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Artist or Maker: Miró, Joan (1893-1983)

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Description: Joan Miró (1893-1983)
Peinture
signed and dated 'Miró. 1925.' (lower right); signed and dated 'Joan Miró. 1925' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 19¾ in. (65.1 x 50.1 cm.)
Painted in 1925

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Provenance: Nadine Effront, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the late 1960s.

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Exhibited: Knokke-Heist, Casino Communal, Joan Miró, June - August 1971, no. 9.

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Published: J. Dupin, Miró, London, 1962, no. 145 (illustrated p. 512).
P. Gimferrer, Les arrels de Miró, Barcelona, 1993, no. 257, p. 344.
J. Dupin & A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró: catalogue raisonné. Paintings, vol. I, 1908-1930, Paris, 1999, no. 151 (illustrated p. 128-1925).

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

'I escaped into the absolute of nature. I wanted my spots to seem open to the magnetic appeal of the void, to make themselves available to it. 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 dream progression' (Joan Miró, quoted in M. Rowell (ed.), Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, pp. 264-265).

One of Miró's highly celebrated 'dream' paintings that were executed in his rue Blomet studio in Paris between 1925 and 1927, this blue-ground painting is an outstanding example of Miró's remarkable transformation of the language of painting into a unique visual poetry. Conveyed with a delicate eloquence of style and a fierce simplictity of means, the forms in Miró's work are never abstract but imaginative extensions of figurative imagery which, during his time in the rue Blomet, had been suggested by hallucinations brought on by hunger. From the cracks in his wall and ceiling Miró would make imaginary sketches in notebooks, the most suggestive of which he would use as the basis for his paintings.