胡安·米羅

阿迪蒂畫廊，巴黎（1962年或之前購入）
萊昂及皮耶·哈迪，巴黎
西奧畫廊，馬德里
雅克·阿庫埃，布哥斯（購自上述畫廊；售出：巴黎Christian de Quay，1993年10月21日，拍品編號47）
私人收藏，巴黎（購自上述拍賣）
購自上述收藏

馬德里，西奧畫廊，〈胡安·米羅〉，1978年，品號不詳，圖錄載彩圖（尺寸長寬調轉）

巴塞羅那，胡安·米羅基金會，〈胡安·米羅：20年，現實變幻〉，1983年，品號93，圖錄載彩圖

布哥斯，柯爾登宮，〈Hojas de Hierba 收藏西班牙藝術〉，1989年，品號不詳，圖錄載圖

紐約，西班牙學院，〈雅克·阿庫埃收藏現代名家傑作〉，1990-91年，品號不詳，圖錄載彩圖

大加那利島拉斯帕爾馬斯，西班牙，現代藝術大西洋中心；德特內里費島聖克魯斯，西班牙，「農場」展覽廳及加那利群島官立建築學院，〈藝術公報及其時代1932-1936年〉，品號不詳，圖錄載彩圖

羅馬，科爾索博物館，〈馬克斯·恩斯特及其超現實主義同儕〉，2002年，品號不詳，圖錄載彩圖

馬德里，吉列爾莫·德·奧斯馬畫廊；巴塞羅那，奧里奧爾畫廊；巴黎，特莎·埃羅爾德畫廊，〈畢加索與米羅：油畫及紙本作品〉，2004-05年，品號20，圖錄載彩圖

聖路易，費爾內-布蘭卡當代藝術空間，〈達達主義－超現實主義聯展1916-1969年〉，2012年，品號不詳，圖錄載彩圖

雅克·杜賓，《胡安·米羅生平與作品》，紐約，1962年，品號225，518頁載圖

佩雷·金費雷，《尋根米羅》，巴塞羅那，1993年，352頁載圖

雅克·杜賓及阿里安·勒龍·梅諾，《胡安·米羅專題目錄：油畫》，巴黎，1999年，第I冊，品號277，208頁載彩圖

“A painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world. It doesn’t matter if it depicts flowers or people or horses, as long as it reveals a world, something alive” Joan Miro

Peinture is from a series of supremely abstracted works Miró painted at the height of his involvement with the Surrealists. Miró joined the Surrealist group in 1924 and participated in their first exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in 1925. The present work, painted in 1927, was executed when Miró was living in Montmartre and working alongside Max Ernst, René Magritte, Jean Arp and the poet Paul Éluard. The credo of these painters, which André Breton first expressed in his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, was rooted in a belief “in the future resolution of the two states seemingly so contradictory, which are dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality” (A. Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, Ann Arbor, 1972). This new ideology encouraged Miró to eliminate representation from his canvases, and, as he would later declare: “The discovery of Surrealism coincided for me with a crisis in my own painting and the decisive turning that … caused me to abandon realism for the imaginary. I spent a great deal of time with poets, because I thought you had to go beyond the plastic thing to reach poetry. Surrealism freed the unconscious, exalted desire, endowed art with additional powers… I painted as if in a dream, with the most total freedom" (quoted in Joan Miró (exhibition catalogue), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1993, pp. 180 & 194).

Unlike Dalí and Magritte's figurative version of Surrealism, Miró's artistic development took a different turn. Over the course of the 1910s and early 1920s, Miró struggled to create an individual pictorial idiom, free from dependence of over signifiers. What he ingeniously developed was a distinctly original language comprised of freely invented gossamer figures that border the realms of figuration and abstraction. This visual vocabulary of “image-signs” bear no resemblance to the natural world, and their function is more akin to that of words or music than to a literal representation of nature; originating from the world of dreams and the unconscious, their other-worldly character emphasized by the void of the background that the images populate. As Jacques Dupin commented, they are “devoid of all materiality, all corporeal density. Because of their spectral appearance, they seem to be figures of yet unborn, still not given life. They ignore the laws of gravitation; they hover in the clouds or glide through liquid or viscous matter. They are the very substance of dreams and hallucinations" (ibid., p. 164).

In the present work, as in his most accomplished paintings of this period, Miró uses whimsical and ambiguous forms that first appear abstract, only to gradually take form in shifting and delightful ways. In its powerful simplicity, Peinture reveals a mastery of the void, exploring a very new sense of space. Deceptively childlike in execution, the composition exhibits a sophisticated ambiguity in elements with multiple readings. It is composed of a highly saturated winged figure at far right, the solidity of which contrasts with the thin hash marks floating above left and the central green-headed creature set against the teal-grey surface. Works such as the present compelled André Breton to comment that Miró “may be looked upon as the most Surrealist among us” (A. Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture quoted in J. Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 156). 

Isabella Monod-Fontaine wrote of Miró’s 1927 works: “Gone are the monochrome spaces left almost untouched, the floating, washed-out pigments; now the colors cover over, they are saturated, violent, almost shrill, working together (or clashing) along the horizon that gives shape to each of these strange, fascinating compositions.  Each split ground establishes a different climate of color, apparently supporting the various scenes that are played out of their unusual stages. These colored grounds play exactly the same kind of role as the animal characters. They act and declaim, shout or whisper in the background” (I. Monod-Fontaine, Joan Miró, 1917-1934, La Naissance du Monde (exhibition catalogue), Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004, p. 73).