Joán Miró

Joan Prats, Barcelona (acquired directly from the artist in 1928)
Thence by descent to the present owners

Barcelona, Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona entre dues exposicions: 1888-1929, 1987
Barcelona, Centre d'Art Santa Monica, El Surrealisme a Catalunya, 1988
Barcelona, Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, Avantguardes a catalunya, 1992
Teruel, Museo de Teruel, Los paréntesis de la mirada: Un homenaje a Luis Bunuel, 1993
Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró, Record de Joan Prat, 1996
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Gaceta de arte y su época 1932-1936, 1997
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Joan Miró 1917-1934, 2004, no. 140, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Miro: The Dutch Interiors, 2010-11, no. 1

Carolyn Lanchner, Joan Miró, New York, 1993, illustrated p. 393
Agnès de la Beaumelle, Miró 1917-1934, La Naissance du Monde, Paris, 2004, no. 140, illustrated pp. 224 & 393

Executed on cream laid paper, not laid down, attached to the mount intermittently along all four edges. The sheet is slightly time stained and there are restored artist's pinholes to the corners and to the centre of each edge. There is a fixative (probably applied to the white chalk by the artist before he applied the black crayon) which has causes some discolouration to the sheet. There are a few tiny nicks and repaired tears to parts of the extreme edges and some minor wear and creasing to the upper left and lower left corners. Otherwise, this work is in overall good condition. Colours: overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, though the papertone is slightly warmer in the original.
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The present work is a rare and exceptionally detailed study for Miró’s important oil painting La Pomme de Terre (Fig. 4), which is held in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum in New York. Executed in 1928, in the period just after the artist’s fully abstracted dream paintings, this painting forms part of Miró’s so-called Dutch Interiors series. Dutch Interiors I, II and III are inspired by postcards of seventeenth-century Dutch genre scenes that the artist collected during a two week trip to Holland in early 1928. A letter from Miró to Catalan art critic Sebastià Gasch on 16^th August 1928 confirms that - though not inspired by any particular Dutch paintings like the first three works had been - he considered La Pomme de Terre and Still Lifeexecuted in Montroig in that same summer of 1928, to be part of the same distinct series or conceptual group. These five works were all executed between July and December 1928 in his upstairs studio at the family farm in Montroig, Catalonia.

It is only when we consider this extraordinary series in the context of the automatic, flighty spirit in which he undertook his dream paintings that directly preceded it, that we realise quite how reactionary and transitional this group really was. By nature of its process, the dream painting phase had allowed Miró’s rate of production to rocket. The genesis of the Dutch Interiors, in contrast, was deliberately labour-intensive, and the preparatory drawings (of which the present work is an exquisite example and the only one to have remained in private hands) offer a fascinating insight into this slowed-down, protracted working practice. It was almost as if he felt that he had exhausted (even if only temporarily) the boundaries of his earlier brand of free-fall abstraction, and he seemed to crave some self-imposed limits so as to stir a new and distinct creativity. This was a deliberate change of tack for Miró and the results were startling. As Jacques Dupin has rightly noted, the fact that these 1928 Montroig works were more rooted in reality than the whimsical dream paintings ‘did not mean a return to the motif, to descriptive painting, but was a response to the earth, to “the absolute of nature” […] He felt the need to get his feet on the ground again’ (Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 175). The success and ensuing popularity of this highly acclaimed series is confirmed by recognition by some of the great international museum collections: Dutch Interior I, II, and II are in the MoMA New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Metropolitan Museum respectively and Pomme de Terre is of course also in the Metropolitan Museum.

Miró’s August 1928 letter to Gasch gives a sense of quite how absorbed Miró was in this particular project and of the painstaking process involved: ‘I am working very hard – I intend to finish a canvas by the middle of next week, the first to be finished since I am here – one and a half months – and with unprecedented preparation, and after a completely systematic work’, adding ‘I think it will be a pretty impressive effort’ (Miró, letter to Gasch, Montroig, 16^th August 1928, trans. Portell). The artist’s remarks about unprecedented preparation surely refer to the elaborate process that the present work is testament to, and to what Anne Umland has described as ‘unusual points of departure’ for the artist and ‘the atypically numerous mediating drawings that preceded his meticulous transfer of  a final large-scale cartoon or gridded drawing to canvas’ (Anne Umland, ‘Dutch Interiors and Imaginary Portraits’, Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937 (exhibition catalogue), MoMA, New York, 2008, p. 56).

That the work is from an important transitional period for the artist is incontestable, as is its rarity, but these points should not detract from the astonishing power of the image itself. The subject of the work is a looming woman whose pulsating body seems to be in a constant battle with the space in which it finds itself and desperate to escape from its physical contours, evoking the amorphous figures which later populated the works of Francis Bacon (Fig. 1). Jacques Dupin’s description of the protagonist as a ‘blind giantess’ perfectly articulates the disorientating and poetic mystery that this central figure lends the image, and Dupin’s subsequent descriptions of the intricacies of the composition are every bit as evocative: ‘she holds herself truly erect [..] arms raised, in a spellbound immobility that is in notable contrast to the swirling mobility of the secondary figures around her. From one heavy breast, red-brown and black, a black line swings around her body, and along its sweeping trajectory we find, at the left, a broad-blade knife from which hangs a tiny ladder, from the tiny ladder an insect, and from this insect another insect. Above the blade is a tiny winged woman whose long curved arm supports a bird; the bird holds a twig on which a butterfly is settling. At the upper right corner a fantastic snake comes writhing down, in pursuit of an insect devouring a leaf gnawed at by another insect. At the lower right […] a tall candle with a flickering flame. In the woman’s body, a landscape appears where the heart should be: a fish, the sea, the sun, a cloud. The woman’s body really is a landscape, with a number of topographical features in addition to those just mentioned. There are hills, geological formations, and lakes. The breast could even be a volcano.’ For Dupin, ‘this “potato” presents the very image of the Earth in the guise of woman - Mother Earth, Miró’s true titular deity’ (Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 192). This extraordinarily complex and lyrical composition has a marvellous elasticity which perfectly suits the work’s key themes of metamorphosis, fluctuation, and growth. Even if the Dutch Interiors series might first appear to represent a return to a more figurative approach in the wake of the pure abstraction of his preceding dream paintings, make no mistake, that even if the seed for the present work was rooted in reality, the irrefutable overarching theme is that stalwart of the Miróscape, the subconscious.