Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris
Madame Vulliany, Paris (acquired from the above in 1939 at a sale to benefit the children of Spanish refugees)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Drawings, Paris, 2010, vol. II, no. 85ܫ6, illustrated p. 39 (ജwith incorrect provenance)

Executed on cream wove paper laid down on board. There are artist's pinholes in the lower two corners. Apart from some minor scattered spots of foxing, mainly in the upper quarter of the composition, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the yellows are brighter in the original.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

'My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colours. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.' Joan Miró  

The late 1930s and early 1940s were a period of immense creativity for Miró, a time when he would develop the iconography and pictorial vocabulary that would inhabit the remainder of his unique œuvre. Executed at the creative zenith of his pre-war period, the present work encapsulates the rising tensions in Europe at the close of the 1930s. In 1936, a right-wing coup against the government of the Second Spanish Republic unleashed a brutal civil war that weighed heavily upon the artist. Painted shortly thereafter, the present work uses an electrified pale💛tte and potent imagery that are resonant of this significant period for the artist.

In 1937, Miró provided an explicit reaction to Franco's rise to power in his large-scale work, Le Faucheur (fig. 1). This mural, now lost, dominated the Spanish Pavillion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937, taking its place alongside Julio González's Montserrat and Picasso's masterpiece, Guernica. The Spanish Pavillion that year provided an unprecedented emotive force that made clear the feelings of sympathy which these artists felt for their fellow citizens in support of the Republic. Within these series of wartime works, the trope of a female figure in distress became a potent symbol for artists such as Picasso and Miró, leading the former to his seminal Weeping Women series (fig. 2). The present work originates from a similar series which Miró executed in 1938 focusing on the female figure, which included masterworks such as Tête de femme (fig. 3).

In his analysis of Miró's work for the Spanish Pavillion in 1937, Jacques Dupin provides a description equally applicable to the present work: '...this emancipated female body takes wild, unheard-of risks. It distends itself, it stretches and shrinks, it deforms itself by following a rigorous logic whose outrageousness and cruelty must be confirmed with every stroke. There is no room for fantasy or capricious invention. The body is denatured according to the strictest laws of metamorphosis. Miró never intervenes; he is not a manipulator or a surgeon. He merely guides and keeps watch over the inner pulsings, the flow of perverse energy, carefully tracking the process of upheaval that extends from the whole to all of its parts' (J. Dupin in Joan Miró: A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1987, p. 42). This dialogue with figural iconography which Dupin describes, clearly evident in the present work, will become the basis for the artist's groundbreaking Constellations series executed between 1940 and 1941 (fig. 4).

By the time he executed the present work, Miró was enjoying relative acclaim for the unmatched orginality of his paintings from the early 1930s. Herbert Read, an English poet and art critic, wrote of Miró in a publication from 1934: 'Everyone must grant Miró the sensibility of a supreme artist; there are paintings of his which leave this sensibility so naked and obvious, that only the aesthetically blind can refuse to respond -- pictures in which a single sensitive line explores a field of pure colour, tracing, as it were, the graph of the artist's acutest point of sensibility, registering the seismographic disturbances of a mind exposed to the assaults of the senses' (H. Read in Christian Zervos (ed.), Cahiers d'Art, 9, nos. 1-4, 1934, p. 52). Despite this positive critical𒉰 acclaim, Miró eschewed any sense of artistic comfort, cꦯonstantly seeking novel forms of expression within his art.

Additional information has appeared since the publication of Jacques Dupin's catalogue raisonné of the artist's drawings that confirm this work was included in a 1939 sale at Galerie Jeanne Bucher, the proceeds of which were donated to the children of Spanish refugees. This sale was a show of support among the art world in Paris for the plight of the Spanish citizens during the civil war. The work was purchased at that sale by Madam🍌e Vulliany and has remained in her family since.

 

Fig. 1, Joan Miró painting Le Faucheur for the Spanish ౠPavillion at the Paris World's Fair, 193๊7

Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, La femme qui pleure avec mouchoir III, 1937, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Centro de 🅘Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

Fig. 3, Joan Miró, Tête de femme, 1938, oilℱ on canvas, The Minneapolis Institute 🐬of Arts, Minneapolis

Fig. 4, Joan Miró, L'Étoile matinale, 1940, gouache and o༺il wash on paper, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona