristocracy at the same time… When I was painting Mme. K’s portrait (which she posed for) I proposed to do a realistic work and so I started eliminating, until I felt myself in this moment of my completely anti-cubist rebellion, to the extent of eliminating Cubism from my work” (quoted in Joan Miró, exh. cat., Fundació Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 182).
At this time, Miró was living and working in the Rue Blomet, a now-legendary address in the heart of Montparnasse that was for a time in the mid-1920s the crucible of Surrealist thought and activity in Paris. The artist had moved there from Barcelona in 1921. He took a studio next to André Masson, and over the following years, many of the leading poets, writers, and artists of Surrealism passed through, including Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Ernst and others. In this corner of Paris, one might find Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway visiting, hear heated debates about Friedrich Nietzsche, Dostoevsky or the Marquis de Sade, the much-revered heroes of this new generation of artists, or witness this group of poets and artists playing the surrealist drawing game, Cadavre exquis (“Exquisite Corpse”).
In various ways these artists and writers were united in their shared desire to break free from the bounds of convention and access a world in which dreams, primal desires, and the subconscious reigned supreme. “We were living in an atmosphere of extraordinary, drunken, complete and unforgettable liberty,” Masson remembered (quoted in M.A. Caws, Surrealism and the rue Blomet, exh. cat., Eykyn Maclean, New York, 2013, p. 15). “Then, being with all the poets opened new doors for me,” Miró likewise recalled, “helping me go past the plastic pictorial fact, to go beyond painting: that was very, very important. Rue Blomet, for me, that is something crucial in my life and in my work” (quoted in ibid., p. 15).
Miró now applied the same free-flowing automatic, unconscious, and dream-like approach that his new poet friends had shown him as a way to further energize and enrich the poetic sense of reality already hinted at in works such as La Ferme of 1921-1922 (Dupin, no. 81; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Miró was “not so much trying to escape from reality,” in these 1924 paintings, Jacques Dupin has written, as attempting “to escape into nature, that is, into all of nature, including the imaginary as well as the real which is revealed in the omnipotence of desire” (Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 96).
On 3 May 1924, Miró wrote from his Rue Blomet studio to his friend, the writer Sebastià Gasch, that he was “in the middle of working feverishly, maybe as never before, and with the wind favoring all my things” (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 29). It is likely that it was Portrait de Madame K. and the small series of closely related, mostly grisaille works to which Miró was referring (Dupin, nos. 91, 93-95 and a drawing, no. 197).
With these works, Miró enlisted a geometric gridded structure—heightened in Portrait de Madame K. with the proliferation of set squares. In his quest to rid himself of reality, he was exploring how to convey pictorial space without recourse to traditional techniques. As Jacques Dupin explained, “Color plays so muted a role in these works, because the painter has set out to solve problems of form with greater freedom than in the past; he is concentrating on organizing the kind of pictorial space he has just discovered. He still moves in the direction of the liberation of forms, but his primary concern is to invest his new forms with greater lyricism. A concern with analysis and schematization, with geometric division of the picture surface, as well as the absence of color and the use of letters, all superficially recall certain features of cubist paintings. But only superficially” (Miró, New York, 1962, p. 142).
The mysteriously titled protagonist, “Madame K.” is thought to have been the Polish artist and a friend of Miró, Dora Bianka. Born Dorota Kucembianka, she studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the years leading up to the First World War. After a period spent in London, she returned to Paris where she became immersed in the avant-garde art world centered around Montparnasse. Her work was first included in the 1925 Salon d’Automne and she regularly contributed to these shows thereafter. It is thought that Bianka was the model both for the present work and Portrait de Madame B. (Dupin, no. 98; Private collection) of the same year.
