Joan Miró

Waddington Galleries, Toronto & London
Private Collection (acquired from the above in the late 1980s; sale: Christie's, London 22nd June 2006, lot 517)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Executed on cream laid paper, laid down on card. The collage elements are secure. There are two vertical and horizontal fine lines of creasing, possibly due to previous folding. The sheet is time stained and there is mount staining to all four edges. There is a pin hole to the centre of the upper edge and a fine crease circa 2cm to the left of the pinhole. There is a further pinhole to the centre of the right edge, lower right corner. There are a few small spots of discoloured glue to some of the extreme edges of the collage elements. Otherwise, this work is in overall good condition.
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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."

The present work is a maquette for a poster that Miró made to advertise his good friend Raymond Queneau’s 1944 book Loin de Rueil (later translated into English as The Skin of Dreams). Queneau was a novelist, poet, and perhaps most famous as the co-founder in 1960 of avant-garde literary movement Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). The group was made up of mainly French-speaking writers and mathematicians who sought to create works by using constrained writing techniques as a trigger for creativity and inspiration. Queneau's 1947 Exercices de Style, for example, is the recounting ninety-nine times of the same inconsequential episode, in which a man witnesses a minor altercation on a bus trip; each account is unique in terms of tone and style. Queneau was a great admirer of Miró’s work, whose pared-down visual vocabulary and repetitive iconography he recognised as echoing many of his own literary experiments and concerns. Though Queneau had already met many of the Surrealist set in Paris in the 1920s, he did not meet Miró until 1939. The present work is testament to their ensuing friendship and collaborations and Queneau was to return the favour in his numerous catalogue texts that he would go on to write for various Miró exhibition catalogues in years ahead. Roland Penrose has spoken with great warmth about the importance of such collaborations, describing the way in which Miró’s ‘desire to work in close association with his friends has resulted in an extraordinarily rich output of books of poems by them, decorated with unique ingenuity’ going on to say that ‘Books such as Paul Eluard’s A toute Epreuve, Tzara’s L’Antitête and Parler seul, René Char’s A la santé du serpant, Michel Leiris’s Bagatelles végétales, René Crevel’s La Bague d’aurore, Raymond Queneau’s Album 19 and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (see lot 241) are among Miró’s most brilliant achievements’ (Roland Penrose, Miró, London, 1970, pp.164-165)

The present work is an excellent example of Miró’s iconic palette of bold primary colours and his typically confident execution. His entire career was dedicated to explorations of spontaneity, form and colour, his compositions becoming more and more simplified and abstract as years went on. This maquette exudes an extraordinary rhythmic energy and the confident rendering of the collage element lends the work a raw physicality and conviction. Miró’s use of primary colour, experimentation with paper and scissors, and the organic sensuality of the leaf-like outlines in the present work, make for a fascinating comparison with Henri Matisse’s cut-outs of the same period (currently the subject of an acclaimed exhibition at the Tate Modern), as evidenced by works like Matisse’s White alga on red and green background, of 1947.

In words that might just as well have been written about the present work, such are their relevance, Penrose has explained how ‘Miró’s gift for calligraphy, and the ease with which he plays with colour, find an outlet whenever he designs a poster. The brilliance of the colour contrasts, the unexpectedness of the layout, and the flourish with which his posters declare their purpose, attract attention like a trumpet call’ (ibid.).