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Lot Essay
Charged with a heady atmosphere of romance and passion, Peinture (Amour) is a richly suggestive composition from Joan Miró’s acclaimed series of “oneiric” or “dream” paintings, a revolutionary group of works that occupied the artist intensely from 1925-1927. Instinctively rendered and filled with a mysterious play of lyrical forms that appear suspended upon brushed, monochromatic grounds, these paintings mark the artist’s first extended thematic cycle of pictures, and are widely regarded as among the most important and revolutionary of Miró’s career. Painted in 1925, at the very beginning of this ground-breaking burst of creativity, Peinture (Amour) holds an illustrious position as one of the earliest works in the artist’s oeuvre to focus on the interaction between two lovers, a theme that would come to dominate Miró’s painterly output over the ensuing years as he explored the powerful forces of love, attraction, sexuality and eroticism.
The dream paintings were the visionary product of a period of crisis in Miró’s art. In 1924, the painter found that he had exhausted the painstakingly rendered realism that characterized his densely constructed compositions from the early 1920s, such as La Ferme (Dupin, no. 81; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) or Le cheval, la pipe et la fleur rouge (Dupin, no. 76; The Philadelphia Museum of Art). Seeking to capture what he once described as “all the golden sparks of our souls,” Miró instead began to delve into his subconscious, drawing from its depths a series of cryptic signs and symbols, shapes and forms, which he then translated on to his canvases (letter to J.F. Ràflos, 7 October 1923; in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 83). The deceptive simplicity of the resulting paintings shocked contemporary viewers, their austere aesthetic and enigmatic, elusive imagery securing Miró’s reputation as one of the most exciting artists within the bourgeoning Surrealist movement.
Miró’s first dream paintings had their roots in the intensely creative environment of the rue Blomet, in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, where the artist lived and worked during this formative period. Here, Miró was surrounded by a circle of pioneering artists and poets, including Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, and André Masson, who had a studio right next door to his own. Immersing himself in their theories, he spent long hours reading the automatic poetry of his new acquaintances. “The rue Blomet was a decisive place, a decisive moment for me,” he later explained. “It was there that I discovered everything I am, everything I would become” (quoted in “Memories of the rue Blomet,” in ibid., p. 100). Under the influence of the group’s automatist techniques and the inspiration of his friends and neighbors, Miró’s canvases opened up, liberated from the extraordinary detail of his earlier work, to instead become “receptacles for dreams” (J. Dupin, op. cit., 1962, p. 157).
However, as he later recalled, the harsh realities of life as a young painter in Paris left an indelible mark on his work—Miró often existed in a state of extreme poverty, spending days on end without a full meal. Too proud to ask his artist friends for financial help, he survived on just a few sporadic dried figs. Speaking to Jacques Dupin, he explained: “I ate little and badly. I have already said that during this period hunger gave me hallucinations, and the hallucinations gave me ideas for paintings… It was a period of intense work. I filled my notebooks with drawings, and these served as the starting point for canvases” (quoted in “Memories of the rue Blomet,” in Rowell, op. cit., 1987, p. 103). While in this state, Miró would sit on the floor of his studio staring at the roughly textured walls of the sparsely decorated room, captivated by the meandering paths of cracks in the plaster and mysterious marks on the ceiling.
These shapes filled his imagination with their fleeting forms, traces of an unknowable universe which suddenly flashed into being before his eyes, which he then attempted to capture on paper or burlap before they shifted and changed. Following these spontaneous impulses of his unconscious, Miró started to paint with a new, unplanned and unconstrained abstract imagery composed of graphic-like signs and forms, inspired by the sketches he created in this semi-lucid state. “I painted without premeditation,” he described, “as if under the influence of a dream. I combined reality and mystery in a space that had been set free… 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” (interview with D. Chevalier, in Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture, November 1962; quoted in ibid., p. 264).
In Peinture (Amour), two amorphous personnages occupy the center of the composition, their white bodies flowing and morphing into one conjoined entity, as a thin red line encircles them. While the composition contains echoes of the 1924 painting Le Baiser (Dupin, no. 96; Private collection) in both its color palette and the manner in which the two beings are connected, here Miró explores a more erotic moment, in which the couple appear locked in a passionate embrace. As such, Peinture (Amour) is one of a small group of works within the dream paintings from 1925 that openly invoke romantic, sexual subject matter (Dupin, nos. 128-132), each granted a subtitle that indicates their inherent eroticism, from Peinture (Coitus) to Peinture (Les amants—Adam and Eve).
