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Lot Essay
ADOM (Association pour la défense de l'oeuvre de Joan Miró) has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Painted in November 1939, this gouache is the record of the reunion between Miró and a dear Catalan friend, the writer Francesc Trabal (1899-1957), which took place either in the cottage “Les Clos des Sansonettes” on the English Channel coast at Varengeville, which the artist had rented in late August, or during a meeting in Paris. Trabal had been forced to flee Barcelona earlier that year, following the fascist General Franco’s defeat of the Loyalist supporters of the Spanish Republic, and was making his way to Le Havre, there to embark on an exile that eventually brought him to Chile.
Miró had taken the precaution of moving his family and work to Varengeville as the certainty of a wider European conflict appeared imminent, and in fact Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September. Hostilities on the western front remained limited during the period known as “the phony war,” which lasted until the German thrust into the Low Countries and France during May 1940. By this time Miró had already completed in Varengeville the first eight of his celebrated series of twenty-three Constellations (Dupin, nos. 628-650). He and his family then fled south to escape the German blitzkrieg rapidly advancing toward the Channel coast.
Trabal is the author of “A Conversation with Joan Miró,” the first-ever interview to feature the artist, which the Catalan nationalist newspaper La publicitat, Barcelona, published on 14 July 1928 (see M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, pp. 91-98). One of the most notable voices in the resurgence of Catalan literature during the 1930s under the liberal policies of the Spanish Republic, Trabal published Vals (“The Waltz”), his finest and best-known novel, in 1935, the year before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The Dalkey Archive, London, published in 2013, as part of its Catalan Literature Series, Martha Tennent’s recent translation of Vals into English. As an avid reader and often a friend of contemporary poets and novelists, especially those writing in Catalan, Miró would have surely known Trabal’s Vals, and likely alludes to the book in this painting, which he dedicated as a personal tribute to his friend.
The novel Vals is a kind of portrait of the artist as a young Catalan, which recounts the emerging romantic feelings of Zenzi, an appealing nineteen-year-old who–like the author Trabal early in his own life–seems set on making a life for himself as a writer. Young women find him intelligent, attractive and personable; he is drawn to a number of them, each for her particular qualities, so that they become like the changing partners in a waltz. “Even with his eyes shut,” the author wrote, “he kept seeing figures spinning around, a never ending parade” (op. cit., 2013, pp. 40-41). His feelings eventually focus on a young woman named Raya. The ominous portents embodied in the shark-like bird and black crescent moon in Miró’s composition may pertain to her; but in deference to the potential reader of The Waltz, nothing further will be revealed in this note.
Painted in November 1939, this gouache is the record of the reunion between Miró and a dear Catalan friend, the writer Francesc Trabal (1899-1957), which took place either in the cottage “Les Clos des Sansonettes” on the English Channel coast at Varengeville, which the artist had rented in late August, or during a meeting in Paris. Trabal had been forced to flee Barcelona earlier that year, following the fascist General Franco’s defeat of the Loyalist supporters of the Spanish Republic, and was making his way to Le Havre, there to embark on an exile that eventually brought him to Chile.
Miró had taken the precaution of moving his family and work to Varengeville as the certainty of a wider European conflict appeared imminent, and in fact Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September. Hostilities on the western front remained limited during the period known as “the phony war,” which lasted until the German thrust into the Low Countries and France during May 1940. By this time Miró had already completed in Varengeville the first eight of his celebrated series of twenty-three Constellations (Dupin, nos. 628-650). He and his family then fled south to escape the German blitzkrieg rapidly advancing toward the Channel coast.
Trabal is the author of “A Conversation with Joan Miró,” the first-ever interview to feature the artist, which the Catalan nationalist newspaper La publicitat, Barcelona, published on 14 July 1928 (see M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, pp. 91-98). One of the most notable voices in the resurgence of Catalan literature during the 1930s under the liberal policies of the Spanish Republic, Trabal published Vals (“The Waltz”), his finest and best-known novel, in 1935, the year before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The Dalkey Archive, London, published in 2013, as part of its Catalan Literature Series, Martha Tennent’s recent translation of Vals into English. As an avid reader and often a friend of contemporary poets and novelists, especially those writing in Catalan, Miró would have surely known Trabal’s Vals, and likely alludes to the book in this painting, which he dedicated as a personal tribute to his friend.
The novel Vals is a kind of portrait of the artist as a young Catalan, which recounts the emerging romantic feelings of Zenzi, an appealing nineteen-year-old who–like the author Trabal early in his own life–seems set on making a life for himself as a writer. Young women find him intelligent, attractive and personable; he is drawn to a number of them, each for her particular qualities, so that they become like the changing partners in a waltz. “Even with his eyes shut,” the author wrote, “he kept seeing figures spinning around, a never ending parade” (op. cit., 2013, pp. 40-41). His feelings eventually focus on a young woman named Raya. The ominous portents embodied in the shark-like bird and black crescent moon in Miró’s composition may pertain to her; but in deference to the potential reader of The Waltz, nothing further will be revealed in this note.