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拍品专文
“During these tragic years, I have continued working every day, and this has helped me keep my balance—my work has kept me on my feet; otherwise I would have gone under; it would have been a catastrophe.” – Joan Miró (letter to P. Loeb, 30 August 1945; quoted in M. Rowell, p. 197).
In 1939, Joan Miró published a statement in the avant-garde journal, Cahiers d’Art, in which he boldly proclaimed the power of art in times of hardship and fear. Faced with the harrowing reality of war in his home country of Spain, and the rapidly worsening political tensions that were then sweeping across Europe, Miró’s response was not only timely, but also a defiant reminder of the importance of continuing to create in times of threat. “The outer world, the world of contemporary events, always has an influence on the painter—that goes without saying. If the interplay of lines and colors does not expose the inner drama of the creator, then it is nothing more than bourgeois entertainment. The forms expressed by an individual who is part of society must reveal the movement of a soul trying to escape the present, which is particularly ignoble today, in order to approach new realities, to offer other men the possibility of rising above the present” (“Statement,” in Cahiers d’Art, Paris, April-May, 1939; quoted in Rowell, p. 166).
The trio of drawings from this distinguished family collection offer a rare, concentrated glimpse into Miró’s astounding creativity and perseverance during the Second World War, as he continued to work in the shadow of the conflict. Created over the course of just two and a half weeks in October and November 1942, together they reveal the multiple threads that occupied and overlapped within the artist’s imagination during this period, simultaneously harking back to the configuration of forms that had populated his famed series of Constellation paintings of 1940-1941, and boldly pushing into new realms of creative experimentation.
Following the outbreak of the war, and anticipating the occupation off France by Germany, Miró and his family returned to Spain in July 1940. Over the course of the following five years, he lived and worked largely in isolation, cut off from the art world and his network of painter friends and acquaintances in Paris. Though plagued with anxiety about the conflict and his ever-worsening financial circumstances, these years spent working intensively on his own, exploring his meandering thoughts without interference, allowed Miró to reach a new level of pictorial maturity and self-confidence in his abilities. As Jacques Dupin has explained, the array of watercolors, drawings, pastels and gouaches that emerged as a result of this forced break were “characterized by a freedom of invention and marvelous effortlessness” (Dupin, p. 257).
Common shapes and forms appear across the three different works offered in this sale, conjuring a cast of amorphous figures that appear at once familiar and distinctly otherworldly, their bodies an amalgamation of geometric and flowing, curvilinear shapes. Showcasing the endless variety and inventiveness of Miró’s pictorial vocabulary, these three compositions also reveal the importance of his ongoing explorations of materiality in his works on paper. Though wartime restrictions had left him short of many materials, these drawings are nevertheless filled with the same intensity of expression and lyrical approach to form as his most complex paintings in oil, created using an array of contrasting techniques and media. Varying types of inks, pencils and pigments were combined within a single sheet, creating intriguing juxtapositions and unexpected correspondences that fed Miró’s fervent imagination and prompted new directions of thinking in his work.
“I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed within myself purposely.” – Joan Miró (quoted in W. Rubin, Miró in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1973, p. 82).
Created on Friday 13 November 1942, Femmes rêvant de l’évasion is an evocatively titled work, that captures the spontaneity and invention that marked Joan Miró’s works on paper during the war years. In the early 1930s, Miró had moved away from poetic or overtly descriptive titles in his oeuvre, wary of their ability to ascribe meaning to his works, investing them with interpretations he otherwise wished to avoid. However, during the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, when the artist was living in exile in France, the need for poetry struck him once again. Miró returned to writing and inventing lyrical titles for his works, the combination of phrases or words coming spontaneously to mind as he worked on each particular image. While most often not directly tied to the imagery of the work, as Margit Rowell has explained, “This parallel verbal poetry, which is never denotative or descriptive, enriches—in fact mythologizes—the iconography of the painting” (Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 169).
The title of Femmes rêvant de l’évasion instantly conjures an image of a group of women, recasting the amorphous beings of the drawing into distinct characters, lost in a reverie as they dream of escape. While the wartime context in which the drawing was created prompts us to view the scene as one in which the characters hope for a route out of the conflict, there is a timelessness to the poetic statement, evoking the universal desire to slip away from the mundanity or difficulty of our reality, if only for a moment. The dramatic splash of watercolor to the upper right hand side of the page casts a delicate spattering of dots across the sheet, blurring the sense of space as the characters appear to alternately float atop the pigment, or sink into the clouds of color. The spontaneity of this splash of watercolor offers a sharp contrast to the precise, linear depictions of the forms described in ink across the page, creating a palpable pictorial tension that draws the eye in multiple different directions at once.
