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Artist or Maker: Joan Miró (1893-1983)
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Provenance: Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona.
E.V. Thaw & Co., New York.
Mr. and Mrs. Neison Harris, Chicago (acquired from the above).
By descent from the above to the present owner.
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Exhibited: Paris, Galerie La Licorne, 1921, no. 28.
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Literature: J. Dupin and A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné, Paintings, Paris, 1999, vol. I, p. 66, no. 73 (illustrated in color).
J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 2004, p. 77, no. 78 (illustrated, p. 81).
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Notes: Property from a Private American Collection
Miró painted Nature morte au raisin during the late summer or early fall of 1920, in his family home in Montroig, Catalonia. It is one of a series of cubist-influenced still lifes that Miró painted following his return from his first visit to Paris. Jacques Dupin has identified and extolled these paintings, "The four still lifes: Espagnol jouant aux cartes [fig. 1], Table avec le lapin [fig. 2], Cheval, pipe et fleur rouge [fig. 3], and Nature morte au raisin [the present painting], are superb works, overflowing with energy and charged with extreme plastic force. These are highly elaborate canvases, extremely dense, in which a precise and sometimes naturalistic realism is combined with a stylized decorative Cubism" (in op. cit., 2004, p. 77).
Miró had been planning his first trip to Paris since the summer of 1919. He hoped that once there he and his Barcelona dealer Josep Dalmau could begin to make arrangements for exhibition of this work to be held in the near future. Miró arrived in Paris in late February 1920, where he met his friend the painter Enric Ricart, who had traveled from Barcelona ahead of him. They took rooms among a small community of fellow Catalans at the Hôtel de Rouen, at 13, rue Notre-Dames-des-Victoires. On March 2 Miró and Ricart visited Picasso. Several days later Ricart wrote home to the painter Josep Ràfols, a mutual friend, that Miró seemed "enthusiastic to paint and draw" (quoted in A. Umland, "Chronology," Joan Miró, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 321). Working had to wait, however, for as Miró recalled in an 1928 interview with Francesc Trabal:
I was thoroughly overhwhelmed by Paris. I was completely disoriented for one entire year. So much so that I tried to go to an art school and I couldn't even draw a line. I'd lost the hang of it, and I didn't get it back again until I went back to Montroig the following summer, and I immediately burst into painting the way children burst into tears. I was mostly influenced by Picasso and the Cubists, and when I got back to the Tarragon countryside I was seized with a mad desire to work and I produced a number of things, including a self portrait [D., no. 72; actually painted in 1919] and The Table [fig. 2]. Dalmau introduced me to Picasso, and when I was back in Paris [in February 1921] Picasso told Dalmau I was going to be a success, and I know that Picasso started talking a lot about me to people he knew and that was obviously a help (in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 92).
Miró exhibited his self-portrait in the 1920 Salon d'Automne in Paris, and Dalmau included several recent works in a group show at his gallery in Barcelona in October-November. Miró began Table avec le lapin in mid-November and completed it in January 1921. The artist then returned to Paris for his second stay in February. After urging Dalmau to action, he completed arrangements for his exhibition, his first solo show outside Barcelona, which opened at the Galerie La Licorne at 110, rue de La Boétie, in April 1921. Miró displayed all four of the Montroig still lifes, including Nature morte au raisin, together with the self-portrait and twenty-four other paintings and fifteen drawings done since 1915, in his Paris debut.
Nature morte au raisin is the smallest of the 1920 Montroig still lifes, and was probably the first of them that Miró completed. It is the most overtly cubist of the group, and shows the artist flush with excitement at the paintings he had recently seen in Paris, including the table-top and open window still lifes that Picasso had done in the summer and fall of 1919. Maurice Raynal wrote in his preface to the Galerie La Licorne catalogue, "[Miró] often drinks in the cup of grandfather Cézanne, and smokes the pipe of uncle Picasso" (reprinted in J. Lassaigne, Miró, Geneva, 1963, p. 118). Miró has employed in Nature morte au raisin the simplified and flattened "cut-out" planes of late Synthetic Cubism. The division of the composition into two basic horizontal bands of color appears to prefigure his abstract surrealist paintings of the later 1920s. The split and overlapping forms in the glass are indeed Picasso-esque, and the presence of the apple and pear may be a nod in the direction of his "glorious Saint Cézanne," as Miró called him in a letter to Ràfols in May 1920 (quoted in M. Rowell, op. cit., p. 72).
Miró's rendering of these forms also derive from his study of the medieval and primitive art of his native Catalonia, such as the Romanesque frescos in the church of Saint Climent. He adapted their use of flattened modeling, based on strong internal contrasts of light and shade, to create objects that possess a remarkable, singular presence--a nearly schematized realism--so that they stand out, almost larger than life, from their flat spatial environment. Miró continued to work with this distinctive conception of form in his famous painting The Farm, 1921-1922 (D., no. 81; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and during his subsequent foray into Purist painting. It ultimately served as the basis for the pictorial elements seen in his surrealist paintings, in which the image of the object has been completely transformed into an abstract sign.
Miró remembered that his show at Galerie La Licorne was not a financial success. "I didn't sell a thing." he told Trabal. "That show wasn't talked about very much, but the few people who did talk about it had high hopes for me and were sure I'd end up being accepted" (quoted in ibid., p. 92). Raynal understood the importance of the crucial formative influences that were at work in the paintings that Miró brought to show in Paris. He was witnessing, as he wrote in his catalogue preface, "a painterly temperament already asserting itself." and he assured the young painter, "You possess all the necessary baggage to travel far. Run then without hesitation, after your shadow" (reprinted in J. Lassaigne, op. cit.).
(fig. 1) Joan Miró, Horse, Pipe and Red Flower, 1920. Philadephia Museum of Art. BARCODE 23657489
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, Still Life with Rabbit (The Table), 1920-1921. Sold, Christie's London, 26 June 1995, lot 33. BARCODE 23657496
(fig. 3) Joan Miró, Spanish Playing Cards, 1920. The Minneapolis Institute of Art. BARCODE 23657502
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