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Dimensions: measurements 73 by 92cm. alternate measurements 28 3/4 by 36 1/4 in.

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Provenance: Acquired by the family of the present owner in Paris circa 1937

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Notes: To be included in the supplement to the Miró Catalogue raisonné being prepared by Jacques Dupin.
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED FRENCH COLLECTION
Painted at the height of his involvement with the Surrealist group, Miró?s Peinture of 1926 brilliantly exemplifies the artist?s move towards his supremely abstract canvases. Unlike Dalí and Magritte?s figurative version of Surrealism, Miró?s artistic development took a different turn. He joined the group in 1924, and participated in their first exhibition held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. André Breton commented that Miró ?may be looked upon as the most Surrealist among us? (A. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, quoted in Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 156). Breton?s first Surrealist manifesto of 1924 proclaimed: ?in the future resolution of the two states, seemingly so contradictory, which are dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality?. This new ideology encouraged Miró to eliminate representation from his canvases. Coinciding with his own pictorial experiments, it encouraged him to abandon realism in favour of the imaginary. In the present work, as in his most accomplished paintings of this period (figs. 1 & 2), he used whimsical and ambiguous forms that first appear abstract, only to gradually take form in shifting and delightful ways. In its powerful simplicity, Peinture reveals a mastery of the void, exploring a very new sense of space. Deceptively childlike in execution, the composition exhibits a sophisticated ambiguity in elements with multiple readings. It is composed of a brightly coloured red dot and yellow and green flame-like forms, these solid shapes contrasted with the thin, freely meandering black lines and a white-headed creature set against the earthly-coloured bare canvas. Jacques Dupin commented about this childlike quality of Miró?s works from this period: ?What Miró did achieve was the arduous conquest of powers lost since childhood. And he succeeded by going his own way, stubbornly, passionately, with conscious fidelity to his own gifts and to the conditions of painting. It was from the inside, by pushing painting to its extreme consequences, that he made it possible to go beyond paintings, to reach the domain that lies beyond it? (ibid., p. 156). His technique shows affinities with automatism, a concept central to the Surrealist thought. Verging between figuration and abstraction, Miró?s whimsical forms originate from the world of dreams and the unconscious, their other-worldly character emphasised by the void of the background that the images populate. As in Miró?s most successful works of the 1920s, this remarkable composition consists of a visual vocabulary of ?image-signs?. These images bear no resemblance to the natural world, and their function is more akin to that of words or music than to a literal representation of nature. As Jacques Dupin commented, they are ?devoid of all materiality, all corporeal density. Because of their spectral appearance, they seem to be figures of yet unborn, still not given life. They ignore the laws of gravitation; they hover in the clouds or glide through liquid or viscous matter. They are the very substance of dreams and hallucinations? (ibid., p. 164). As such they defy precise interpretation, a characteristic emphasised by the elusive title of the work. Miró had experimented with incorporating poetry, or lyrical text, into some of his pictures of this period, but then largely rejected the use of highly descriptive titles in favour of intangible ones such as Peinture or Composition. The artist himself declared: ?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? (quoted in Joan Miró (exhibition catalogue), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 180). Fig. 1, Joan Miró, Peinture, 1927, tempera and oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fig. 2, Joan Miró, Peinture, 1927, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London