Joan Miró

Galerie Berggruen, Paris

Charlotte Mack, San Francisco

André Emmerich Gallery, New York

Mr & Mrs Frank Titelman, New York

Galerie K., Paris

Sale: Christie’s, New York, 8th November 2000, lot 53

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Jacques Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1961, no. 127, illustrated p. 495

Pere Gimferrer, Les arrels de Miró, Barcelona, 1993, no. 272, illustrated p. 346

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 1999, vol. I, no. 161, illustrated in colour p. 134

The canvas is lined and has been placed on a new stretcher. There are a couple of intermittent fine lines of retouching along the inner stretcher bar lines and a small spot in the lower left, as well as a few very minor spots on the framing edges visible under ultra-violet light. This work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly fresher and less red in the original.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Joan Miró’s Peinture (Homme avec moustache) is a wonderful example of his poetic Surrealist art. Imbued with wit and an enigmatic charm, the present work belongs to Joan Miró’s fabled ‘dream paintings’ cycle in which he pioneered a poetic form of abstraction that is considered to be his finest achievement. Having abandoned the fantastical figurative manner of representation he had hitherto used, Miró concentrated on a new visual idiom that was first employed in works such as La Sieste (fig. 1), and which he continued to develop over the next few years.

Unlike his contemporaries’ more explicit, figurative, version of Surrealism, Miró's artistic development took a different turn. For Miró the liberty granted by the Surrealist attitude to experimentation led him to become extremely imaginative with forms of representation, eventually leading to total abstraction. For instance, the ‘moustache’ motif central to the present work, was repeatedly used to indicate masculinity and even humanity as a whole in the ‘dream paintings’ (fig. 3 & 4). He had joined the Surrealist group in 1924, and participated in their first exhibition held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Breton's first Surrealist manifesto of 1924 proclaimed: 'I believe in the future resolution of these two states, seemingly so contradictory, which are dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality'. Breton commented that Miró 'may be looked upon as the most Surrealist among us' (A. Breton, ‘Le Surréalisme et la peinture’, in Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 156).

In the ‘dream paintings’ Miró’s painterly technique developed a striking honesty which was very different to the slick illustrative manner he had used before. The simplistic forms and elemental palette of white, black, blue, red and brown was applied with a verve and intensity which proclaimed the importance of the medium of expression as much as the subject of the work. The frottage-like impression of the stretcher bars found in the present work became a particular device the artist used in paintings during the mid-1920s (figs. 1, 3 & 4). This raw, candid style of painting has led Caroline Lanchner to note: ‘A curiously little-remarked phenomenon characterises the majority of paintings done after drawings of the A to E series. Sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly, their surface films of scumbled paint are applied so as to show the traces of underlying stretcher bars. When Miró observed ‘I have always evaluated the poetic content according to its plastic possibilities’, his reference was not specifically to these paintings of 1925, but they illustrate his point. His unorthodox exploitation of the basic constituent fact of traditional easel painting that, before all else, the field of operation is a canvas supported by a rectangle of wood and one or more crossbars – paralleled the way his poet friends used the very arbitrariness of language to open it to new meanings’ (C. Lanchner, in Joan Miró (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 42).

Peinture (Homme avec moustache) has all the essential qualities that marked Miró’s ‘dream paintings’ out as the high-point of his early career. Its rich and earthy colouration, the elegance of its construction and the importance of the motifs depicted serves to underline the outstanding qualities of Miró’s paintings. Alberto Giacometti once said of the inimitable quality of Miró’s art: ‘For me, it was the greatest liberation. Anything lighter, more airy, more detached, I had never seen. In a way, it was absolutely perfect. Miró could not put down a dot without it being in just the right place. He was so much a painter, through and through, that he could leave three spots of colour on the canvas and it became a painting’ (quoted in Joan Miró, 1917-1934 (exhibition catalogue), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2004, p. 212).