胡安·米羅

Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris

Mme Andrée Heinbach, Paris (acquired from the above circa 1930)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, London, 1962, no. 158, illustrated p. 513

Pere Gimferrer, The Roots of Miró, New York, 1993, no. 300, fig. 172, illustrated in colour p. 104

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 1999, vol. I, no. 211, illustrated p. 160

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in very good original condition. Colours: In comparison to the printed catalogue illustration, the colours are overall less warm in the original.
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Painted at the height of his involvement with the Surrealist group, Miró’s Peinture of 1926 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 J. Dupin, op. cit., 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. At the time he painted the present work, Miró was sharing a studio on rue Blomet with André Masson, and the sharp triangular forms that he developed at the time foreshadow Masson's own imagery in the following years.

 

In the present work, as in his most accomplished paintings of this period (figs. 2 & 3), Miró used whimsical and ambiguous forms that first appear abstract, only to gradually take form in shifting and delightful ways. In its powerful simplicity, Peinture reveals a mastery of the void, exploring a very new sense of space. Deceptively childlike in execution, the composition exhibits a sophisticated ambiguity in elements with multiple readings. It is composed of varyingly defined shapes in red, yellow, black and white, contrasted with the thin, freely meandering black lines. The intentionally layered background of smeared drips of paint and pigment applied with a sponge on the earthly-coloured bare canvas create a dynamic backgrop to Miró's visual vocabulary. Jacques Dupin commented about this childlike 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).

 

His technique shows affinities with automatism, a concept central to Surrealist thought. 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. As in Miró’s most successful works of the 1920s, this remarkable composition consists of a visual vocabulary of ‘image-signs’. These images bear no resemblance to the natural world, and their function is more akin to that of words or music than to a literal representation of nature. As Jacques Dupin commented, they are ‘devoid of all materiality, all corporeal density. Because of their spectral appearance, they seem to be figures of yet unborn, still not given life. They ignore the laws of gravitation; they hover in the clouds or glide through liquid or viscous matter. They are the very substance of dreams and hallucinations’ (ibid., p. 164).

 

As such they defy precise interpretation, a characteristic emphasised by the generic title of the work. Miró had experimented with incorporating poetry, or lyrical text, into some of his pictures of this period, but then largely rejected the use of highly descriptive titles in favour of intangible ones such as Peinture or Composition. The artist himself declared: ‘I spent a great deal of time with poets, because I thought you had to go beyond the plastic thing to reach poetry. Surrealism freed the unconscious, exalted desire, endowed art with additional powers […]. I painted as if in a dream, with the most total freedom. The canvases of this period are the most naked I have painted’ (quoted in Joan Miró (exhibition catalogue), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 180).