Joan Miró

Galerie Otto Stangl, Munich
Galerie Alfred Schmela, Düsseldorf
Galerie Melki, Paris
Galerie Di Meo, Paris
Galerie New Selection, Knokke
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1980

Paris, Galerie Melki, Miró, 1974, no. 3, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Composition)

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró. Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 1999, vol. I, no. 280, illustrated p. 209

The canvas is unlined. Apart from two tiny specks of retouching in the lower right corner, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly stronger and deeper in the original.
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Painted at the height of his involvement with the Surrealist group, Miró's Peinture (Le Pêcheur) of 1927 brilliantly exemplifies the artist's move towards his supremely abstract canvases. Unlike Dalí's and Magritte's figurative version of Surrealism, Miró's artistic development took a different turn. He joined the group in 1924, and participated in their first exhibition held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. André Breton commented that Miró 'may be looked upon as the most Surrealist among us' (A. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, quoted in Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 156). Breton's first Surrealist manifesto of 1924 proclaimed: 'in the future resolution of the two states, seemingly so contradictory, which are dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality'. This new ideology encouraged Miró to eliminate representation from his canvases. Coinciding with his own pictorial experiments, it encouraged him to abandon realism in favour of the imaginary.

 

In the present work, he used whimsical and ambiguous forms that first appear abstract, only to take form gradually in shifting and delightful ways. The central figure of a fisherman, holding a fishing rod, is executed in a freely meandering line, its hollow, translucent shape set against a monochrome blue background. In its powerful simplicity, Peinture (Le Pêcheur) reveals a mastery of the void, exploring a very new sense of space. Verging between figuration and abstraction, Miró's whimsical forms originate from the world of dreams and the unconscious, their other-worldly character emphasised by the void of the background that the images populate.

Jacques Dupin commented about this fantastic quality of Miró's works from this period: 'What Miró did achieve was the arduous conquest of powers lost since childhood. And he succeeded by going his own way, stubbornly, passionately, with conscious fidelity to his own gifts and to the conditions of painting. It was from the inside, by pushing painting to its extreme consequences, that he made it possible to go beyond paintings, to reach the domain that lies beyond it' (ibid., p. 156).