Joan Miró

Louis Broder, Paris (Joan Miró publisher)
Gift from the above to the family of the present owner

Patrick Cramer, Catalogue raisonné des livres illustrés, Geneva, 1989, no. 148, pp. 370-71 (illustration of a lithograph made after the present work)

Gouache, pastel and collage on black paper, hinged to the mount at two points along the upper edge. The collage elements are stable. The sheet is light stained. There are pinholes to all four corners and to the centre of each edge. There is small area of abrasion to the upper right corner, possibly original. There are some very fine lines of shrinkage to the green gouache with some associated flecks of paint loss. This work is in good condition.
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Le Lézard aux plumes d'or (Paris, 1971), an emblematic art book born from the collaboration between Joan Miro and the renowned art publisher Louis Broder, highlights the poetic talents of the Catalan painter. Miro's interest in poetry is discernable in his works as early as 1920 or 1930 where words, even mysterious sentences, mingle with his canvases, such as Sourire de ma blonde (1924) or Une étoile caresse le sein d'une négresse (1938).

Miro also wrote poetic texts, kept in notebooks or sometimes published in reviews. It is in one of these texts that can be found the beginnings of Le Lézard aux plumes d'or. The text of the illustrated art book – "a poem illuminated by the author" to quote Miro – is the reworked version of the text "Jeux poétiques" written between 1936 and 1939 and published in 1945 in the Cahiers d'art. Upon Louis Broder's insistence Miro finished by accepting to rework and modify this text in order to create one of the most beautiful artist's books of the twentieth century: Le Lézard aux plumes d'or (Paris, 1971).

A first version of the book, in 1967, was destroyed due to the inadequate quality of paper. Thus, it was only in 1971 that the book was able to be published, with fifteen etchings and twenty three pages of extravagant and enchanting poetry, mingling calligraphy texts and illustration. The text employs the Surrealist literary tendency of reducing pauses or gaps in the flow of words to a minimum, and is accompanied by exceptional illustrations testifying to the influence of the American avant-garde that Miro met with in the 1960s, and in particular the gestural painting of Jackson Pollock. Nicolas Calas wrote of the book: "Miro inflects the images of his poem in terms of the movement of his hand, and his calligraphy, so that it moulds the curves of the poem, forming a baroque drawing." (Nicolas et Elena Calas, Miró lithographe, Paris, 1981, p. 17).

According to a few reviewers of the time, the "lizard", absent from the text to which it gives its name, was the poet's alter ego, just as Loplop was for Max Ernst. Originating from the collection of Louis Broder, the two works presented here are preparatory gouaches for the plates 6 and 13 of this book. The two compositions depict themes dear to the artist, the sun and the moon.