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Lot Essay
La Cafetière is the second still-life among Miró's earliest paintings that Jacques Dupin recorded in his catalogue of the artist works (op. cit., 1999)–the first was executed in 1914, the previous year (Dupin, no. 3; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona). The adventurous modernist impulse in the temperament of the twenty-two year old Miró is already strongly apparent.
Miró probably painted La Cafetière before beginning his obligatory military service in mid-June 1915, while studying in Barcelona with the Círcol Artístc de San Lluc, whose members included Joan Prats and Josep Llorens Artigas, later the architect and ceramicist who remained Miró's life-long friends. A former student at San Lluc had already become famous: Antoni Gaudí, the architect of the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, whose "use of flowing organic shapes, and his revolutionary techniques," as Roland Penrose noted, "influenced Miró deeply throughout his life" (Miró, New York, 1969, p. 12).
On 15 March 1915 Miró wrote from Barcelona to his friend Bartomeu Ferrà, "I am working hard; all my efforts are directly toward constructing properly... My work will be stronger if, in addition to beauty of color, it has well-constructed form" (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 319). The landscapes Miró painted in 1915 make use of post-Impressionist divisionism (Dupin, nos. 4-8); while brilliantly colored, they lack a decisive treatment of space. "The still lifes [such as La Cafetière], on the other hand," Dupin declared, "–no doubt because the subject is more concentrated and because it imposes greater concentration on the artist–give evidence of real plastic vigor. Here Miró succeeds in bringing out the forms by treating them brutally, blending passionate line with tumultuous color. The influences of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse combine here to fertilize the Catalan sub-soil, and the result is a kind of Mediterranean expressionism... Through the saturated and muted colors of these paintings, the heaviness of the pigment is combatted by an impetuous, highly personal rhythm... Like Matisse, Miró indulges in his passion for color by setting up the usual objects of still lifes on Spanish tablecloths or in front of richly colored wallpapers or draperies. But he folds, crumples and twists the hangings and tablecloths, thereby giving them the appearance and movement of waves and hills, escarpments or ravines in the Tarragona countryside. He employs powerful, rough brush strokes, in the spirit of Cézanne, but cruder, more savage... The surface is never at rest; underground forces seem to govern its movements, to distend it, to make it surge. Even at this early date, external reality is threatened by the internal energy of an especially tyrannical subjectivity... he is already at grips with his personal demons" (Miro, Paris, 2012, pp. 40-41 and 44).
Miró probably painted La Cafetière before beginning his obligatory military service in mid-June 1915, while studying in Barcelona with the Círcol Artístc de San Lluc, whose members included Joan Prats and Josep Llorens Artigas, later the architect and ceramicist who remained Miró's life-long friends. A former student at San Lluc had already become famous: Antoni Gaudí, the architect of the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, whose "use of flowing organic shapes, and his revolutionary techniques," as Roland Penrose noted, "influenced Miró deeply throughout his life" (Miró, New York, 1969, p. 12).
On 15 March 1915 Miró wrote from Barcelona to his friend Bartomeu Ferrà, "I am working hard; all my efforts are directly toward constructing properly... My work will be stronger if, in addition to beauty of color, it has well-constructed form" (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 319). The landscapes Miró painted in 1915 make use of post-Impressionist divisionism (Dupin, nos. 4-8); while brilliantly colored, they lack a decisive treatment of space. "The still lifes [such as La Cafetière], on the other hand," Dupin declared, "–no doubt because the subject is more concentrated and because it imposes greater concentration on the artist–give evidence of real plastic vigor. Here Miró succeeds in bringing out the forms by treating them brutally, blending passionate line with tumultuous color. The influences of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse combine here to fertilize the Catalan sub-soil, and the result is a kind of Mediterranean expressionism... Through the saturated and muted colors of these paintings, the heaviness of the pigment is combatted by an impetuous, highly personal rhythm... Like Matisse, Miró indulges in his passion for color by setting up the usual objects of still lifes on Spanish tablecloths or in front of richly colored wallpapers or draperies. But he folds, crumples and twists the hangings and tablecloths, thereby giving them the appearance and movement of waves and hills, escarpments or ravines in the Tarragona countryside. He employs powerful, rough brush strokes, in the spirit of Cézanne, but cruder, more savage... The surface is never at rest; underground forces seem to govern its movements, to distend it, to make it surge. Even at this early date, external reality is threatened by the internal energy of an especially tyrannical subjectivity... he is already at grips with his personal demons" (Miro, Paris, 2012, pp. 40-41 and 44).