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拍品专文
The narrative of production in Miró’s oeuvre continually followed a process that alternated between creation, de-creation and re-creation. During the late 1920’s the artist declared he wanted to “assassinate painting,” and to this end pursued a plan of attack in which he often resorted to severely reduced formal means, the use of lowly materials, the construction of three-dimensional objects, or simply any approach to making art that stood apart from--and indeed undermined--the conventionally practiced technique of painting in oil on canvas, even in its then most advanced modernist guise. The large pictures that Miró had done during 1930 mark an extreme phase in this furious process of “successive destructions” that constitutes his concept of “anti-painting”; these are some of his wildest, most unaccountable creations (Dupin, nos. 318-322). Because “Miró himself has asserted that he wanted to kill painting,” Georges Bataille observed, “the decomposition was pushed to the point where nothing remained but some formless blotches on the cover (or, if you prefer, on the tombstone) of painting’s box of tricks. Thereafter, little colored and mad elements irrupted anew, which, today, have disappeared once more in his pictures, leaving only the trace of one knows not what disaster” (quoted in Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008, p. 89).
The year 1931, however, brought a new phase of renewal in this cyclic process. To mark this change Miró created during April several roughly schematic renderings of the head itself, the present painting and two others (Dupin, nos. 348-349), which appear to brim with excited vibrations of gestating ideas for the future. Emphatic lines of black paint weave in and about the pale, loosely washed ground, corralling small flashes of pure color, “clearing the way,” as Dupin noted, “for a new more affirmative, more powerful style which will subject lyrical flights to the rigorous control of the plastic artist. Poetry remains the supreme goal of Miró’s art, but his means for attaining it became richer and more complex. In short, his purpose became that of disciplining expression by opposing to lyricism the fruitful resistance of rigorous structures” (Miró, Paris, 2012, p. 161).
These Têtes d’homme are the progenitors of the extended series of paintings on Ingres paper that Miró created during the summer and early autumn of that year (Dupin, nos. 362-392). The artist described his method in a 1978 interview with Lluís Permanyer: “I painted this way after having become obsessed with ‘assassinating painting.’ I wanted to eliminate at the root an entire decrepit art, the old conception of painting, so that another art, more pure and authentic, would be born. So it was a question of a ‘positive crime’… I demanded a complete purity of spirit. I executed works from that period without any previous sketches… I did exactly what Matisse said to do and in a more profound way than the surrealists: I let myself be guided by my hand. Then I added the color. Color was very important in these works, because the black lines were very strong and left large white spaces; then I added the spots in oil to give the colors a maximum of richness and above all to achieve the creation of an atmosphere. Since the topic did not seem sufficiently clear, I almost always used realistic titles that came to me as I worked on the canvas and the composition led me to represent a man or a woman. I never did it in reverse, tying the work to the title” (quoted in Joan Miró 1883/1993, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 280).
The year 1931, however, brought a new phase of renewal in this cyclic process. To mark this change Miró created during April several roughly schematic renderings of the head itself, the present painting and two others (Dupin, nos. 348-349), which appear to brim with excited vibrations of gestating ideas for the future. Emphatic lines of black paint weave in and about the pale, loosely washed ground, corralling small flashes of pure color, “clearing the way,” as Dupin noted, “for a new more affirmative, more powerful style which will subject lyrical flights to the rigorous control of the plastic artist. Poetry remains the supreme goal of Miró’s art, but his means for attaining it became richer and more complex. In short, his purpose became that of disciplining expression by opposing to lyricism the fruitful resistance of rigorous structures” (Miró, Paris, 2012, p. 161).
These Têtes d’homme are the progenitors of the extended series of paintings on Ingres paper that Miró created during the summer and early autumn of that year (Dupin, nos. 362-392). The artist described his method in a 1978 interview with Lluís Permanyer: “I painted this way after having become obsessed with ‘assassinating painting.’ I wanted to eliminate at the root an entire decrepit art, the old conception of painting, so that another art, more pure and authentic, would be born. So it was a question of a ‘positive crime’… I demanded a complete purity of spirit. I executed works from that period without any previous sketches… I did exactly what Matisse said to do and in a more profound way than the surrealists: I let myself be guided by my hand. Then I added the color. Color was very important in these works, because the black lines were very strong and left large white spaces; then I added the spots in oil to give the colors a maximum of richness and above all to achieve the creation of an atmosphere. Since the topic did not seem sufficiently clear, I almost always used realistic titles that came to me as I worked on the canvas and the composition led me to represent a man or a woman. I never did it in reverse, tying the work to the title” (quoted in Joan Miró 1883/1993, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 280).