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Lot Essay
Jacques Dupin has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Executed in 1970-1971, Femme avec un papillon posé sur sa tête is an exceptionally large-scale and fully worked composition executed at a time when Miró was pursuing the joint influences of recent American art and of Japanese calligraphy on his own uniquely poetic, instinctive and gestural style of painting. "American painting," Miró admitted in 1970, had "showed me a direction I wanted to take but which up to then had remained at the stage of an unfulfilled desire. When I saw these paintings, I said to myself, 'you can do it, too: go to it, you see, it is O.K.!' You must remember that I grew up in the school of Paris. That was hard to break away from" (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 219).
Inspired by the dramatic large scale open field style of painting as pioneered by such artists as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, in the 1960s, Miró, after moving into the large studio he had always dreamed of, began to make work on an ever-increasing scale. In addition to this, a visit to Japan in 1966 for a retrospective of his work held in Tokyo allowed Miró to meet with Japanese poets, potters and calligraphers whose art he had always admired. In particular, as he recalled of this visit, "I was fascinated by the work of the Japanese calligraphers and it definitely influenced my own working methods. I work more and more in a state of trance, I would say almost always in a trance these days. And I consider my painting more and more gestural" (quoted in ibid., p. 219).
According to Jacques Dupin, Miró's primordial signs, arising from a deeply animistic spirit and executed in spontaneous, energetic gestures, are best expressed on paper: "The sign's vivacity is nowhere more evidently produced and fortified than in Miró's improvisations on paper; the site par excellence for the sign's confrontation with the void's corrosive, vivifying power. The sign replies to these continual attacks, transforming itself through an endless series of mutations and encounters; these improvisations are the sign's open laboratory and, for Miró, the extremity of his pleasure" (Miró, Paris, 2004, p. 355).
As Miró's work of the 1960s progressed he became freer and more at ease with his working process. Femme avec un papillon posé sur sa tête demonstrates that, as a direct result of this practice, Miró's forms grew more open and expansive, his gestural lines more dramatic and flowing while the poetic nature and integrity of his pictorial vocabulary remained essentially the same. In this bold and large-scale work the iconic figure of a woman is connected to an unusually detailed butterfly near the lower edge of the composition. Thick daubs of color are interspersed among the smooth flowing calligraphic lines of Miró's powerful glyph-like imagery.
The palette of the present work, reduced to the essentials of red, yellow, green and blue, augmented by black and white, reflects the reductive color vocabulary Miró had used since the 1940s. Red, prominent in the center of the composition, represents fire, power or the sun, while green has the mellower role of life-giver, an element closer to the natural cycle of birth and regeneration. Yellow, aside from its natural role as a complement to blue, signifies joy, while blue offers a window into the spiritual.
A year after the present work was painted Douglas Cooper stated, "A great part of Miró's strength lies in an uncanny power to ward off the perils of imbalance, incoherence and formlessness. His placing of colors in relation to each other, his distribution of graphic signs and large forms, his interweaving of heavy outlines and finer but rhythmically impelled lines, is not merely subtle but so cunningly done that he can produce harmony and equilibrium within a basically unstructured composition, while building up a visually delightful pattern" ("Miró: Painter-Poet of Catalonia," Joan Miró, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 1972, n.p.).
Executed in 1970-1971, Femme avec un papillon posé sur sa tête is an exceptionally large-scale and fully worked composition executed at a time when Miró was pursuing the joint influences of recent American art and of Japanese calligraphy on his own uniquely poetic, instinctive and gestural style of painting. "American painting," Miró admitted in 1970, had "showed me a direction I wanted to take but which up to then had remained at the stage of an unfulfilled desire. When I saw these paintings, I said to myself, 'you can do it, too: go to it, you see, it is O.K.!' You must remember that I grew up in the school of Paris. That was hard to break away from" (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 219).
Inspired by the dramatic large scale open field style of painting as pioneered by such artists as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, in the 1960s, Miró, after moving into the large studio he had always dreamed of, began to make work on an ever-increasing scale. In addition to this, a visit to Japan in 1966 for a retrospective of his work held in Tokyo allowed Miró to meet with Japanese poets, potters and calligraphers whose art he had always admired. In particular, as he recalled of this visit, "I was fascinated by the work of the Japanese calligraphers and it definitely influenced my own working methods. I work more and more in a state of trance, I would say almost always in a trance these days. And I consider my painting more and more gestural" (quoted in ibid., p. 219).
According to Jacques Dupin, Miró's primordial signs, arising from a deeply animistic spirit and executed in spontaneous, energetic gestures, are best expressed on paper: "The sign's vivacity is nowhere more evidently produced and fortified than in Miró's improvisations on paper; the site par excellence for the sign's confrontation with the void's corrosive, vivifying power. The sign replies to these continual attacks, transforming itself through an endless series of mutations and encounters; these improvisations are the sign's open laboratory and, for Miró, the extremity of his pleasure" (Miró, Paris, 2004, p. 355).
As Miró's work of the 1960s progressed he became freer and more at ease with his working process. Femme avec un papillon posé sur sa tête demonstrates that, as a direct result of this practice, Miró's forms grew more open and expansive, his gestural lines more dramatic and flowing while the poetic nature and integrity of his pictorial vocabulary remained essentially the same. In this bold and large-scale work the iconic figure of a woman is connected to an unusually detailed butterfly near the lower edge of the composition. Thick daubs of color are interspersed among the smooth flowing calligraphic lines of Miró's powerful glyph-like imagery.
The palette of the present work, reduced to the essentials of red, yellow, green and blue, augmented by black and white, reflects the reductive color vocabulary Miró had used since the 1940s. Red, prominent in the center of the composition, represents fire, power or the sun, while green has the mellower role of life-giver, an element closer to the natural cycle of birth and regeneration. Yellow, aside from its natural role as a complement to blue, signifies joy, while blue offers a window into the spiritual.
A year after the present work was painted Douglas Cooper stated, "A great part of Miró's strength lies in an uncanny power to ward off the perils of imbalance, incoherence and formlessness. His placing of colors in relation to each other, his distribution of graphic signs and large forms, his interweaving of heavy outlines and finer but rhythmically impelled lines, is not merely subtle but so cunningly done that he can produce harmony and equilibrium within a basically unstructured composition, while building up a visually delightful pattern" ("Miró: Painter-Poet of Catalonia," Joan Miró, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 1972, n.p.).