From the walls of La Colombe d’Or (where it has hung for more than 70 years): Joan Miró’s Peinture (Femmes, lune, étoiles)

In the 100 years since La Colombe d’Or was founded in the charming hilltop village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the hotel and restaurant has become a place of pilgrimage for collectors and enthusiasts of modern art. Adorning the simple, whitewashed walls of the dining room are works by some of the 20th century’s leading European Modernists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Marc Chagall. A large Alexander Calder mobile rotates in the wind by the swimming pool, while a colourful ceramic mosaic by Fernand Léger embellishes the terrace.

Until recently, Joan Miró’s Peinture (Femmes, lune, étoiles) was also part of the impressive display. A major canvas from the artist’s post-war series of Peintures lentes (‘Slow Paintings’) — a term coined by the art critic Jacques Dupin to describe Miró’s reflective yet calculated approach to painting between 1949 and 1950 — it depicts a group of figures communicating under a star-filled sky.

‘It epitomises Miró’s post-war style, full of poetry,’ says Valérie Didier, an Impressionist and Modern Art specialist at Christie’s in Paris. ‘It includes his signature graphic figures and palette reduced down to four pure tones, applied in flat planes, along with the essential black touches and his leitmotifs of the moon and stars.’

Executed in 1949, Peinture (Femmes, lune, étoiles) was acquired by the hotel’s founders, Paul Roux and his wife Baptistine, known as ‘Titine’, from Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1950. It has hung in the dining room of the Colombe d’Or since then. On 20 October 2023, it will be offered for sale for the first time in more than 70 years in Avant-Garde(s) Including Thinking Italian at Christie’s in Paris.

‘Mirós of this scale and quality, and with such extraordinary provenance, rarely come to market,’ says Didier. ‘The sale also offers collectors an opportunity to buy a piece of art history.’

The hotel-restaurant started life in 1920 as ‘Chez Robinson’, a café-bar with an open-air terrace that attracted small groups of artists and international tourists looking to while away lazy afternoons under the sun. Paul and Titine later expanded the bar into a simple hotel with a restaurant and three rooms, renaming it La Colombe d’Or (‘The Golden Dove’) in the process.

Thanks to the couple’s warm hospitality and Paul’s passion for the arts, the auberge soon became a favourite meeting place for avant-garde artists, among them Braque, Picasso, Chagall and Matisse. Poets and writers such as Jacques Prévert, and actors including Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, were also fans.

‘In the early days, many of the visiting artists gifted works to Paul and Titine in exchange for food and lodging, or as a token of their friendship,’ says Didier. ‘Over the years, the Rouxs enhanced the hotel’s collection by acquiring and commissioning new works.’

After Paul’s death in 1953, his son Francis took the helm. He continued to cultivate the hotel’s creative and lively spirit, forging friendships with a new generation of artists, including Calder, César, de Staël and Arman. Brigitte Bardot and François Truffaut rubbed shoulders with Charlie Chaplin, David Niven, Sophia Loren and Roger Moore.

Now run by the third generation of the Roux family, La Colombe d’Or continues to attract celebrities from the worlds of art, film and fashion, as well as art enthusiasts and collectors eager to explore the hotel’s illustrious past.

‘Everybody who goes to La Colombe d’Or falls under its charm,’ says Didier. ‘Just imagine all the inspiring conversations and ideas that have been exchanged there over an authentic home-cooked meal.’

We know from the hotel’s guest book — a who’s who of the era — that Miró first visited the storied hostelry on 28 March 1951, just a few months after Peinture (Femmes, lune, étoiles) was added to the hotel’s collection. By then he was an artist of international renown, his distinctive visual vocabulary having garnered the attention of critics, collectors and artists on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Peinture (Femmes, lune, étoiles), Miró invites us to reflect on human relationships and our connection to the cosmos, a theme first explored in his Constellations series a decade earlier. These 23 gouaches, begun in 1940 in Varengeville in Normandy, teem with metaphorical signs and symbols, all arranged within a frenetic universe.

‘I felt a deep desire to escape,’ the artist said of his wartime isolation, in which he turned to the inner world of his imagination for inspiration. ‘I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music, and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings.’

Although the stars and the moon link the present painting to his Constellations series, the two principal figures on the left of the canvas, represented by thick, opaque triangles, are more refined than those in Constellations, and more deliberately structured within the space.

The smaller subjects to the right of the two female protagonists are further simplified, with dumbbell feet and rounded segment features.

The ground, meanwhile, reveals just how experimental Miró was at this stage of his career. Ranging in colour from pink to bronze, it has a lighter area at its centre, which Miró achieved by scratching away the layer of casein paint with sandpaper, creating a contrast between the casein’s opacity and the pinkish-ochre ground’s transparency.

According to Didier, the graded colours, simulating depth and relief, combined with the halo-like centre, give the composition an otherworldly feel. ‘You don’t really know if you’re on Earth, in the sky, or in an invented place,’ she says. ‘There’s an ambiguity to the composition that prompts the viewer to ask questions about this mysterious universe, to draw their own conclusions about it, and, to some extent, to create their own poetry.’

And this is exactly as Miró intended. When he was asked by the writer Georges Raillard whether a work represented a woman or a bird, he said: ‘It could be a dog, a woman or I don’t know what, that doesn’t interest me at all, that’s up to you.’

Brimming with infinite meanings and possibilities, Peinture (Femmes, lune, étoiles) shows Miró in all his post-war audacity. ‘He enjoyed expanding people’s minds and playing with the viewer’s emotions,’ says Didier. ‘But, above all, this painting reveals Miró’s relentless desire always to experiment with new materials, new subjects and new techniques.’

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