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Descriptif du lot
Joan Miró’s Personnage brims with energy: the surface is entirely articulated with gestural brushstrokes, some richly impastoed and others thinner, lending the picture an infectious sense of vigour. Near the top, like a calligraphic counterpoint, two dots and a dash form a profoundly Miró-esque face, their emotive, engaging glance competing for our attention against the swirling brushstrokes. Created in 1977, this picture encapsulates the painterly qualities that came to the fore in Miró’s compositions while working from his purpose-built studio in Mallorca, where he had the space and time to explore new thoroughfares of creativity. This was a period in which he began to experiment with new media, such as tapestries and pottery as well as vast murals, all of which came to inform his eloquent means of expression. This is encapsulated in the bold swathes of blue and red as well as the heavy areas of black in Personnage, which sing of the artist’s new-found artistic freedom.
Miró’s move to this studio in 1956, two decades earlier, had encouraged a retrospective glance on the part of the artist. He found himself unpacking and rediscovering a range of works from earlier in his career. This was a phenomenon which was accentuated by the subsequent founding of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in 1968. Miró would gift his eponymous foundation thousands of drawings and other works, bringing his past artistic trajectory to his attention once again. However, Miró responded to this backwards glance by approaching his work with a new sense of innovation and invention, abandoning and reacting against some of his earlier precepts and styles.
This change in course had also been spurred by an American exhibition dedicated to his works by The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959. Travelling across the Atlantic, Miró perceived the impact that his art had had in the United States: he was able to appreciate the Abstract Expressionists who had developed in part thanks to the examples he and other Surrealists had set. This took the effect of a confirmation for Miró, freeing and emboldening his painterly aesthetic. In Personnage, the manner in which the entirety of the canvas has become involved in the composition appears informed by the development of artists such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko whose paintings he saw during his trip. The Abstract Expressionists’ impact upon Miró is underscored by the rich gesturality of the surface of Personnage, with its vivid brushwork. As the artist himself explained, American painting, ‘showed me the liberties we can take, and how far we could go, beyond the limits. In a sense, it freed me’ (quoted in J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 303).
Personnage is imbued with the physicality of the various acts of painting, which are so resolutely emphatic of the human presence. Here, there are sweeping brushstrokes, there, a cluster of dabs of paint as though applied with fingers, recalling the earliest paintings on rockfaces of our common prehistoric forebears. In this way, Miró explained that he sought to tap into an aesthetic that was so individual that it teetered towards the universal (see G. Fischer and J.-L. Prat, Miró: From Earth to Sky, exh. cat., Albertina, Vienna, 2014, p. 180).
Despite veering towards the universal, Miró’s iconography here remains firmly rooted in his own individual past, and the glyph-like characters that had peopled his works throughout so much of his career. In Personnage, the small face at the top recalls the delicate figures of many of his earlier compositions. At the same time, the vaster, more oval eye-like elements recall a Surrealist preoccupation, explored in the famous photographs of the roofs of Sibiu by Lee Miller. Yet they also hark back to Miró’s own Catalan heritage. As he explained to Yvon Taillander only a few years before Personnage was painted, the characters ‘have eyes all over them: an eye on the face, an eye on the leg, an eye on the back’ and so forth, derived from ‘a Romanesque chapel where there is an angel whose wings have been replaced by eyes. Another Romanesque angel has eyes in its hand, right in its palm. I saw that in Barcelona when I was still a baby’ (quoted in Y. Taillander, ‘Miró: Now I work on the Floor,’ 1974; in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 282).
Miró’s move to this studio in 1956, two decades earlier, had encouraged a retrospective glance on the part of the artist. He found himself unpacking and rediscovering a range of works from earlier in his career. This was a phenomenon which was accentuated by the subsequent founding of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in 1968. Miró would gift his eponymous foundation thousands of drawings and other works, bringing his past artistic trajectory to his attention once again. However, Miró responded to this backwards glance by approaching his work with a new sense of innovation and invention, abandoning and reacting against some of his earlier precepts and styles.
This change in course had also been spurred by an American exhibition dedicated to his works by The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959. Travelling across the Atlantic, Miró perceived the impact that his art had had in the United States: he was able to appreciate the Abstract Expressionists who had developed in part thanks to the examples he and other Surrealists had set. This took the effect of a confirmation for Miró, freeing and emboldening his painterly aesthetic. In Personnage, the manner in which the entirety of the canvas has become involved in the composition appears informed by the development of artists such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko whose paintings he saw during his trip. The Abstract Expressionists’ impact upon Miró is underscored by the rich gesturality of the surface of Personnage, with its vivid brushwork. As the artist himself explained, American painting, ‘showed me the liberties we can take, and how far we could go, beyond the limits. In a sense, it freed me’ (quoted in J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 303).
Personnage is imbued with the physicality of the various acts of painting, which are so resolutely emphatic of the human presence. Here, there are sweeping brushstrokes, there, a cluster of dabs of paint as though applied with fingers, recalling the earliest paintings on rockfaces of our common prehistoric forebears. In this way, Miró explained that he sought to tap into an aesthetic that was so individual that it teetered towards the universal (see G. Fischer and J.-L. Prat, Miró: From Earth to Sky, exh. cat., Albertina, Vienna, 2014, p. 180).
Despite veering towards the universal, Miró’s iconography here remains firmly rooted in his own individual past, and the glyph-like characters that had peopled his works throughout so much of his career. In Personnage, the small face at the top recalls the delicate figures of many of his earlier compositions. At the same time, the vaster, more oval eye-like elements recall a Surrealist preoccupation, explored in the famous photographs of the roofs of Sibiu by Lee Miller. Yet they also hark back to Miró’s own Catalan heritage. As he explained to Yvon Taillander only a few years before Personnage was painted, the characters ‘have eyes all over them: an eye on the face, an eye on the leg, an eye on the back’ and so forth, derived from ‘a Romanesque chapel where there is an angel whose wings have been replaced by eyes. Another Romanesque angel has eyes in its hand, right in its palm. I saw that in Barcelona when I was still a baby’ (quoted in Y. Taillander, ‘Miró: Now I work on the Floor,’ 1974; in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 282).