Sans titre (Danseuse espagnole)

Part lyrical fantasy, part abstracted juxtaposition, Joan Miró’s Sans titre (Danseuse espagnole) belongs to the artist’s earliest Surrealist output, during which his artistic approach radically altered; a preliminary drawing of this work can be found in Miro’s sketchbooks, marked with a brown X to indicate that he had completed the final composition for it. Miró travelled to Paris for the first time in 1920 and ended up remaining in the city for five years. While there, he became friends with André Masson, his neighbour, as well as Michel Leiris, Benjamin Péret, and Max Jacob, among others. These were exciting years in Paris, during which the avant-garde was flourishing: The first Surrealist Manifesto was published in 1924. Sans titre (Danseuse espagnole) captures the energy of this era, and the exciting aesthetic transformation that Miró himself was undergoing. ‘I’d go home in the evenings to my studio in the rue Blomet,’ he recalled of this time. ‘I’d go to bed, I hadn’t always eaten, I saw things, I noted them in notebooks. I saw shapes in the cracks in the walls, in the ceiling, especially the ceiling. It wasn’t much of a studio, but clean, I polished it every day, I tidied. Whereas my neighbour Masson!’ (J. Miró quoted in G. Picon, Joan Miró: Carnets Catalans: dessins et textes inédits, Geneva, 1976, p.72).
In the mid-1920s, Miró began to experiment with automatic writing as he embraced a looser idiom, seen in the gestural marks of Sans titre (Danseuse espagnole). Indeed, by the time he executed the present work, Miró was installed in Surrealist circles and aware of, if not necessarily participating in, their various attempts to cajole imagery from the depths of the unconscious mind. As Miró wrote to Leiris in 1924, ‘I am working furiously; you and all my other writer friends have given me much help and improved my understanding of many things… In spreading out my canvases, I have noticed that the ones that are simply drawn (or that use a minimum of colour); the intromission of exciting materials (colours), however stripped of pictorial meaning, shakes up your blood and the exalted sensation that claws at the soul is ruined’ (J. Miró to M. Leiris, 10 August 1924, in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 86).