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Property from a private American Collection JOAN MIRÓ (1893-1983) Portrait signed and dated

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:2,500,000.00 - 3,500,000.00 USD
Property from a private American Collection JOAN MIRÓ (1893-1983) Portrait signed and dated
Property from a private American Collection
JOAN MIRÓ
(1893-1983)
Portrait
signed and dated "Miró 1927" (lower right);
signed and dated "Miro 1927"
(on the reverse)
oil on canvas
57 1/2 x 44 7/8 in. (146 x 114 cm)
painted in 1927
Estimate: $2,500,000-3,500,000 <p>Provenance
Galerie Georges Bernheim, Paris
Helena Rubenstein, Paris and New York (by 1941; sale: Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., New York, April 20, 1966, lot 58)
Sol Kittay, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Société Philippe Maurice, Geneva (sale: Sotheby's, London, March 30, 1977, lot 45A)
Galerie Melki, Paris (acquired at the above sale; sale: Sotheby's,
New York, May 17, 1978, lot 74)
Private Collection, New York (acquired at the above sale)
The Pace Gallery, New York
Anon. sale: Christie's, New York, November 13, 1984, lot 141
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner <p>Exhibited
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Joan Miró, 1941-1942, p. 41, n.n.
New York, Acquavella Galleries, Inc., xix and xx century master paintings, 1983
Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Joan Miró, 1987, no. 2 <p>Literature
Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró-Life and Work, Paris, 1961, p. 515, no. 186a (illustrated, p. 219)
Mario Bucci, Miró, New York, 1968, pl. 24 (illustrated)
Pere Gimferrer, The Roots of Miró, Barcelona, 1993, pp. 122, 219 and 350, no. 349 (illustrated, fig. 207)
Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, 1908-1930, Paris, 1999, vol. I, p. 189, no. 251 (illustrated in color)
The present picture is a whimsical and imaginative example from the celebrated series of "dream paintings" that Miró made between 1925 and 1927, a period that witnessed a dramatic shift in the artist's aesthetic and that proved to be one of the most exceptional stages of his career. Since his arrival in Paris in 1921, Miró had been living at 45 rue Blomet, along with the painter André Masson and a band of young and innovative Surrealist poets known as the Blomet group. Miró was deeply impressed by the poetry that he heard discussed at Masson's studio ("I gorged myself on it all night long," he later recalled), and in 1925 he participated in the first group exhibition of the Surrealists at the Galerie Pierre. During these years, Miró's figurative and Cubist-inspired landscapes rapidly evolved into more allusive and abstract compositions, the detailed and densely packed imagery of his early paintings supplanted by concise ideographic signs. In an interview with Jacques Dupin near the end of his life, Miró recalled the profound importance of this period for his artistic evolution:
"The rue Blomet was a divine place, a decisive moment for me. It was there that I discovered everything I am, everything I would become... More than anything else, the rue Blomet was friendship, an exalted exchange of discovery of ideas among a marvelous group of friends. As for Breton and Eluard...they ignored my existence until my painting freed itself in the direction of poetry and dreams" (quoted in Margit Rowell, Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, pp. 101-102). Indeed, the poet André Breton, author of the Surrealist manifesto, later commented on the importance of Miró's achievement for Surrealism as a whole: "Miró's stormy adherence in 1924 marks an important date in the development of Surrealist art. Miró, who had at the time put behind him an art less evolved in spirit, but which displays essential plastic qualities, swiftly cleared away the last obstacles still barring the way to absolutely spontaneous expression. From that moment on his production testifies to an innocence and a freedom which have not been surpassed..." (quoted in Jacques Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993, p. 113).
Miró was particularly influenced by the Surrealist precept of automatism: "dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation," as Breton wrote (quoted in William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968, p. 64). As a point of departure for his paintings, Miró began to jot down fugitive impressions that he experienced during dream-like states - while hallucinating from hunger or exhaustion, for instance, or while staring fixedly at the rough surface of an old wall. As the artist explained, "Rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint, the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work..." (quoted in ibid., p. 68). At this stage, Miró would abandon automatism and develop the image in a deliberate and calculated way. His finished paintings, however, retain a poetic and dream-like quality, characterized by shifting and ambiguous references, spontaneous associations, and inventive uses of abstract form. Miró himself later commented on the origins of these watershed works:
"The discovery of Surrealism coincided for me with a crisis in my own painting and the decisive turning that...caused me to abandon realism for the imaginary. I spent a great deal of time with poets, because I thought you had to go beyond the plastic thing to reach poetry. Surrealism freed the unconscious, exalted desire, endowed art with additional powers... I painted as if in a dream, with the most total freedom. The canvases of this period are the most naked I have painted... I was very interested in the void, in perfect emptiness. I put it into the pale and scumbled grounds, and linear gestures on top were the signs of my dream progression..." (quoted in Joan Miró 1893-1983, exh. cat., Fundació Miró, Barcelona, 1993, pp. 180 and 194).
The present picture, at once charming and complex, is an excellent illustration of the results that Miró's new technique yielded. Developed from a preparatory sketch (FIG. 1), the completed oil painting suggests a bust in profile through the simplest possible means: zones of black and white indicating the head and neck, accented by a schematically rendered eye. Floating on a golden-brown background, the forms at first appear wholly abstract, only gradually coalescing into one of Miró's fanciful personnages. The bust format evokes the traditional genre of portraiture, with its goals of verisimilitude and psychological penetration - an effect that is heightened by the rectilinear base of the black field, which alludes to the pedestal of a sculpted bust. These established idioms, however, are subverted as quickly as they are summoned up. The deliberately titled Portrait is not in fact a portrait of a specific person, but merely a cipher of human form. The prominent eye, moreover, has been interpreted as a disembodied declaration of the artist's presence, making the painting at once a "non-portrait" and a brilliant psychological self-portrait.
Many of Miró's most compelling dream paintings suggest the human form in similarly innovative ways. In a 1927 canvas in Villeneuve d'Ascq, for instance, the artist conjures up the image of a bullfighter through only two lines, a black rectangle, and a small red circle (FIG. 2); in the Guggenheim Museum's Personnage, an enigmatic amoeba-like shape gains an inescapably human quality with the simple and witty addition of a hatched crescent that functions as an ideogram for a smiling mouth. Not coincidentally, Picasso was experimenting during these same years with the reduction of the human form to just a few evocative signs. As fellow Spaniards, Picasso and Miró were close. Miró drew support from his older colleague, as indicated by a letter that he wrote to him early in 1925: "My dear friend, you did me a lot of good this morning. Before going to see you, I was plunged in black ideas that you chased away... Once again I follow the path of my imperious need to work. Thank you" (quoted in Carolyn Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 32). Yet Picasso in turn was undeniably influenced by Miró's work, particularly by the sense of avant-garde challenge that his dream paintings represented. As Picasso's biographer, Pierre Daix, has written, "Miró's effect on Picasso was striking" (P. Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, Paris, 1993, p. 205); and Breton unequivocally declared, "One might say that [Miró's] influence on Picasso, who joined the Surrealists two years later, was decisive" (quoted in ibid., p. 205).
Examples of Miró's dream paintings may be found today in numerous major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
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