Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist)
Valentine Gallery, New York (acquired by 1941)
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Lee Ault, New York
Mr & Mrs Klaus Perls (acquired from the above by 1962. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 1^st May 1996, lot 52)
Helly Nahmad Gallery, Switzerland
Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Joan Miró, 1933-1934: paintings, tempera, pastels, 1935
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Joan Miró, 1962, no. 58, illustrated in the catalogue
London, Tate Gallery & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Joan Miró: Exhibition, 1964, no. 109, illustrated in the catalogue
St. Louis, Washington University Art Gallery & Chicago, The David and Alfred Smart Gallery, The University of Chicago, Joan Miró: The Development of a Sign Language, 1980, no. 22, illustrated in the catalogue
Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Miró in America, 1982, no. 14, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Zurich, Kunsthaus & Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle, Joan Miró Retrospective, 1986, no. 76, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró, Impactes Joan Miró 1929-1941, 1988, no. 21, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Joan Miró: Paintings & Drawings 1929-41, 1989, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Haus der Kunst, Elan Vital oder das Auge des Eros, 1994, no. 505, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
London, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Joan Miró - A Retrospective, 1999-2000, no. 17, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Joan Miró 1917-1934, 2004, no. 203, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Calder/Miró, 2004, no. 110, illustrated in colour in the c✅atalogue

Jacques Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1961, no. 341, illustrated p. 314
Jacques Lassaigne, Miró, Lausanne, 1963, illustrated in colour p. 70
Gaston Diehl, Miró, Paris, 1974, illustrated in colour p. 46
Pere Gimferrer, The Roots of Miró, New York, 1993, no. 593, illustrated in colour p. 194
Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 2000, vol. II, no. 424, illustrated in colour p. 78

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in excellent original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the colours are deeper 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."

With inimitable creativity and grand scale, Peinture exemplifies the stylistic qualities that distinguish Miró as a visionary Modernist. Miró painted this work during an intensely creative moment in his career, a time when he broke away from any discernible influences  and created wholly unique works. Coming from a series widely held to be amongst the most sophisticated compositions of his career, Peinture is a Modernist masterwork. 

Throughout the 1920s, Miró fostered an autonomous identity amid the circle of artists active in Paris. Associating with the Dadaists and subsequently the Surrealists, Miró began to develop a personal artistic voice. Through his fellow Spaniard and good friend, Pablo Picasso, Miró would meet many of the luminaries that dominated this culturally thriving metropolis, including Max Ernst (fig. 1). Though he would absorb the surrounding ethos and appreciated the aesthetic advances made by Picasso in works such as Femme (fig. 2), Miró maintained a singular voice through his paintings. By 1932, he would be forced to move back to his hometown of Barcelona, though he would take with him the vibrant lessons of his time in🐷 Paris. 

In January of the following year, Miró embarked upon a series of paintings executed with a novel sense of plasticity. In the six months that followed, he created a group of works that have come to occupy a vital position in the Modernist canon. One of the few paintings from this series not currently housed in a museum, Peinture is infused with a personal language that is at once abstract in its forms and yet legible to the viewer. The works in this series took as their inspiration a group of colꦓlages that Miró executed simultaneously. The present work is inspired by a collage executed on 6th February 1933 which Miró kept in his own collection and donated to the Fundació Joan Miró in 1976. The migration of forms from collage to oil paint in this instance is a startling testament to Miró's sophisticated formal exploration throughout this series. The printed elements in the or💃iginal collage become monumentalised in the subsequent painting, transformed from mechanical objects to organic forms pulsing with energy.

