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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from Jacques Dupin.
Reflecting on his celebrated Constellations series, Miró singled out a period in his life when his work began to absorb and undergo demonstrable change: 'At Varengeville-sur-Mer, in 1939, there began a new stage in my work which had its source in music and nature. It was about the time the war broke out. I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings...' (in James Johnson Sweeney, 'Joan Miró: Comment and Interview', Partisan Review, no. 2, 1948, p. 210). Throughout the 1940s, Miró's work saw the consolidation of the themes of birds, stars and women that would become fundamental to the artist in his desire for his work to stretch the limits of the visual and to 'attain to music'. And its influence and development can be eminently felt in the present lot.
Where the Constellations had offered up intricacy and buzzing movement, this work demonstrates Miró's ability to achieve true balance through a delicacy of touch, in both form and composition. If it is musicality he aims to evoke it is one realised here through each form and colour that he places on the paper carrying the purity and spacing of single notes, eliciting a sense of spiritual serenity and order, drawn from the chaos that is elsewhere present in his work. It is an order realised through light subtlety - the line and the star are moved off the horizontal, tilted in such a way that they appear to set in motion a ripple of dynamism so that the droplets seem to cascade one by one down the paper, in a serpentine chain. The result is a tilting, liquid beauty that carries the eye from top to bottom. Indeed, Miró explained how the configuration for a number of his works had been triggered by liquid movement and by catching reflections of light on water, and that is echoed here.
The sublimation of the characters, the Personnage and the Oiseau, is not to deny the anecdotal nature of the scene in favour of pure form. Rather it serves to liberate both the figures themselves, which become continually probed in Miró's oeuvre, and the viewer, who is able then to make free, unrestrained associations. The composition succeeds in 'removing' the viewer by creating a space for cosmic, elemental contemplation that goes beyond the visual, and works towards 'attaining to music' and evoking the 'desire to escape' of which Miró speaks.
Reflecting on his celebrated Constellations series, Miró singled out a period in his life when his work began to absorb and undergo demonstrable change: 'At Varengeville-sur-Mer, in 1939, there began a new stage in my work which had its source in music and nature. It was about the time the war broke out. I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings...' (in James Johnson Sweeney, 'Joan Miró: Comment and Interview', Partisan Review, no. 2, 1948, p. 210). Throughout the 1940s, Miró's work saw the consolidation of the themes of birds, stars and women that would become fundamental to the artist in his desire for his work to stretch the limits of the visual and to 'attain to music'. And its influence and development can be eminently felt in the present lot.
Where the Constellations had offered up intricacy and buzzing movement, this work demonstrates Miró's ability to achieve true balance through a delicacy of touch, in both form and composition. If it is musicality he aims to evoke it is one realised here through each form and colour that he places on the paper carrying the purity and spacing of single notes, eliciting a sense of spiritual serenity and order, drawn from the chaos that is elsewhere present in his work. It is an order realised through light subtlety - the line and the star are moved off the horizontal, tilted in such a way that they appear to set in motion a ripple of dynamism so that the droplets seem to cascade one by one down the paper, in a serpentine chain. The result is a tilting, liquid beauty that carries the eye from top to bottom. Indeed, Miró explained how the configuration for a number of his works had been triggered by liquid movement and by catching reflections of light on water, and that is echoed here.
The sublimation of the characters, the Personnage and the Oiseau, is not to deny the anecdotal nature of the scene in favour of pure form. Rather it serves to liberate both the figures themselves, which become continually probed in Miró's oeuvre, and the viewer, who is able then to make free, unrestrained associations. The composition succeeds in 'removing' the viewer by creating a space for cosmic, elemental contemplation that goes beyond the visual, and works towards 'attaining to music' and evoking the 'desire to escape' of which Miró speaks.