Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist)
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Katia Granoff, Paris
Private Collection, Paris

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Joan Miró, Paintings, Tempera, Pastels, 1935
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Galerie Maeght, Joan Miró, Rétrospective de l’oeuvre peint, 1990, no. 95

Clement Greenberg, Miró, New York, 1948, pl. XXIV, illustrated p. 68
Jacques Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1961, no. 375, illustrated p. 514
Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings, Volume II : 1931-1941, Paris, 1999, no. 479, illustrated p. 118 (also titled Personnage)
Pierre Matisse and his artists (♓exhibition catalogue), The Pierpont Morgan Library, New✅ York, 2002, photograph of the 1935 Miró exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, showing the present work, p. 165

Figure, also called Personnage, was included in the third Miró exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in 1935, one of a group of fifteen pastels on velours paper that were executed at Montroig during the summer of 1934. Writing to Pierre Matisse on October 12, 1934, about the forthcoming exhibition, Miró emphasized that “these pastels are very painted. I intend to fix them very solidly. You will be able to do a greatly varied show, with many different kinds of things, which I hope will be of considerable interest…” (Margit Rowell, ed., Joan Miró Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1936, p. 124)

The centerpiece of this exhibition was Miró’s celebrated painting La Ferme (1924) from the collection of Ernest Hemingway (see fig. 1), but this stood in complete contrast to Miró’s more recent work, which constituted the bulk of the exhibition. In addition to a series of works of gouache and collage on black paper and another in oil and collage on sandpaper were the fifteen large pastels, which are generally thought to be the first manifestation of what Miró was to call sauvage paintings. As described by Jacques Dupin: “These are in remarkable contrast to his other works of the same period: the collage paintings on sandpaper, for instance, or the gouache drawings. In these pastels Miró abandons his technique of flat painting, his cursive writing, and his predilection for pure colors. He resorts to modeling and makes use of a certain chiaroscuro to create a disturbed, anxiety-laden atmosphere. The massive, stylized figures seem to represent elementary organic forms; they suggest bones and such inner organs as the kidney and liver. They seem as though blown up, suspended in some thick, viscous fluid, and are bathed in a murky light that gives off a nightmarish glow” (Jacques Dupin, Miró, New York, 1994, pp. 186-87).

Picasso’s metamorphic figures of the late 1920s were sculptural in form, variously evoking bones and human organs. Although monstrous, they were frequently depicted in mundane activities, playing ball on the beach or o𝄹p𒁃ening the door of beach cabanas. In contrast, the lurid figures in Miró’s pastels are silhouetted against featureless backgrounds, and the whimsicality of the 1920s has entirely disappeared, replaced by an anonymous fear or dread. In the present works the facial features and sexual organs are less exaggerated than they are in many of the other works from the group (see fig. 2). The sex of the figure is suggested by minuscule breasts in the middle of the orange form while the arms and legs are reduced to flipper-like forms reaching towards the four corners of the sheet of paper.

Speculating on the cause of this sudden change in Miro’s style, Jacques Dupin points not to any changes in his own personal circumstances but to events happening in the world outside to which Miró was acutely sensitive. “Still, we may legitimately be surprised that, beginning early as 1934, certain works of Miró were already bearing witness, not just to some vague malaise or anxiety (everyone felt this), but to a true panic terror, a recognition of the human tragedy in its most brutal, least bearable forms – in the most desperate terms, the screams of the dying, the torture of the flesh, the morbid regression of humanity even beyond savagery, to sheer animalism. Miró’s works would then give expression to all this in the form of an assault upon the human figure, disintegrating it entirely, submerging it in the tidal wave of unleashed elemental powers. It is as though the Spanish tragedy and, later, the horrors of the second World war had first broken out in the works of the Catalan artist, long before setting ablaze his country and the rest of the world” (Dupin, ibid., p. 185).

 Fig. 1, The present work in the 1935 exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery, New 🧸York💝

Fig. 2, Joan Miró, Les Amoureux, October 1934, pastel and pencil on ไvelours paper, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection