+ Expand
Artist or Maker: Joan Miró (1893-1983)
+ Expand
Provenance: Galerie Pierre, Paris.
René Gaffé, Brussels.
Roland Penrose, London, 1937.
Zwemmer Gallery, London, by 1937.
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.
Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, London, 29 April 1964, lot 112.
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London, by 1964 (no. LOS4683).
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Inc., New York, by 1964 (no. 4159).
Audrey and Billy Wilder, Los Angeles, by whom acquired from the above on 28 November 1964; their sale, Christie's, New York, 13 November 1989, lot 39 (US$ 2,640,000).
Waddington Galleries, London.
Private collection, Chicago.
Galerie Daniel Malingue, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
+ Expand
Exhibited: London, Zwemmer Gallery, Selected early paintings and drawings by Joan Miró, May - June 1937, no. 12.
Santa Barbara, University of California Art Gallery, Selections from the Collection of Mr and Mrs Billy Wilder, October - November 1966, no. 34 (illustrated p. 22).
Paris, Galerie Malingue, Maîtres Impressionnistes et Modernes, October - December 1990, no. 20 (illustrated).
Paris, Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Joan Miró, March - June 2004, no. 117 (illustrated pp. 217 & 390).
+ Expand
Literature: P. Viladas, 'A Life in Pictures', in House and Garden, April 1989, pp. 156-159 (a photograph of the Wilder appartment in Los Angeles illustrated p. 156 with the present work hanging).
J. Dupin, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné, vol. I, Paintings, 1908-1930, Paris, 1999, no. 301 (illustrated p. 220).
+ Expand
Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
L'étoile is one of the series of sixteen paintings on white grounds that formed the culmination of Miró's series of so-called 'dream paintings' made between 1925 and 1927. Among the most dramatic and radical developments in twentieth century painting, Miró's 'dream paintings' were a conscious attempt by the artist to translate the mental process of seeing into a new and more revelatory visual form. 'I was painting with an absolute contempt for painting', Miró recalled, 'I was painting from necessity and to do something more than just simply paint. The idea of painting has no spiritual value whatsoever. I painted the way I did because I couldn't tolerate any other way. I was feeling aggressive, but at the same time, I was feeling superior' (conversation with Francesc Trabal, 1928, reproduced in La Publicitat, Barcelona), 14 July 1928).
Begun in his studio in the rue Blomet in Montmartre in 1925, Miró's dream paintings marked the beginning of his aim to 'escape' the conventional limitations of painting and to create work that related to and existed within what he referred to as 'the absolute of nature'. Towards this end Miró methodically followed a semi-automatic process of translating hallucinogenic dream-like imagery often brought on by hunger and developed it into a unique cipher-like graphic language in which personal experience was condensed into an extraordinarily powerful and poetic visual form. 'The signs of an imaginary writing appeared in my work,' Miró recalled. 'I painted without premeditation, as if under the influence of a dream. I combined reality and mystery in a space that had been set free. I owed this lighthearted atmosphere to the influence of Dada... Later a deepening sense of the marvelous led me to the notion of the fantastic. I was no longer subjected to dream-dictation, I created my dreams through my paintings... I escaped into the absolute of nature. I wanted my spots to seem to open to the magnetic appeal of the void. I was very interested in the void, in perfect emptiness. I put it into my pale and scumbled grounds, and my linear gestures on top were the signs of my dream progression' (M. Rowell (ed.), Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, pp. 264-5).
L'étoile was painted between May and June 1927 when Miró had holed-up in a new studio in the rue Tourlaque with the conscious aim of pushing the logic of his 'dream paintings' to their most elemental and extreme. Miró's much-quoted statement that he wished to 'assassinate' painting is reflected in the celebrated series of blue-ground and white-ground paintings that he produced at this time. Reducing the ground of his paintings to nothing but a simple monochrome background generated a sense of the painting as an inert void-like surface and also enhanced the transient cipher-like quality of his imagery. In an article written on Miró's work in April 1927, shortly before the artist began work on the white-ground paintings, the Catalan critic Sébastià Gasch wrote: 'Joan Miró does not stubbornly seek slavishly to copy nature, nor to imitate what cannot be imitated, nor to translate what cannot be translated: he knows that there exists an artistic truth which has nothing to do with optical truth and that there is such a thing as an artistic act with a life of its own, wholly free from all imitation. Miró, alert to his inner life is only interested in the translation into form of his own dreams, the dreams of a poet, in the expression of his interior visions by strictly material means, in the rendering of his imagination's suggestions through the exclusive medium of shape and colour. And the results he obtains are every day more positive. The welcome Paris's most exclusive artistic circles have given his works vouches for that' (Sebastià Gasch, 'El pintor Miró', in La Gaceta Literia, vol. I, no. 8, Madrid, 15 April 1927).
Having read this article, Miró wrote back to Gasch on 5 May 1927 praising the accuracy of his interpretation and saluting it for what he described as its 'resolutely terrorist' activity.
The monochrome background paintings that Miró adopted during his self-imposed isolation at the rue Tourlaque were prompted by Miró's own 'terrorist' attitude towards the destruction of painting. Following on from the 'blue-ground' works, which were themselves a partial return to Miró's first assault on painting in his blue 'dream' paintings of 1924-5, the 'white-ground' paintings continued Miró's 'preoccupation with the void' and reduced the 'painterliness' of his painting to an absolute minimum. The monochrome white of the background of these works ensures that Miró's reductive images are seen as a mysterious kind of pictorial writing set against an infinite and almost mystical expanse of emptiness. Miró has said of these works that he wanted to give them 'an astral quality' and towards this end he sought to make forms that 'no longer showed the pull of gravity' but which floated like calligraphic ciphers on the infinite white backgrounds. For Miró, the white ground paintings represented a meeting of night and day, dream and consciousness, of both the void and the human imagination. As if to symbolise this fact he sometimes mixed powdered silver and gold - archetypal symbols of the sun and moon - into the constitution of the white ground and, as in L'étoile, for example, incorporated them into the surface of the painting.
In this respect, L'étoile is the consummate example from the series, being a pictorial expression of exactly the same sentiments. Consisting essentially of only three elements; the white ground, a man/foot and a star, the painting expresses the mysterious union between man and ideal and between heaven and earth. As Miró's friend the poet and critic Michel Leiris recalled, Miró could sum-up mankind using only the image of the sole of a foot (M. Leiris, 'Joan Miró', in Documents, vol. 1, no. 5, Paris, 1929, pp. 264-6). It is a foot that, here in this work, is contrasted with a shooting star in the same way as in Miró's 1925 blue-ground painting of the head of a Catalan peasant. Through the elemental simplicity and graphic charm of Miró's imagery, a poetic and surprisingly potent portrait of man and the cosmos is born.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s L'étoile belonged to the collections of René Gaffé and Roland Penrose before being bought by the celebrated German film director Billy Wilder who owned it for 25 years.
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
We're Hiring!
