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Provenance: Galerie Pierre, Paris.
René Gaffé, Brussels.
Roland Penrose, London (acquired from the above, 1936).
E.V. Thaw & Co., New York
Acquired from the above by the present owners circa 1975.
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Exhibited: New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Joan Miró: Magnetic Fields, October 1972-January 1973, p. 84, no. 7 (illustrated).
Dusseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle, Ausstellung Surrealität--Bildrealität, December 1974-Feburary 1975, no. 236.
The Cleveland Museum, The Spirit of Surrealism of Art, October-November 1979.
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Literature: J. Dupin and A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1999, vol. I, p. 129, no. 154 (illustrated in color).
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Notes: Property from the Collection of John Russell & Rosamond Bernier
Miró executed Painting in the course of his remarkable series of "oneiric" or "dream" pictures, the term applied to them by his leading scholar, Jacques Dupin. Miró worked on these paintings, many of which he did not often assign more specific titles, mainly in his family home in Montroig, Catalonia, from the summer of 1925 through early 1927. After four score years these paintings have securely sustained their status and reputation as being among the most radical in the artist's entire oeuvre. They strongly influenced the color-field painters working in America during the late 1940s and 1950s, including William Baziotes, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. The deceptive simplicity of these paintings shocked their first viewers, who had grown accustomed to expecting some measure of formal complexity in modern painting, while at least being able to recognize an artist's subjects. This austere, minimalist aspect still surprises and seems perennially fresh, and the mystery of Miró's imagery continues to intrigue viewers today, having yielded up little of their teasingly enigmatic meanings over the years.
Miró was given his first one-man exhibition of paintings at the Galerie Pierre in June 1925. His paintings to this point had alternated between compositions rich in fantastic imagery and more spare works on flat color grounds, but all made reference to familiar objects and scenes, translated into his whimsical signs. In the spring of that year Miró completed Carnaval d'Arlequin, his most densely composed picture to date (Dupin, no. 115, fig. 1), which comprised a teeming inventory of personages and things excerpted from daily life. In reaction to this effort, and perhaps understanding that the milestone event of his exhibition in June indicated it was time to begin a new chapter in his work, Miró then embarked on a freer, more abstract and adventurously interior approach to painting. The artist no longer found it necessary to identify objects as translations of things known and seen. He realized instead that there were even more profound and exciting realms to be revealed, where the unknowable and the invisible suddenly flashed into one's consciousness, leaving only a vague trace of its passing, which was subject neither to precise description nor rational explanation. This was the primordial world of the innermost consciousness, lying beyond the sphere of ordinary dreams, to which Miró and his Surrealist colleagues now laid claim as the source of their creative powers. Dupin has written:
What is at issue here is not only a dream state or a state of reverie but a kind of agitation effects one's entire being. The smallest shudder carries its disturbance and truth into the painting. Through a rift in the fabric of conventional plastic language, a wave of nocturnal energy comes surging up bearing an emotional charge that combines erotic fantasies, inner demons, primitive urges and cosmic sparks in a movment that continually threatens to overwhelm or exhaust the painter, to drown him in the void which is both a source of life and the abyss of death. The lines oscillate, intertwine, bunch into knots, break apart. Pulsing, monochromatic space becomes an organic environment that induces couplings and metamorphoses, perverse collusions between form and color, between the sign and the movement that alters it (in Joan Miró: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1987, pp. 38-39)
Miró painted The Birth of the World (Dupin, no. 125; fig. 2), the most famous of his dream pictures, in the late summer and fall of 1925. The present Painting probably followed later in the year. During this time Miró made frequent trips to Paris, where he stayed in his studio at 48, rue Blomet. André Masson, who pioneered automatist drawing, was his next door neighbor and a close friend. In early November 1925 they attended an exhibition of works by Paul Klee at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail that impressed them both. Miró reminisced to Dupin in 1977 about his Paris sojourns, "I ate little and badly. 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" (in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 103). These drawings may owe something to the psychic automatist technique that Breton, Masson and other Surrealists had advocated, as well as the stresses and privations that Miró endured in Paris. For the most part, however, the drawings represent a more willful and deliberate exploration of the plastic possibilities in sign-making, a process which Miró carried even further in his dream paintings. Dupin has stated:
The distance between the sketches--in which the mutation of the realist object into an ideogrammatic sign is rendered with meticulous care--and the mysterious act of painting is so enormous that we can safely describe it as a new creation, an adventure for which there has been no preparation. The sign has been plunged into a boiling crucible and reemerges dripping and revivified in its relationship with the energy of the colors, whose depth and amplitude have taken over the entire surface of the painting. The intense throbbing of space alters its nature without eliminating its distinctive features. In the ferment of blue or dark brown, the presence of a head or a horse is less significant than the exploration of emptiness by lines and dots and marks, the examination of the pictorial itself, which is carried out by the sorcery of pure gesture (ibid., p. 38).
Miró inscribed below a spot of blue paint on his Painting-poem, 1925 (Dupin, no. 147) the legend "ceci est la couleur de mes rêves." Miró executed many of his most evocative dream paintings on a blue ground, and indeed appears to have favored this tranquil and introspective color, the traditional color of melancholia. He employed on some of his dream canvases a dark, nocturnal hue, and on others, as seen here, a cerulean tone, the color of the diurnal sky over his home in Montroig. A white, wraithlike spirit sails like a kite across this blue dome of heaven, while the artist hints at another personage in the contours of a cursive letter "R." He has suggested the obscure beginnings of other letters at upper right, and the circular dotted lines at lower right are perhaps a pair of eyes, the mind's eyes, indicating the presence of the artist himself.
This painting has a most distinguished provenance, and met with a most unusual later encounter with its creator. The first owner was Miró's most enthusiastic early collector and patron, the journalist René Gaffé, who also owned Carnaval d'Arlequin, The Birth of the World, and, among many other early Mirós, Portrait de Mme K. and Danseuse espagnole, both painted in 1924 (Dupin, nos. 93 and 94) which were sold in the sale of his collection at Christie's, New York, 6 November 2001, as lots 14 and 16. Gaffé sold Painting to Roland Penrose, Miró's friend and early biographer, in 1936. Penrose invited Miró to his home, a large farm in Sussex, when the artist came to London in 1964 to attend his retrospective at the Tate Gallery. Miró was delighted to see Painting once again. He asked Penrose to remove it from its frame, and with a brush and black paint he proceeded to add two comma-like strokes on the "R" figure, a spot on the tail of the curving forms at upper light, as well as below it, and a pictograph representing a bird in flight at bottom right (fig. 3). Rosamond Bernier, the present owner, was a particularly close friend of the artist. In 1956 and 1961 she published two interviews with Miro in the Paris Magazine L'OEIL which she had founded in 1955. These are reprinted in Margit Rowell's selection of Miró writings and interviews (op. cit., pp. 233-236 and 256-260). In addition to her friendship with Miró she counted among her friends many of the leading proponents of the Modern movement such as Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, Leger and Braque--and also knew many of the surrealist artists and writers, most especially Breton, Ernst and Matta. In 1991 Knopf published her memoirs of this exciting time in Europe titled Matisse, Picasso, Miró--as I Knew Them. Mrs. Bernier is married to John Russell, the distinguished art historian and critic, and is a popular lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
(fig. 1) Joan Miró, Carnaval d'Arlequin, 1924-1925. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. BARCODE 22867377
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, The Birth of the World, 1925. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE 22867384
(fig. 3) The artist adding a pictograph to the present painting in 1964. BARCODE 22867391
