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Lot Essay
Joan Miró and Josep Llorens Artigas met in 1912 in Barcelona and their friendship flourished during their studies together at the art school run by Francesc Galí. Their long and highly productive artistic collaboration began in the summer of 1944. Artigas’s studio was filled with vases and pots that had been slightly misshapen or discoloured during the first stage of the firing process, and Miró was fascinated by the irregular forms and unique hues of this vast array of beautifully crafted objects. Choosing the vases he found most intriguing, Miró began to paint directly on to their surfaces, with Artigas producing a series of special glazes for him to use. These allowed Miró to achieve a greater luminosity in his forms, the fluid glaze providing more vibrant, brighter, and translucent hues than traditional materials.
During the sixties, Miró and Artigas's created a series of sculptures and ceramics for the garden of the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. The collection of vases realised in this period, including the present work, are considered the most fascinating ones, thanks to their subtle hints to Japanese pottery.
As Jacques Dupin has explained, these experiments in ceramics allowed Miró to explore new creative avenues, opening his highly personal artistic language to new possibilities: ‘The requirements of ceramics altered Miró’s line, simplified his colours, exaggerated his rhythms. He dove into nature’s vast reserve, which surrounded him and the abandoned objects that he gathered. We run into his familiar themes, but the bird and the woman, serpents and stars have changed worlds and have submitted to ceramic’s materiality as well as to the rules of its game. The union of line and real space, of colour and substance, recaptures the primitive resonance of his savage paintings. Here, it is the flames of the kiln, after a slow alchemical process, that perform the integration of mind into matter’ (J. Dupin, ‘Terres de Grand Feu,’ in Joan Miró - Josep Llorens Artigas: Ceramics Catalogue raisonné, 1941-1981, ed. J. Punyet Miró & J. Gardy Artigas, Paris, 2007, p. 22).
During the sixties, Miró and Artigas's created a series of sculptures and ceramics for the garden of the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. The collection of vases realised in this period, including the present work, are considered the most fascinating ones, thanks to their subtle hints to Japanese pottery.
As Jacques Dupin has explained, these experiments in ceramics allowed Miró to explore new creative avenues, opening his highly personal artistic language to new possibilities: ‘The requirements of ceramics altered Miró’s line, simplified his colours, exaggerated his rhythms. He dove into nature’s vast reserve, which surrounded him and the abandoned objects that he gathered. We run into his familiar themes, but the bird and the woman, serpents and stars have changed worlds and have submitted to ceramic’s materiality as well as to the rules of its game. The union of line and real space, of colour and substance, recaptures the primitive resonance of his savage paintings. Here, it is the flames of the kiln, after a slow alchemical process, that perform the integration of mind into matter’ (J. Dupin, ‘Terres de Grand Feu,’ in Joan Miró - Josep Llorens Artigas: Ceramics Catalogue raisonné, 1941-1981, ed. J. Punyet Miró & J. Gardy Artigas, Paris, 2007, p. 22).