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Lot Essay
Pierre Matisse gave Miró a one-man exhibition in his New York gallery in November to December 1953 in which he included virtually all of his recent paintings, about sixty in all. The catalogue text was written by James Johnson Sweeney, the director of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Miró may have painted the present gouache in conjunction with several lithographs that he executed to illustrate the catalogue.
This gouache is notable for its unusual all-over spotted look, in which Miró applied many large and small dots by dipping his fingertips in wet paint and dabbing the color onto the sheet. He appears to have brushed on the thick black graphic elements first, added the spots of color and then applied a few flourishes in black ink with a fine brush. This swirling network of multi-colored spots recalls the bead-like forms of color that Miró attached to the meandering tendrils which enliven and unify the surface in many of the works in his famous Constellations series of 1940-1941.
Miró also used his fingertips to create dotted lines and patterns in the largest and most important painting that he executed in 1953, a work he simply titled Peinture, which Sweeney acquired for The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Dupin, no. 927). The use of dotted lines looks back to a similar effect that Miró employed in a small number of paintings he made during the summer of 1938, including La caresse des étoiles (lot 33). Taking the idea of the fingerprint motif a step further, Miró pressed his entire paint-covered handprint on to the canvas in two paintings done in 1953 (Dupin, nos. 996-997). He continued the use of dotted lines and spotted surfaces in paintings he made during the following year.
The subject in the present gouache is familiar from many oil paintings and works on paper: Miró has included here two black stars, two personages, and in the black cloud-like shape at lower right, a third star in white that hovers over a sleeping bird form. While some of the spots appear to have been applied randomly, most appear to follow the contours of the black elements or cluster closely around them, as in the forms seen in the Guggenheim oil Peinture. The overall effect, a kind of latter-day pointillism, suggests a cosmic dimension, or the atomic particles that comprise all matter.
This gouache is notable for its unusual all-over spotted look, in which Miró applied many large and small dots by dipping his fingertips in wet paint and dabbing the color onto the sheet. He appears to have brushed on the thick black graphic elements first, added the spots of color and then applied a few flourishes in black ink with a fine brush. This swirling network of multi-colored spots recalls the bead-like forms of color that Miró attached to the meandering tendrils which enliven and unify the surface in many of the works in his famous Constellations series of 1940-1941.
Miró also used his fingertips to create dotted lines and patterns in the largest and most important painting that he executed in 1953, a work he simply titled Peinture, which Sweeney acquired for The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Dupin, no. 927). The use of dotted lines looks back to a similar effect that Miró employed in a small number of paintings he made during the summer of 1938, including La caresse des étoiles (lot 33). Taking the idea of the fingerprint motif a step further, Miró pressed his entire paint-covered handprint on to the canvas in two paintings done in 1953 (Dupin, nos. 996-997). He continued the use of dotted lines and spotted surfaces in paintings he made during the following year.
The subject in the present gouache is familiar from many oil paintings and works on paper: Miró has included here two black stars, two personages, and in the black cloud-like shape at lower right, a third star in white that hovers over a sleeping bird form. While some of the spots appear to have been applied randomly, most appear to follow the contours of the black elements or cluster closely around them, as in the forms seen in the Guggenheim oil Peinture. The overall effect, a kind of latter-day pointillism, suggests a cosmic dimension, or the atomic particles that comprise all matter.