Joan Miró

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró: Catalogue raisonné. Drawings, vol. III, Paris, 2012, no. 1807, illustrated in color p. 94

Work is in excellent condition. Executed on black paper. Taped to mount at several places around edges. 1 cm mat stain around extreme perimeter. Artist's pinholes at corners and several places along edges. Newspaper elements appears slightly time darkened, otherwise fine.
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The present work is a superb example of Miró's increasingly frequent experimentation with texture in his later work. During this period, the artist was exploring the potential of new materials, including rice paper, corrugated cardboard, old envelopes, or newspaper. What is particularly striking about the present work, is not simply the fact that the artist is using newspaper, but the way he combines it to such great effect with the oil and paper. Executed with a technical assurance and the economy of pictorial means typical of the last decades of his career, the present work shows his style verging between figuration and abstraction. Present here are the components with which he created the human form, a series of signs and symbols that display a formal sophistication unique to Miró's art. By the time he executed this work in 1973, the artist enjoyed general acclaim in the European and American artistic communities, which did not prevent him from continuing to expand the boundaries of the medium. Sans titre (II) is formed through a series of strokes and splatters that reference the gestural abstraction present in his earlier work of the 1930s. 

After a trip to New York in 1947, Miró became acquainted with the art of the Abstract Expressionists and was fascinated by their new techniques and aesthetic agenda. As the artist later recalled, the experience of seeing canvases of the Abstract Expressionists was like "a blow to the solar plexus." Several young painters, including Jackson Pollock, were crediting Miró as their inspiration for their wild, paint-splattered canvases. In the years that followed he created works that responded to the enthusiasm of this younger generation of American painters and the spontaneity of their art. It was also under their influence that he started painting on a large scale, such as in the present work. The paintings he created from the early 1950s onwards are a fascinating response to these new trends of abstraction, while at the same time showing Miró's allegiance to his own artistic pursuits.