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Lot Essay
In the late 1920s, Joan Miró’s work underwent a radical shift. He began to question the practice of painting and sought new forms of expression. Jacques Dupin has described the artist’s shift in style as a transition “from object to sign, from figurative space to imaginary space, from descriptive realism to a visionary, fantastic art” (Joan Miró, A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1987, p. 33). With a self-declared objective to “assassinate painting,” Miró’s work in this period was dominated by assemblages, collages of various materials, and an in depth exploration into the possibilities of drawing.
Miró described an almost visceral engagement with drawing in the immediacy he felt with the various media employed for works on paper: “I often work with my fingers; I feel the need to dive into the physical reality of the ink, the pigment, I have to get smeared with it from head to foot. A virginal piece of paper becomes exactly like this old newspaper” (ibid., p. 51). Following the path of this immediacy, Miró’s creations on paper allow his imagination free reign in the production of pictorial signs that would dance across the surface in charcoal, ink, collage, gouache and oil.
The present lot is from a series of eleven gouache-dessins which the artist executed in August 1934, at the height of his experimentation with works on paper. In the winter and spring immediately preceding their creation, he had begun working with new supports such as sheets of black paper and sandpaper, and experimenting with a powdered form of pastel and the many combinations these new materials offered, such as pastel with India ink and collage with painting. Abrupt shifts created by the juxtaposition of various textures and mediums introduced a tension that is only resolved and made rhythmic through the flexible interplay of the forms. Indeed, one feels the complete freedom of representation in the graphic play of the figures in the present work. The closed forms created by lines of Conté crayon cover the surface of the sheet, with smoothly applied gouache used to create flat areas of pure, saturated color. The localized color along the right edge creates a sense of imbalance, the physical sensation of movement, or as Dupin described, a “kind of dizzy gliding” (J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 2012, p. 183).
Works in this gouache-dessin series are rarely offered at auction, and several reside in public collections, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
(fig. 1) The artist in his Paris studio, 1936
Miró described an almost visceral engagement with drawing in the immediacy he felt with the various media employed for works on paper: “I often work with my fingers; I feel the need to dive into the physical reality of the ink, the pigment, I have to get smeared with it from head to foot. A virginal piece of paper becomes exactly like this old newspaper” (ibid., p. 51). Following the path of this immediacy, Miró’s creations on paper allow his imagination free reign in the production of pictorial signs that would dance across the surface in charcoal, ink, collage, gouache and oil.
The present lot is from a series of eleven gouache-dessins which the artist executed in August 1934, at the height of his experimentation with works on paper. In the winter and spring immediately preceding their creation, he had begun working with new supports such as sheets of black paper and sandpaper, and experimenting with a powdered form of pastel and the many combinations these new materials offered, such as pastel with India ink and collage with painting. Abrupt shifts created by the juxtaposition of various textures and mediums introduced a tension that is only resolved and made rhythmic through the flexible interplay of the forms. Indeed, one feels the complete freedom of representation in the graphic play of the figures in the present work. The closed forms created by lines of Conté crayon cover the surface of the sheet, with smoothly applied gouache used to create flat areas of pure, saturated color. The localized color along the right edge creates a sense of imbalance, the physical sensation of movement, or as Dupin described, a “kind of dizzy gliding” (J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 2012, p. 183).
Works in this gouache-dessin series are rarely offered at auction, and several reside in public collections, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
(fig. 1) The artist in his Paris studio, 1936