Lot 18
  • 18

Joan Miró

Estimate
2,500,000 - 3,500,000 USD
Log in to view results
bidding is closed

Description

  • Joan Miró
  • Personnage fascinant
  • Signed Miró (toward upper left); signed Miró, dated 3/IV/68 and titled on the reverse
  • Oil on canvas
  • 45 3/4 by 28 7/8 in.
  • 116.2 by 73.3 cm

Provenance

Acquired from the artist circa 1980

Exhibited

Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Miró, 1968, no. 136


Barcelona, Antic Hospital da la Santa Creu, Miró, no. 140, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Literature

Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, London, 1962, illustrated p. 423

James J. Sweeney, Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1970, illustrated p. 212

Michel Tapié, Joan Miró, Milan, 1970, illustrated no. 147

Alexandre Cirici, Miró-Mirall, Barcelona, 1977, illustrated p. 137

Rosa Maria Malet, Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1983, illustrated no. 101

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, 1959-1968, vol. 4, Paris, 2000, no. 1295, illustrated p. 232

Condition

This work is in very good condition. Original canvas. There are a few tiny pigment losses at the top and upper left edges, a few in the green stroke at the top left corner and in the green and black pigments at the lower right edge. Under UV light, a few small spots of inpainting in the green pigments in the bottom right quadrant and in the top corners. Otherwise fine.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

Miró's stunning Personnage fascinant, painted during his mature phase, embodies the artist's preoccupations. Although no figurative elements are immediately discernible, the artist evokes the properties of his subject through the veiled anthropomorphic codes which had become familiar over the course of his production. His generous application of color is offset by the brushy, translucent washes of paint that suggest the composition's background. 

When he painted this work in 1968, Miró was primarily concerned with reducing his pictorial language to its essentials. "Through this rarefaction and seeming lack of prudence," explains his biographer Jacques Dupin, "the canvas' pictorial energy was in fact magnified, and his painting strikingly reaffirmed.  This process also seemed like a breath of fresh air, or an ecstatic present from which new signs, colors, and the full freedom of gesture surged forth. By limiting the colors of his palette, Miró's enduring themes yielded works of various sizes, proportions rhythms, and resonances" (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, pp. 337-38).

Personnage fascinant shows Miró's artistic style verging between figuration and abstraction. For Miró, tangible subjects such as human figures, birds, stars, the sun, night and dusk formed a poetic language. After his Constellations series of 1941, these became the primary subjects of his art. The artist had always wanted a larger studio, a dream which was finally realized in 1956 when he moved to Palma de Mallorca (fig. 1). The dynamic and deliberate style of his work from the 1950s onward reflect the atmosphere of sunlit Mediterranean air and the freedom and spaciousness of his studio. Another exceptional example of Miró's dramatic monumental paintings of this period is Personnages dans un paysage (fig. 2), executed in 1973. 

Miró's own reflection on the artistic process further articulates his late style: "... silence is denial of a noise - but the smallest noise in the midst of silence becomes enormous. The same process makes me look for noise hidden in silence, the movement in immobility, life in inanimate things, the infinite and the finite, forms in a void, and myself in anonymity" (Margit Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 253). Miró builds the present composition using a pictorial lexicon of signs and symbols, while still referencing recognizable objects, in this case, human figures. Working with thick lines and monochromatic spaces as his central compositional elements, Miró fully explored the possibilities of movement within a two-dimensional field.

This work was acquired from the artist by Robert S. McNamara, the famed Secretary of Defense who served under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968.