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Lot Essay
Jacques Dupin has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Danseuse belongs to a group of paintings on Ingres paper that Miró made in the summer of 1931. Executed at the height of Miró's prolonged attempts to destroy painting and free his art from the legacy of what he described as the "scum" that came before him, this series marks Miró's return to the traditional tools of his craft and a new beginning in his work.
The paintings on Ingres paper followed on the heels of the reliefs and sculptures made of refuse and other flotsam found around his farm in Montroig that Miró had been making in an attempt to free himself from all the conventional rules of painting.
Consisting solely of a series of wire-like forms, simple objects, familiar symbols and smooth, unbounded single brushstrokes of color, these paintings reflect the assemblages and found-object sculptures and reliefs that Miró had been making at that time. Many of these paintings were also based on a variety of found objects from the Montroig farm that served as spurs for the creation of the work. At the same time that he was working on these paintings however, Miró was also contemplating an important project for a ballet in collaboration with Georges Antheil. A number of the paintings consequently seem to reflect some of Miró's ideas for this ballet and Danseuse is clearly one. The theme of dancing plays an important part in much of Miró's work. He was himself a keen dancer and admirer of flamenco and the iconic figure of the "Spanish Dancer" recurs repeatedly in his work. In this work the wire-like lines that define the picture seem, like those of Picasso's 1929 wire sculptures, to articulate both the movement of the dancing figure through space and the structure of its body. Curved and extended to create a fine graphic pattern on the paper, the painted semi-abstract forms of the figure also generate their own elegant but original visual dance within the picture plane.
The present work was once in the celebrated collection of Roger Dutilleul (1873-1956), one of the most important collections of modern art, created over fifty years from 1905 to his death in 1956. The majority of Dutilleul's collection forms the core of the 20th Century art collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Lille at Villeneuve d'Ascq.
Danseuse belongs to a group of paintings on Ingres paper that Miró made in the summer of 1931. Executed at the height of Miró's prolonged attempts to destroy painting and free his art from the legacy of what he described as the "scum" that came before him, this series marks Miró's return to the traditional tools of his craft and a new beginning in his work.
The paintings on Ingres paper followed on the heels of the reliefs and sculptures made of refuse and other flotsam found around his farm in Montroig that Miró had been making in an attempt to free himself from all the conventional rules of painting.
Consisting solely of a series of wire-like forms, simple objects, familiar symbols and smooth, unbounded single brushstrokes of color, these paintings reflect the assemblages and found-object sculptures and reliefs that Miró had been making at that time. Many of these paintings were also based on a variety of found objects from the Montroig farm that served as spurs for the creation of the work. At the same time that he was working on these paintings however, Miró was also contemplating an important project for a ballet in collaboration with Georges Antheil. A number of the paintings consequently seem to reflect some of Miró's ideas for this ballet and Danseuse is clearly one. The theme of dancing plays an important part in much of Miró's work. He was himself a keen dancer and admirer of flamenco and the iconic figure of the "Spanish Dancer" recurs repeatedly in his work. In this work the wire-like lines that define the picture seem, like those of Picasso's 1929 wire sculptures, to articulate both the movement of the dancing figure through space and the structure of its body. Curved and extended to create a fine graphic pattern on the paper, the painted semi-abstract forms of the figure also generate their own elegant but original visual dance within the picture plane.
The present work was once in the celebrated collection of Roger Dutilleul (1873-1956), one of the most important collections of modern art, created over fifty years from 1905 to his death in 1956. The majority of Dutilleul's collection forms the core of the 20th Century art collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Lille at Villeneuve d'Ascq.