JOAN MIRÓ | Dessin-Collage

Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Royal S. Marks Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above on March 23, 1963

New York, The Museum of Modern Art & traveling, The Art of Assemblage, 1961-62, no. 152, illustrated in the catalogue
Albany, Albany Institute of History and Art, A Special Loan Exhibition of Objects Collected by our Patrons of the Arts, 1966, no. 20, illustrated in the catalogue

Dorothy Canning Miller, ed., The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection: Masterpieces of Modern Art, New York, 1981, illustrated in color p. 121

Please contact the Impressionist & Modern Art Department directly for a condition report.
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.

Miró’s artistic career was defined by a perpetual drive for experimentation, adopting and at times, inventing, new methods, materials and processes to create an ever-changing and highly individualistic and expressive visual vocabulary. This composition, part of an important series of assemblages produced by Miró in 1933, was made during a particularly restless moment of his career. While his fellow Surrealists barreled forward with the momentum of their movement in the late 1920s, Miró consumed himself with the idea of “anti-painting,” which in his words, was “a revolt against a state of mind and traditional painting techniques that were later judged morally unjustifiable. It was also an attempt to express myself through new materials: bark, textile, fiber, assemblages of objects, collages, and so on” (quoted in Joan Miró, Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937 (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 1). The origin of Miró’s break from conventional two-dimensional painting traces to a confluence of events in spring 1926, when Miró first moved his studio across the Seine into an artist complex used by leading Dadaists Jean Arp and Max Ernst. Around the same time, Miró and Ernst collaborated with Sergei Diaghilev on a production of Romeo and Juliet for the Ballets Russes. Miró’s participation in the project was publicly denounced by André Breton and Louis Aragon, creating a rupture between him and the rest of the Surrealist group.

In the years following the events of 1926, Miró vastly expanded his repertoire of materials and media, experimenting with the creative potential of unprimed canvas, the painterly qualities of pastel, selective application of gesso, the varied textures of copper panel, masonite and flocked paper as supports, and the incorporation of found objects and postcard images into cohesive collages and wooden constructions. Brimming with creative energy that favored tactility and materiality, Miró’s artistic output during the decade following 1926 followed no discernible progression or linear evolution. His work during this critical period vacillated between conventional canvases and the aforementioned methods of radical experimentation, and sometimes both simultaneously, in a state that Jacques Dupin has described as "spiritual homelessness" (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Paris, 2012, p. 167). During this period, Miró also experienced great tumult in his personal life. His happy marriage to Pilar Juncosa in October 1929 was followed by financial difficulties brought on by the Great Depression, which forced him to return to Barcelona in early 1932 and set up a studio in his childhood home.

During a stay on his family farm in Montroig in the late summer of 1933 and then again in Barcelona in early 1934, Miró produced a series of collages blending together his signature playfulness of line with cutouts of postcards, catalogues, magazines, and other found images. The present work is an example from this group that juxtaposed elements taken from postcards and illustrations in popular media of the day with bold and seemingly ludic lines that coalesce into personnages floating in space against an earthy background. In a departure from the Surrealist principle of automatic writing and creation, Miró appears to have planned these compositions carefully. As Jim Coddington notes in his study of these works, registration lines are visible on some of the compositions, where Miró marked the placement of postcards and collage elements. The result of this highly deliberate and technically sophisticated process is a harmonized composition defined by a multitude of textures. In a poetic style unique to the artist, the collage unites dreamlike Surrealist manifestations of line and form with Dadaist impulses to assemble found materials, a combination that anticipated the assemblages of such postwar artists as Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg, the latter of whom frequently appropriated imagery from popular culture to create provocative collages.

Nelson Rockefeller acquired this work from Royal S. Marks Gallery in 1963, during his time as Governor of New York. A formidable dealer in the city during his lifetime, Royal Marks directed his estate, after his death, to set up a fund for the promotion of AIDS education and research.

ADOM has confirmed the authenticity of this work.