In his early thirties and unmarried, Miró appears to have had romance very much on his mind at this time. Love and sexuality were central topics in the rue Blomet circle and Surrealism as a whole, and therefore unsurprisingly these themes came to pervade many of Miró’s dream paintings, themselves vehicles for the unimpeded, unmediated expressions of the artist’s innermost desires and primal impulses. As Jacques Dupin has noted: “All these oneiric paintings possess great erotic power. Connected with subjective obsessions and realized at the dictation of the unconscious, they simultaneously unmask and mask, set down and erase, the infinitely varied phantasms of the libido” (op. cit., 1962, pp. 164-166).
The dream paintings were the visionary product of a period of crisis in Miró’s art. In 1924, the painter found that he had exhausted the painstakingly rendered realism that characterized his densely constructed compositions from the early 1920s, such as La Ferme (Dupin, no. 81; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) or Le cheval, la pipe et la fleur rouge (Dupin, no. 76; The Philadelphia Museum of Art). Seeking to capture what he once described as “all the golden sparks of our souls,” Miró instead began to delve into his subconscious, drawing from its depths a series of cryptic signs and symbols, shapes and forms, which he then translated on to his canvases (letter to J.F. Ràflos, 7 October 1923; in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 83). The deceptive simplicity of the resulting paintings shocked contemporary viewers, their austere aesthetic and enigmatic, elusive imagery securing Miró’s reputation as one of the most exciting artists within the bourgeoning Surrealist movement.
Miró’s first dream paintings had their roots in the intensely creative environment of the rue Blomet, in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, where the artist lived and worked during this formative period. Here, Miró was surrounded by a circle of pioneering artists and poets, including Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, and André Masson, who had a studio right next door to his own. Immersing himself in their theories, he spent long hours reading the automatic poetry of his new acquaintances. “The rue Blomet was a decisive place, a decisive moment for me,” he later explained. “It was there that I discovered everything I am, everything I would become” (quoted in “Memories of the rue Blomet,” in ibid., p. 100). Under the influence of the group’s automatist techniques and the inspiration of his friends and neighbors, Miró’s canvases opened up, liberated from the extraordinary detail of his earlier work, to instead become “receptacles for dreams” (J. Dupin, op. cit., 1962, p. 157).
However, as he later recalled, the harsh realities of life as a young painter in Paris left an indelible mark on his work—Miró often existed in a state of extreme poverty, spending days on end without a full meal. Too proud to ask his artist friends for financial help, he survived on just a few sporadic dried figs. Speaking to Jacques Dupin, he explained: “I ate little and badly. I have already said that during this period hunger gave me hallucinations, and the hallucinations gave me ideas for paintings… It was a period of intense work. I filled my notebooks with drawings, and these served as the starting point for canvases” (quoted in “Memories of the rue Blomet,” in Rowell, op. cit., 1987, p. 103). While in this state, Miró would sit on the floor of his studio staring at the roughly textured walls of the sparsely decorated room, captivated by the meandering paths of cracks in the plaster and mysterious marks on the ceiling.
These shapes filled his imagination with their fleeting forms, traces of an unknowable universe which suddenly flashed into being before his eyes, which he then attempted to capture on paper or burlap before they shifted and changed. Following these spontaneous impulses of his unconscious, Miró started to paint with a new, unplanned and unconstrained abstract imagery composed of graphic-like signs and forms, inspired by the sketches he created in this semi-lucid state. “I painted without premeditation,” he described, “as if under the influence of a dream. I combined reality and mystery in a space that had been set free… 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” (interview with D. Chevalier, in Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture, November 1962; quoted in ibid., p. 264).
In Peinture (Amour), two amorphous personnages occupy the center of the composition, their white bodies flowing and morphing into one conjoined entity, as a thin red line encircles them. While the composition contains echoes of the 1924 painting Le Baiser (Dupin, no. 96; Private collection) in both its color palette and the manner in which the two beings are connected, here Miró explores a more erotic moment, in which the couple appear locked in a passionate embrace. As such, Peinture (Amour) is one of a small group of works within the dream paintings from 1925 that openly invoke romantic, sexual subject matter (Dupin, nos. 128-132), each granted a subtitle that indicates their inherent eroticism, from Peinture (Coitus) to Peinture (Les amants—Adam and Eve).
In his early thirties and unmarried, Miró appears to have had romance very much on his mind at this time. Love and sexuality were central topics in the rue Blomet circle and Surrealism as a whole, and therefore unsurprisingly these themes came to pervade many of Miró’s dream paintings, themselves vehicles for the unimpeded, unmediated expressions of the artist’s innermost desires and primal impulses. As Jacques Dupin has noted: “All these oneiric paintings possess great erotic power. Connected with subjective obsessions and realized at the dictation of the unconscious, they simultaneously unmask and mask, set down and erase, the infinitely varied phantasms of the libido” (op. cit., 1962, pp. 164-166).