Lot 36
JOAN MIRÓ(1893-1983)Femme aux 3 cheveux, constellation
6 December 2022, 14:00 EST
New YorkUS$400,000 - US$600,000
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JOAN MIRÓ (1893-1983)
Femme aux 3 cheveux, constellation
signed 'Miró' (lower right); signed again, inscribed and dated 'Miró. 26/VII/76. Femme aux 3 cheveux. constellation' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
10 5/8 x 7 9/16 in (27 x 19.2 cm)
Painted on July 26, 1976
signed 'Miró' (lower right); signed again, inscribed and dated 'Miró. 26/VII/76. Femme aux 3 cheveux. constellation' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
10 5/8 x 7 9/16 in (27 x 19.2 cm)
Painted on July 26, 1976
Footnotes
Provenance
The artist's family, Spain (by descent directly from the artist).
Private collection, Spain (acquired from the above).
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2020.
Exhibited
Silkeborg, Museum Jorn, Miró & Jorn, February 7 – May 24, 2021.
Literature
J. Dupin & A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, vol. VI, 1976–1981, Paris, 2004, no. 1808 (illustrated p. 84).
Femme aux 3 cheveux, constellation was painted on 26 July 1976, eight months after the death of General Franco, the fascist dictator who had ruled Spain since his victory over democratic Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War fought from 1936 to 1939. The pall of painful memories and a stifling burden of oppression had finally been lifted from the Spanish people. Most importantly for Miró, the death of Franco and the subsequent establishment of a constitutional monarchy under King Juan Carlos I allowed the resurgence of nationalist spirit in his native Catalonia, which was granted the status of an autonomous region and nationality within Spain. Pablo Picasso had been unwilling to visit Spain or to allow the exhibition of his work while Franco was alive. Miró, while a resident on the island of Majorca since 1940, also refused to show his work in any official capacity.
Well into his eighties by this time, Miró neither slowed down nor turned away from the art of his time. In 1976 the first exhibition of the Fundació Joan Miró took place in Barcelona. It presented a large selection of Miró's works held in the museum on permanent loan, and the artist was intimately involved in the planning of the exhibition. Nevertheless, he had the energy to pour himself into painting at the same time, and the present work reveals the bold aesthetic that dominates the paintings from this festive moment in his career.
Previously focusing on large-format surfaces, Miró concentrated almost exclusively on medium and small canvases from the mid-1970s onwards. These later works, such as Femme aux 3 cheveux, constellation, are further distinguished by the artist's bold use of primary color juxtaposed against his pronounced use of black. The paintings from this period also revisit works from the 1920s and 1930s, during which he explored his interest in symbolic language and he continually sought a balance between figuration and abstraction. The chief image in Miró's pictorial universe was the figure of woman, a vital expression of primal female power. The artist demonstrates in the present work how the intuitive methods he derived from the surrealist movement, now brought forward nearly half a century, still possess the ability to startle and delight, while probing both the darkness and the light in human consciousness.
During the last full decade of his life, Miró executed a large number of paintings that were freer and more gestural than ever before. There is a sense of foreboding, urgency, and unseen danger which strikes an emotional chord unique in the artist's career. Like Picasso's late paintings, they reflect Miró's struggle to deal with mortality, yet their unabated energy betrays no diminishment of his artistic will, or of his need to give form to the joy and predicament of life.