Overlaid upon the soft linear outlines that form the protagonist of Portrait de Madame K. is an array of visual allusions and representational signs that create this bold vision of femininity and eroticism. Over the rich surface filled with amorphous passages of pastel, white chalk, and charcoal are two strong black vertical lines that serve as the figure's body. Her breasts appear on opposite sides of the canvas: on the left, rendered in a realistic style, on the right, as a simplified circle, joined by a single, horizontal line. In the middle, below what could be read as a cupid’s arrow, her heart floats, alight perhaps with flames of passion. Her head, as in the closely related, Danseuse espagnole (Dupin, no. 94; Private collection), as well as Maternité from later in the year (Dupin, no. 99; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) is rendered as a black hat-like form, adorned with snake-like tendrils, while her sex is constructed from a triangle, the realistically rendered hairs appearing as if engulfed by flames. There is a pencil study that Miró made for this portrait, titled Portrait of Mlle. K. (FJM 650A; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona). Just as the reason for Miró’s decision to change his protagonist from Mademoiselle to Madame will remain a mystery, so too is the full meaning of this floating vision of femininity unknowable.
“Here,” Jacques Dupin wrote of Portrait de Madame K., “the geometricization of the forms has the function of ritual 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 with flames and roots, seem to incarnate the successive steps of some ritual initiation. The enormous black head with tentacles, the ambiguity of the flakes of fire that are plastered over the triangle at the bottom, the way the female breasts have been evoked… dominate this diagram of amorous knowledge. 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” (ibid., p. 144).
In late June 1924, after this period of intense work in Paris, Miró returned to Montroig for the summer months. He described the works he had just completed in a letter to Leiris. “My latest canvases are conceived like a bolt from the blue, absolutely detached from the outer world.” He went on to discuss what is a tantalizingly close, but not exact description of Portrait de Madame K. revealing his surrealist thought process, steeped in eroticism and desire, in the creation of this radical painting. “Figuration of one of my latest x’s (I can’t find the word for it here; I don’t want to say either canvas or painting). Portrait of a charming lady friend from Paris—I begin with the idea of touching her body very chastely, beginning with her side and going up to her head. Profile drawn in charcoal. A vertical line for the breasts… On the other side, an apple being pecked at by a bird. Sparks fly out of the wound caused by this pecking. Below, going across the sex (I insist on my very chaste and respectful intentions) a comet with its luminous tail blonde hair; one hand holds a flower with a butterfly circling around it; the other hand is trying to take hold of an egg that is turning, a luminous circle around it. In the upper corner of canvas are stars. This is hardly painting, but I don’t give a damn” (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, pp. 86-87). Margit Rowell notes that many works of the period contain one or several of the described motifs but a work corresponding exactly to this image has not been found.
Woman as a symbol would remain one of the central elements around which Miró’s art orbited for the rest of his life. With Portrait de Madame K., Miró conceived an elemental, near magical visual shorthand to convey the figure of a woman. In the closely related work on paper La Famille (Dupin, no. 197; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), he employed some of the same signs to depict the mother in his mythical family trio—in particular the cipher of the woman’s heart, similarly adorned with little flames, can be seen again. From the present work, an erotically-charged evocation of a woman, to a depiction of motherhood in Maternité and La Famille, woman is omnipresent in Miró’s work of this time, feeding his surrealist imagery as he liberated himself from the portrayal of reality.
Portrait de Madame K. was first owned by Miró’s fellow Surrealist, Ernst. In the summer of 1926, Ernst sold this painting, as well as La Famille, to the pioneering Belgian collector, René Gaffé, who was among the first major supporters of Miró. A journalist and publisher, he later became a perfume magnate, which enabled him to turn to collecting. Throughout the 1920s, Gaffé acquired works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, as well as Miró. “In this century made of speculations, complications, crises,” Gaffé wrote in 1939, “this painter can be found to be paradoxical. He has created a simple mystery on the abstract level. He comes out of everyday life, to always bring us back to purity… He succeeded in giving his characters, his animals and his objects, a power of anxiety, surprise, supernatural, which unsettles us without taking away our hopes… For me, who loved his work right away and was most likely his first buyer, I owe him the thrill of having been called a mad man by very respectable people. To live with canvases, is to stay young and optimistic. I give out for free, this advice for those who see their sideburns get covered with snow. Thank you, Miró, for your continuous beneficial action: bringing so much grace, in these darkening times” (“Joan Miró” in Cahiers d'Art, vol. 9, nos. 1-4, 1934, pp. 30-33).
