Marked: FUNDICIO VICTORIA PARELLADA BARCELONA’ front of self-base
artist
Joan Miró, a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramist is celebrated internationally for works that eschew conventional theories of representation. Inspired by the ancient drawings in the Altamira Cave that he visited with the celebrated ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas in 1957, Miró created works reminiscent of children’s drawings and graffiti, a true expression of the “infancy of art”. Such a metaphorical childhood reference reflected the prevailing surrealist theories current among the intellectuals and artists to whom Miró was exposed. In the book Painters on Painting, Miró was quoted in an interview as stating that his favorite schools of painting were the cave painters, the primitives. Believing that all art created after the time of these cave painters was “degenerate”, Miró sought to create “pure” paintings, as in Untitled which embodies the use of ochre pigments and earth tones developed from his visit to the Altamira Cave. Miró further sought in such works to “rediscover the sources of human feeling”, deeming pure abstraction to be an “absurdity” and “empty”. Eschewing abstraction, he sought instead to dismantle the formerly accepted “precepts of representation” and to bring art back through metaphors of infancy and graffiti. Such a radical novel style of painting would later influence generations of twentieth century avant-garde artists. Himself heavily influenced by Surrealism, Miró drew on his own active imagination to create works that appeared at first glance to be spontaneous, but which truly had been meticulously planned and executed.
provenance
Private collection, France
Christie's, London, July 1998
Private collection, acquired from the above
Christie's, New York, November 2024
literature
A. Jouffroy and J. Teixidor, Miró Sculptures, Paris, 1973, p. 59, no. 98 (another cast illustrated).
J. Dupin, Miró as Sculptor, Barcelona, 1976, no. 136 (other casts illustrated in situ in the artist's studio).
C. Escudero i Anglès and V. Izquierdo Brichs, Obra de Joan Miró: Dibuixos, pintura, escultura, ceràmica, tèxtils, Barcelona, 1988, p. 407, no. 1495 (illustrated).
E.F. Miró and P.O. Chapel, Joan Miró, Sculptures: Catalogue raisonné, 1928-1982, Paris, 2006, p. 131, no. 119 (another cast illustrated in color).
E.F. Miró and P.O. Chapel, Joan Miró, Sculptures: Catalogue Raisonné, 1928-1982, www.successiomiro.com/catalogue (accessed September 2024), no. 119 (another cast illustrated in color).