Joan Miró

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired by the late 1930s)
Private Collection, Florida

Wilmington Museum of Art; University of Pittsburgh; Illinois, Springfield Art Association; Art Association of New Orleans; Des Moines Art Association & Durham, Duke University, Classic and Romantic Traditions in Abstract Painting (traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York), 1939-40

Executed on black wove paper, not laid down and t-hinged to a mount at the upper to corners on verso. The sheet is slightly time-stained at the extreme edges. Overall, this work is in good original condition.
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The present work belongs to a series of gouaches made during the summer of 1934, an immensely rich and experimental period in Miró’s career. It was during this time that Miró developed the iconography and pictorial vocabulary that would pervade the remainder of his unique oeuvre. Executed a few months before a right-wing coup against the government of the Second Spanish Republic unleashed a brutal civil war, Sans titre captures some of the anxieties that weighed heavily on the artist. As Jacques Dupin writes, “In the gouache drawings made during the summer of 1934, the combination of gouache with black lead pencil does not appear once. Instead a very special technique is brought into play. The arabesque produces closed forms that cover the entire surface of the paper, and the gouache is used in flat areas of pure color, localized in one corner of the paper to create an imbalance that skillfully generates an invisible dynamism. We also find for the first time in these gouache drawing ellipsoid forms and elongated elements that have been deformed, twisted, and thinned down as though by the effect of some spiral force... In this period, Miró’s interior reflections are marvelously harmonious, euphoric even, as far removed from the hallucinations of 1925 as from the cruel figurations we shall encounter next” (Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró Life and Work, New York, 1961, pp. 258-59).