胡安·米羅

Galerie Pierre, Paris

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

Florence Maisel, Redbank, New Jersey (sold: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 2nd May 1974, lot 257)

Private Collection, USA (sold: Sotheby's, New York, 12th May 1987, lot 343B)

Acquired by the present owner in the 1990s

Lindau, Stadtmuseum Lindau, Miro – Sternennächte. Starry Nights, 2013, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, London, 1962, no. 278, illustrated p. 523

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 2000, vol. II, no. 324, illustrated in colour p. 17

Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma de Mallorca on the 12th October 1929 and they moved to Paris, installing themselves in a flat that was big enough to house both their living quarters and Miró’s studio. Their only child – María Dolorès – was born in July 1930 and over the following months Miró produced a small series of canvases that directly relate to her. A moving testimony to his love for his daughter, this series of little girls also initiated a change of direction in Miró’s work which attempted to surpass the delicate lyricism that had been at the heart of his œuvre and replace it with a newly corporeal combination of colour and form. 

In Tête de petite fille this plasticity of form is tempered by the softness of line and the delicate hues of the background. There is something infinitely touching about the painting which is characterised by a gentleness seen almost nowhere else in his work. The suggestive anthropomorphism that he developed in the 1930s has full play in the present work where the modulated curves of the figure’s head are punctuated by finely drawn lines that suggest locks of hair or an eye and imbue his subject with the unmistakable impression of a young child yawning. Using thickly impastoed daubs of colour to highlight certain features, Miró uses a palette, particularly in the pale pink, which is not seen elsewhere in his œuvre.

Tête de petite fille nonetheless retains evidence of the Surrealist idiom that Miró had begun to develop in the 1920s. Although he had associated closely with the Surrealist group that surrounded André Breton following his permanent arrival in Paris in 1922, Miró always maintained an artistic distance, pursuing his own distinctive aesthetic. As Jordi Solé i Tura has stated: ‘Miró’s adherence to the Surrealist movement in Paris demonstrates the independent spirit he cultivated throughout his career that, above all, had a tone of its own: the encounter with, surprise at, and renewed portrayal of daily reality’ (J. Solé i Tura in Joan Miró: 1893-1993 (exhibition catalogue), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 13). In the present work, that encounter with daily reality is uniquely personal; an important example of Miró’s artistic vision as it developed in the early 1930s, the work is also, first and foremost, a touching love song to his daughter.