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Lot Essay
ADOM (Association pour la défense de l'oeuvre de Joan Miró) has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Executed in 1970, Femme is a large-scale and fully worked composition executed at a time when Miró was pursuing the joint influences of recent American art and 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 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 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 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 the present bold work the iconic figure of a woman is rendered using smooth flowing calligraphic lines whilst the palette, 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 near the upper and lower edges 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.
Executed in 1970, Femme is a large-scale and fully worked composition executed at a time when Miró was pursuing the joint influences of recent American art and 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 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 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 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 the present bold work the iconic figure of a woman is rendered using smooth flowing calligraphic lines whilst the palette, 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 near the upper and lower edges 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.