Joan Miró

Galerie Lelong, Paris
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia
Acquired from the above in 2000

Joan Miró (exhibition catalogue), Centre Cultural Contemporani, Palma de Mallorca, 1999-2000, illustration in color of another cast p. 57
Emilio Fernández Miró & Pilar Ortega Chapel, Joan Miró, Sculptures, Catalogue raisonné, 1928-1982, Paris, 2006, no. 152, illustration of another cast p. 160

This work is in excellent condition. It features a textured green, beige and dark brown-black patina on a reddish-brown vase. A couple minor possible scratches are visible to the surface of the top-most face, but the work is otherwise fine.
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.
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(INTRO SPREAD) The Creative Genius of Joan Miró

The art of Joan Miró bears witness to one of the most prodigious minds of the twentieth century. So expansive was his imagination that he managed to redefine the world on his own terms and in his own language, creating a unique visual vocabulary that eludes easy translation or categorization. His output may be counted among the most inventive and diverse of his era, not only in style, with foundations in Surrealism, Dada, Abstraction and Color Field painting, but also in selection of medium, as few artists were willing to engage such sheer variety of materials, from oil painting to bronze casting to lithography to found object assemblage.

As Kyriakos Koutsomallis writes, “Behind the inventive and exuberant semiography of what at first sight appears to be a random, unruly, and even eccentric style of work, beneath the outer layer of confusion and disorder, here lies the real genius of Miró—his perspicacity, his reclusiveness, his unquiet mind, his ever-vigilant discriminating gaze. For him the creative process is a ritual act, an act which presupposes both order and discipline. Miró is the artist who succeeded in preserving the authentic experience of childhood innocence. Like a child he indulges in play, however almost making fun of his existential anxieties. Passionate and audacious, he recreates—in his own space and on his own terms—the lost world of childhood. Like a true Catalan, he paints with his whole soul, mobilizing the full power of his imagination. He penetrates to the secret recesses of memory where the experiences and traditions of childhood await the alchemical process that will bring them to the surface of his work, at the chosen moment, as a fresh reality. Memories are never lost: they simply lie dormant ready to be put to use, when required, and to enter into the creative moment.”

Koutsomallis continues, “Miró’s break with the past is not a deliberate attempt to reject art, but, as with every revolutionary advance, a rebellion against the aesthetic status quo. Miró does not repudiate tradition, he simply cuts through it. Tradition for him is a storehouse of material waiting to be used, but the manner of its use will be different: it will acknowledge no commitments, models, conditions or limits. Miró’s attitude is not one of denial but of rupture with everything that has preceded” (Joan Miró, In the Orbit of the Imaginary (exhibition catalogue), Basil & Elise Goulandros Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, 2002, pp. 12-13).

The following three lots from a distinguished private collection represent but a cross section of Miró’s profound vision, not to mention his interdisciplinary approach to the creative process, bucking tradition and paving a path to the future.  

 

 

Miró's highly figural Maure is among the most arresting of the artist's late sculptures, created by assembling a selection of bizarre found objects and casting them in bronze. Its very genesis places it firmly in the realm of the Surrealist marvellous, a concept so profound that it gave creative impetus to almost everything which the movement produced and informed much of its theory. Each composite element—steel rebar, a ceramic vessel—is transfigured by the casting process and together, in the viewer's eye, they are assimilated into the form of an improbable being: an automaton, a cadavre exquis, a portent of repressed desires. In a highly unusual nod to the European sculptural tradition, Miró postures his figure with a distinctive sideways and forward S-shaped sway of the body, characteristic of the International Gothic style (see fig. 1).

The present work is imbued with great significance when seen in the context of the Surrealist's preoccupation with the femme fatale and, in particular, with occurrences of this phenomenal figure in myth and in nature. One such example features time and again in Surrealist imagery: the female Mantis. This spectral predator was venerated for its ability to mimic its environment and for its uniquely cannibalistic tendencies. For the Surrealists, this combination of eroticism and death was all too tempting. Miró's insectoid Maure, distinguished thusly by its tripartite body, appears almost organic, almost camouflaged. Seemingly inert, its stilted pose threatens something imminent, potentially fatal. And yet this phantasm is the product of mere everyday objects, given meaning only by the artist's whim; true to Surrealist principles, Miró demonstrates how the marvelous is always present in even the most banal of objects.

 

Fig. 1 German, Rhineland, Second half fourteenth century, Standing Virgin, gilt and polychromed wood, sold: Sotheby’s, London, July 2, 2013, lot 13