- 24
Joan Miró
Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 GBP
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Description
- Joan Miró
- PEINTURE
- signed Miró (lower right); signed Miró, titled, dated 1953 and inscribed 42 on the reverse
- oil on canvas
- 79 by 31cm.
- 31 1/8 by 12 1/4 in.
Provenance
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owners in 1967
Acquired from the above by the present owners in 1967
Exhibited
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Miró. Recent Paintings, 1953, no. 42, illustrated in the catalogue
Literature
Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, New York, 1962, no. 834, illustrated p. 563
Ernst Scheidegger, Traces d'une rencontre: Joan Miró en Catalogne, Paris, 1993, illustrated in a photograph of the artist' s studio p. 40
Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 2001, vol. III, no. 948, illustrated in colour p. 220
Ernst Scheidegger, Traces d'une rencontre: Joan Miró en Catalogne, Paris, 1993, illustrated in a photograph of the artist' s studio p. 40
Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 2001, vol. III, no. 948, illustrated in colour p. 220
Catalogue Note
Executed in 1953 and exhibited at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York later that year, Peinture combines Miró’s love of signs and symbols with a playful and intensely creative technique. Throughout that year he executed several paintings in this elongated format, either vertical, as in the present work, or horizontal. Due to this unusual shape and the nearly abstract, graphic style of this group of works, they have sometimes been compared to ancient scrolls or to writing music. Discussing Miró’s works from 1953, Jacques Dupin observed: ‘Miró begins to work in unusual formats, such as narrow horizontal and vertical panels. He also makes use of unusual materials […]. The use of unorthodox formats and unusual materials […] expresses resistance to conventional easel painting. […] They are by no means easel paintings, and yet they are not quite pure decorations, either; among them are some of Miró’s most beautiful and important works. The grounds, as in the preceding canvases, are marvellously suggestive, for the most part monochrome, but animated, jumbled, agitated, and iridescent’ (J. Dupin, op. cit., 1962, pp. 434 & 438).
The present work exemplifies the expressive power of Miró's images, even though they bear little resemblance to the natural world. Miró is solely reliant upon the lexicon of signs and symbols that he had developed over the years. As Jacques Dupin wrote with regard to the works of 1952-54: ‘To study the form, their distribution and their composition, to elucidate the rhythms and the distribution of the colors, gets us nowhere. Precisely because the artist has not “elaborated,” but has let us come face to face with the pure creative act itself, our instruments of investigation are useless. And yet the brutal forms thus projected are neither arbitrary nor are they mere products of some automatism. They are always related to Miró’s vocabulary of signs and other elements of his language, but they are spontaneous; they are not “worked up” emanations of this language, but a deliberate simplification of it. Hence their expressive power is all the greater; their energy has been caught at the source and let go at once, the sign being the condensed vehicle of subterranean energy that otherwise would be dispersed and lost’ (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona & New York, 1993, p. 294).
The present work exemplifies the expressive power of Miró's images, even though they bear little resemblance to the natural world. Miró is solely reliant upon the lexicon of signs and symbols that he had developed over the years. As Jacques Dupin wrote with regard to the works of 1952-54: ‘To study the form, their distribution and their composition, to elucidate the rhythms and the distribution of the colors, gets us nowhere. Precisely because the artist has not “elaborated,” but has let us come face to face with the pure creative act itself, our instruments of investigation are useless. And yet the brutal forms thus projected are neither arbitrary nor are they mere products of some automatism. They are always related to Miró’s vocabulary of signs and other elements of his language, but they are spontaneous; they are not “worked up” emanations of this language, but a deliberate simplification of it. Hence their expressive power is all the greater; their energy has been caught at the source and let go at once, the sign being the condensed vehicle of subterranean energy that otherwise would be dispersed and lost’ (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona & New York, 1993, p. 294).