- 35
Joan Miró
Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 USD
bidding is closed
Description
- Joan Miró
- Chien enragé par une nuit de lune hantée par les amours des oiseaux
- Signed Miró (lower right); signed Miró, titled and dated 1955 on the reverse
- Oil on paper mounted on cardboard
- 8 3/8 by 10 3/8 in.
- 21.3 by 26.3 cm
Provenance
Galerie Maeght, Paris
Anders Dalén, Lidingö, Sweden
Perls Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above in May 1986
Exhibited
Liljevalchs, Kosthall, Joan Miró, 1972, no. 12
Literature
Jacques Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1961, no. 876, p. 550
Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné, vol. III: 1942-1955, no. 993, illustrated p. 250
Catalogue Note
With its playful and evocative title, this 1955 work presents familiar characters from Miró's imagined universe. The work's title, A Dog Enraged by a Moonlit Night, Haunted by the Love of Birds- finds its origin in the automatic writing espoused by the Surrealists but its correlation to the painting is legible. Miró delights in the absurdism of this narrative.
By the time he executed this work, Miró had developed a lexicon of signs and symbols that weaved among his compositions. As Jacques Dupin wrote with regard to the works of mid-1950s: "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" (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Barcelona & New York, 1993, p. 294).
By the time he executed this work, Miró had developed a lexicon of signs and symbols that weaved among his compositions. As Jacques Dupin wrote with regard to the works of mid-1950s: "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" (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Barcelona & New York, 1993, p. 294).