Joan Miró

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

Mr. Allen Hofrichter, New York

Stephan Hahn, New York

Joseph H. Hazen (acquired from the above on April 21, 1959)

Private Collection

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Miró:  Recent Paintings, 1953, no. 17

Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Gallery, Paintings from the Collection of Joseph H. Hazen, 1966, no. 54

New York, Acquavella Galleries, Inc., Joan Miró, 1972, no. 55

London, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Joan Miró: A Retrospective, 1999, no. 31

Jacques Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1961, no. 791, illustrated p. 560

Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró:  His Life and Work, New York, 1962, no. 791, illustrated p. 560

Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, 1942-1955, vol. 3, Paris, 2000, no. 903, illustrated p. 185

Excellent condition. Original canvas. The very thick impasto is intact. Apart from some minor craquelure, mainly in the yellow background and three hair-line lines of inpainting upper right visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in excellent original condition.
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 luminous Les Jasmins embaument de leur parfum doré la robe de la jeune fille (the Jasmins embalm the dress of the young girl with their golden perfume)is a work of exceptional creative achievement.  Painted at the beginning of a new era in modern art, it is one of the artist's finest canvases from his post-war production. Executed in 1952 and exhibited at Pierre Matisse's gallery in New York the following year, it combines Miró's love of signs and symbols with a thematic narrative that is at once passionate, playful and intensely creative. Its title expresses the whimsy and flight of fancy that characterized Miró's best paintings, but the picture itself also presents a mix of poetic lyricism, radical abstraction, and semiotic complexity that was groundbreaking among the avant-garde during this period.   

In Miró's most successful work, his remarkable visual vocabulary strikes a perfect balance between abstraction and image-signs. There is always energy and movement in these pictures and never a sense of stasis. Moreover, each work is the result of active and ongoing improvisation that renders a precise interpretation impossible. But by the 1950s Miró heightened his audience's engagement with his art by giving his canvases poetic titles. The artist had experimented with incorporating poetry, or lyrical text, into his pictures in the late 1920s, but then largely rejected the use of highly descriptive titles over the next two decades. His return to using language as a didactic tool was a major shift in his art in the 1940s, allowing him to create compositions that were much more engaging for his audience (see figs. 1 & 2). 

As Margit Rowell wrote: "Miró's use of evocative poetic titles became more systematic in the late forties and early fifties [...] In the late twenties and throughout the thirties - those years immediately following his poem paintings - the artist shunned titles almost completely. The Constellations of 1940-41 marked the beginning of the use of long poetic titles as an accompaniment like words to music, perhaps inspired by the poetry the artist had been writing in the late 1930s or perhaps inspired by music itself. But otherwise, Miró's titles throughout the years remained relatively matter-of-fact: Paintings, Woman and Birds, and so on. In the late forties Miró showed a new interest in titles conceived as distinct poetic phrases. Again it would seem that Miró felt the need for a verbal accompaniment so that his motifs would be taken not at face value but as allusive poetic images" (Margit Rowell, Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 228).

In the early 1950s, Miró employed a wide variety of techniques and media, often enhancing the texture of his medium to obtain unusual stylistic effects. In the present work, the artist  applies a thick layer of impastoed oil to the surface of the canvas in a ring-formation.  This technique adds another dimension to the otherwise flat medium of oil on canvas.  Although this work seems to arise from the abstract realm of imagination, there is still present an adherence to the signs and forms that can be found throughout the artist's oeuvre.

When Miró painted the present composition in 1952, he had already become acquainted with the new techniques and aesthetic agenda of the Abstract Expressionists. He first saw their work in New York in 1947, and the experience, the artist would later recall, was like a "blow to the solar plexus." Several young painters, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning (see fig. 3), were crediting Miró as their inspiration for their different abstract styles. In the years that followed, he created works that responded to the enthusiasm of this new generation of American painters and the spontaneity of their art. His work from the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s is a fascinating response to the emerging trends, but, as evident in the present work, Miró retains a loyalty to his own artistic pursuits. "For me form is never something abstract," he said at the end of the 1940s, "it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never form for form's sake" (quoted in Margit Rowell, Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 207).

The present work exemplifies the expressive power of images, even though the images in the picture bear no resemblance to the natural world. Miró is solely reliant upon the lexicon of signs and symbols that he had developed over the years. As Jacques Dupin wrote with regard to the works of 1952-54: "To study the form, their distribution and their composition, to elucidate the rhythms and the distribution of the colors, gets us nowhere. Precisely because the artist has not "elaborated," but has let us come face to face with the pure creative act itself, our instruments of investigation are useless. And yet the brutal forms thus projected are neither arbitrary nor are they mere products of some automatism. They are always related to Miró's vocabulary of signs and other elements of his language, but they are spontaneous; they are not "worked up" emanations of this language, but a deliberate simplification of it. Hence their expressive power is all the greater; their energy has been caught at the source and let go at once, the sign being the condensed vehicle of subterranean energy that otherwise would be dispersed and lost" (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Barcelona & New York, 1993, p. 294).

Fig. 1, Joan Miró, L'oiseau boum-boum fait sa prière à la tête pelure d'oignon, 1952, oil on canvas, sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 5, 2002, lot 34

Fig. 2, Joan Miró, L'Oiseau au plumage déployé vole vers l'arbre argenté, 1953, oil on canvas, sold: Sotheby's, London, February 7, 2007, lot 48

Fig. 3, Willem de Kooning, Abstractions, 1949-50, oil on cardboard, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Fig. 4, Joan Miró, circa 1945