In 1939, Joan Miró published a statement in the avant-garde journal, Cahiers d’Art, in which he boldly proclaimed the power of art in times of hardship and fear. Faced with the harrowing reality of war in his home country of Spain, and the rapidly worsening political tensions that were then sweeping across Europe, Miró’s response was not only timely, but also a defiant reminder of the importance of continuing to create in times of threat. “The outer world, the world of contemporary events, always has an influence on the painter—that goes without saying. If the interplay of lines and colors does not expose the inner drama of the creator, then it is nothing more than bourgeois entertainment. The forms expressed by an individual who is part of society must reveal the movement of a soul trying to escape the present, which is particularly ignoble today, in order to approach new realities, to offer other men the possibility of rising above the present” (“Statement,” in Cahiers d’Art, Paris, April-May, 1939; quoted in Rowell, p. 166).
The trio of drawings from this distinguished family collection offer a rare, concentrated glimpse into Miró’s astounding creativity and perseverance during the Second World War, as he continued to work in the shadow of the conflict. Created over the course of just two and a half weeks in October and November 1942, together they reveal the multiple threads that occupied and overlapped within the artist’s imagination during this period, simultaneously harking back to the configuration of forms that had populated his famed series of Constellation paintings of 1940-1941, and boldly pushing into new realms of creative experimentation.
Following the outbreak of the war, and anticipating the occupation off France by Germany, Miró and his family returned to Spain in July 1940. Over the course of the following five years, he lived and worked largely in isolation, cut off from the art world and his network of painter friends and acquaintances in Paris. Though plagued with anxiety about the conflict and his ever-worsening financial circumstances, these years spent working intensively on his own, exploring his meandering thoughts without interference, allowed Miró to reach a new level of pictorial maturity and self-confidence in his abilities. As Jacques Dupin has explained, the array of watercolors, drawings, pastels and gouaches that emerged as a result of this forced break were “characterized by a freedom of invention and marvelous effortlessness” (Dupin, p. 257).
Common shapes and forms appear across the three different works offered in this sale, conjuring a cast of amorphous figures that appear at once familiar and distinctly otherworldly, their bodies an amalgamation of geometric and flowing, curvilinear shapes. Showcasing the endless variety and inventiveness of Miró’s pictorial vocabulary, these three compositions also reveal the importance of his ongoing explorations of materiality in his works on paper. Though wartime restrictions had left him short of many materials, these drawings are nevertheless filled with the same intensity of expression and lyrical approach to form as his most complex paintings in oil, created using an array of contrasting techniques and media. Varying types of inks, pencils and pigments were combined within a single sheet, creating intriguing juxtapositions and unexpected correspondences that fed Miró’s fervent imagination and prompted new directions of thinking in his work.
“I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed within myself purposely.” – Joan Miró (quoted in W. Rubin, Miró in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1973, p. 82).
Created on Friday 13 November 1942, Femmes rêvant de l’évasion is an evocatively titled work, that captures the spontaneity and invention that marked Joan Miró’s works on paper during the war years. In the early 1930s, Miró had moved away from poetic or overtly descriptive titles in his oeuvre, wary of their ability to ascribe meaning to his works, investing them with interpretations he otherwise wished to avoid. However, during the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, when the artist was living in exile in France, the need for poetry struck him once again. Miró returned to writing and inventing lyrical titles for his works, the combination of phrases or words coming spontaneously to mind as he worked on each particular image. While most often not directly tied to the imagery of the work, as Margit Rowell has explained, “This parallel verbal poetry, which is never denotative or descriptive, enriches—in fact mythologizes—the iconography of the painting” (Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 169).
The title of Femmes rêvant de l’évasion instantly conjures an image of a group of women, recasting the amorphous beings of the drawing into distinct characters, lost in a reverie as they dream of escape. While the wartime context in which the drawing was created prompts us to view the scene as one in which the characters hope for a route out of the conflict, there is a timelessness to the poetic statement, evoking the universal desire to slip away from the mundanity or difficulty of our reality, if only for a moment. The dramatic splash of watercolor to the upper right hand side of the page casts a delicate spattering of dots across the sheet, blurring the sense of space as the characters appear to alternately float atop the pigment, or sink into the clouds of color. The spontaneity of this splash of watercolor offers a sharp contrast to the precise, linear depictions of the forms described in ink across the page, creating a palpable pictorial tension that draws the eye in multiple different directions at once.