Joan Miró

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York 
Galerie Europe, Paris
Marlborough Gallery, London
Donald Morris Gallery, Inc., Birmingham, Michigan
Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago
Peder Bonnier, Inc., New York 
Maria Estelrich, New York
Acquired from the above in 1994

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné. Drawings II 1938-59, vol. II, Paris, 2010, no. 979, illustrated p. 100

Executed on cream wove paper which is very gently undulating due to the application of medium. There are pin holes to each corner and to the center of each edge. There are some fines lines of flattened creases to the center of the left edge. There is some paper rubbing to center of the lower edge due to previous mounting. Light discoloration to the sheet. A circa 10 cm long repaired vertical tear to the center of the upper edge with a slip of backing support on the reverse. This work is in overall fairly good condition.
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The advent of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 prevented Joan Miró from living in his home country for several years. Finally returning in 1940, the artist began to explore a wide range of media, though working on a small scale, due in no small part to limited supply of materials available in post-war Spain. The period from 1940 to 1945 proved pivotal in the forging of Miró’s distinctive style from this point onward, devising the visual vocabulary of elements that would populate his paintings and drawings for the remainder of his career. Whereas in the mid-1920s Miró experimented with poetic titles, sometimes transcribing them directly to the canvas, by the early 1930s he abandoned any titles except those of the most non-descriptive variety (e.g. Personnage, Figure, etc.), so as to avoid false interpretations of artwork. Yet he returned to more descriptive and poetic titles by the early 1940s, many of which he was inspired to create during the act of painting. Femmes devant l’horizon exemplifies Miró’s interest the female form as a motif, which would recurrently appear in his art throughout his long and varied career. Here, the figures he renders appear to float in an unidentified dreamscape. Miró frequently spoke about the relationship between dreams and his artistic creations, leading him to explore the use of empty reserve in his works, stating, “I wanted my spots to seem open to the magnetic appeal of the void, to make themselves available to it. I was very interested in the void, in perfect emptiness. I put it into my pale and scumbled grounds, and my linear gestures on the top were the signs of my dream progression” (quoted in Margit Rowell, ed., Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 264).