Lot Essay
Although Miró had created Surrealist painting-objects during the late 1920s and 1930s, it was not until a decade later, while he was living in Palma, Montroig and Barcelona during the Second World War, that he considered making free-standing sculptures. He wrote in his Working Notes, 1941-1942, "it is in sculpture that I will create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters; what I do in painting is more conventional" (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 175). He began to create sculptures as a further development in the ceramic objects he was making in collaboration with Josep Artigas. The possibility of undertaking larger and more imposing sculptures became a reality when Miró's "big studio," about which the artist had dreamed for years, was finally built in 1956, in Palma.
Jacques Dupin mentioned in his comprehensive monograph on Miró how he had initially looked upon the artist's sculptures as works created in conjunction with his better known achievements in painting, collage and ceramics. However, he eventually revised this view, in light of the scope and scale of the artist's later work in bronze:
The sculptures from the last two decades of Miró's productive life took on a broad place and force...For Miró, sculpture became an intrinsic adventure, an important means of expression that competed with the canvas and sheet of paper--the domains and artistic spaces proper to Miró--without ever simply being a mere derivative or deviation from painting. Miró's approach and conception of sculpture offered him an immediate contact with a reality that, in painting, was attainable through the screen of an elaborately constructed language (in Miró, Barcelona, 2004, pp. 361 and 367).
Jacques Dupin mentioned in his comprehensive monograph on Miró how he had initially looked upon the artist's sculptures as works created in conjunction with his better known achievements in painting, collage and ceramics. However, he eventually revised this view, in light of the scope and scale of the artist's later work in bronze:
The sculptures from the last two decades of Miró's productive life took on a broad place and force...For Miró, sculpture became an intrinsic adventure, an important means of expression that competed with the canvas and sheet of paper--the domains and artistic spaces proper to Miró--without ever simply being a mere derivative or deviation from painting. Miró's approach and conception of sculpture offered him an immediate contact with a reality that, in painting, was attainable through the screen of an elaborately constructed language (in Miró, Barcelona, 2004, pp. 361 and 367).