Lot 17 : Joan Miró (1893-1983)

Joan Miro - 1893-1983

Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2005
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Artist or Maker:

Joan Miró (1893-1983)

Title:

Montroig, La rivière

Description:

Montroig, La rivière
signed and dated 'Miró 1917' (lower left)
oil on canvas
19 1/4 x 23 1/2 in. (48.9 x 59.7 cm.)
Painted in 1917

Provenance:

Sam Salz, New York.
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.
Samuel and Luella Malson, by whom acquired from the above on 2 January 1960; sale, Sotheby's, New York, 8 May 2002, lot 2.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Exhibited:

Barcelona, Galeries Dalmau, 1918, no. 62.
Minneapolis, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Drawings, Paintings & Sculpture from Three Private Collections, 1960, no. 103 (titled Spanish Landscape).
Minneapolis, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1964 (on loan).
Minneapolis, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1966-67 (on loan).

Published:

J. Dupin, Miró, Life and Work, London, 1962, no. 41 (illustrated pp. 110 and 504).
J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1993, p. 51 (illustrated fig 51).
J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993 (illustrated p. 52, fig. 51).
D. Giralt-Miracle, El crit de la terra, Joan Miró i el Camp de Tarragona, Barcelona, 1994, p. 87, no. 21.
J. Dupin, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné, vol. I, Paintings, Paris, 1999, no. 45 (illustrated p. 42).

Notes:

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY

'I have come here for a few days to live with the landscape, to commune with this blue and golden light of the wheat fields and to enoble myself at this sight' Miró wrote to his friend and fellow artist Enric Ricart from the Catalan countryside around Montroig in the summer of 1917.

Montroig - La Rivière is one of an outstanding group of landscape paintings that Miró painted during this summer that led to a complete breakthrough in his art. Drawing stylistically on the combined influence of Fauvism and Cubism and fusing them into a unique formal language, Miró attempted in these works to commune with the landscape and to render it as a personal vision of his inner experience. As Jacques Dupin has pointed out about the extraordinary landscapes that Miró painted at this time, these works reflect either the submission of Miró's painting to the rhythm of nature or, as in this work, the 'drawing in' of reality to the 'inner rhythm' that Miró himself imposed on it. In Montroig - La Rivière, as Dupin commented, 'the artist seems to have listened to the music of the landscape before apprehending its various aspects. In large strokes based on very few simple harmonies, he expresses the profound relationships between earth and clouds, separated by the line that, for Miró, demarcated two worlds - the line of the horizon. The hard curves of the pines and the bushes struggle against the picture. Not a single detail appears; what we have is composition of elementary ovoid or ellipsoid forms, which nonetheless truthfully reconstruct the presence of the earth.' (Jacques Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993, p. 52)

In responding to the landscape in this way, simplifying the forms of reality and abstracting it with the bold simple forms and vivid colour that Miró described at the time as 'Fauvist', Miró began to discover his own unique personal vision through the forms and presence of the Montroig landscape. It was a vision that was to culminate in 1922 with his great painting The Farm while Montroig itself would become Miró's spiritual home for the rest of his life. With its simple forms and rhythms outlining the basic forms of this sparse and elemental landscape, Montroig - La Rivière pulsates with an energy that articulates the primal sense of an inner experience of the land that Miró felt so strongly in this landscape. Writing to Ricart on 25 th August 1917, Miró exulted, 'I have painted quite a lot, very interesting things...The solitary life...the primitivism of this admirable people, my very intense work and above all my spiritual contemplation and the possibility of living in a world created by my mind and soul, like Dante, distanced from all reality. I have withdrawn inside myself, and the more sceptical I have become about the things around me the closer I have become to God, the trees, the mountains, and to Friendship. A primitive like the people of Siurana and a lover like Dante.' (ed. Margit Rowell, Joan Miró Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 50.)

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