Miró himself could sense these works as a personal breakthrough, referring to them in a letter to Pierre Matisse as 'a great success that might mark a red letter day in my career' (letter from Miró to Matisse, 5th November 1933, Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives). In turn, the critical reception of these paintings was unprecedented for Miró, signifying a major turning point in his career. James Johnson Sweeney, a noted critic at the time who had in his collection one of these oils which is now at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, lauded Miró and referred to the 'ripe individuality and assured rhythms of his latest canvases as seen at the Galerie Pierre.' He went on, 'In other periods in which he was handling larger elements and more generous voids he seemed happier. Even there, at times an uncertainty, an overstress, or a sense of tentativeness would creep in. But in these later works all trace of uneasiness has disappeared - each canvas, an assured, complete plastic unit with nothing to begrudge its fellow' (J. J. Sweeney in Cahiers d'Art, nos. 1-4, 193🍸4, pp. 48-49). The present work is one of the strongest and most refined from the series, many of which are now in major institutions across the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery of Prague, the Kunstmuseum in Bern and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (fig. 3).

Oliver Wick has written of this series, 'Miró established his new working procedure in a series, launching for the first time an extensive sequence of large formats. It was probably the overwhelming impression of this space as a whole that prompted Miró to speak of a success and a turning point in his career. The new compositions were based principally on illustrations of machine parts or appliances, cut out and made into collages. Miró had arranged this series of collages on the walls of his small Barcelona studio, to "provoke chance" and to derive further forms from their "motifs and actions." From these visual associations emerged painting after painting, lucid and pure. The intrinsic cohesion and spatial effect of the "Peintures d'après collages" now led to the artist's first true mural commission, entirely in French tradition of "décorations" - paintings in the context of an architectural whole' (O. Wick, 'A Long Road to Monumental Dimensions - Beyond Painting', in Calder/Miró (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 58).

The present work reveals a decisive move towards abstraction but Miró grounds his forms in his experience of the world, a vital element of his most important paintings from this period (fig. 4). In Peinture, Miró is faithful to the choreography of forms within the original collage yet he creates a relation between these elements that coalesces into an organic whole. Jordana Mendelson has written of these works as a discovery of the poetry inherent in mechanical forms: '[Miró] described the "struggle... to achieve a maximum clarity, force, and plastic aggressiveness." Combining collecting with creating and hallucination with production, this series of pairs suggests a sustained interrogation into the mass culture of Catalan modernity and the mechanics of painting, with the banality of modern culture transformed, in order to revolutionise painting and viewer's expectations of it, into a foundation for Miró's own artistic experiments. In the paintings, with their variegated washes of background colour, prominent use of outline, saturated hues, and vivid, balanced compositions, Miró reproduced the precarious equilibrium, embodied in his collages, between the catalogue like taxonomy of the reproductions and their fundamental poetry - the organic forms present in the shapes of the propellers, plumbing, and industrial parts' (J. Mendelson, 'Paintings Based on Collages', in Joan Miró, Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937 (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art💜, New York, 200🎉8).

The sheer originality of Miró's works from the mid-1930s would have an immense effect on both his cꦬontemporaries as well as subsequent generations of artists. Vividly explored in a series of exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler is the clear dialogue between Miró's paintings and the sculptures of his close friend Alexander Calder. Indeed, the intersecting forms in the present work find a parallel with Calder's stabiles executed a few years later (fig. 5). Echoes of Miró's biomorphic formology can be found in works by other Surrealists, such as Yves Tanguy and Hans Arp. The personal iconography extant in the present work however is entirely unique to Miró, an artist that resisted categorisation throughout his career.

The plasticity which pervades Peinture characterises the strongest of Miró's compositions and becomes a beacon for artists in the latter half of the 20th century. Miró arrives at this formal language through years of personal exploration that reach an apex in the mid-1930s. Carolyn Lanchner has written of the '...force of his determination to assert a clear identity for his art. In order to express his particular experience of reality, he had somehow to reimagine the way painting could be made, to think his way out of the conventions it had thus far fostered. Like all the truly original modern artists, he had - as he put it, with less originality than urgency - "to go beyond painting." In September 1923 he described his efforts to his friend J. F. Ràfols: "I know that I am following very dangerous paths, and I confess that at times I am seized with panic like that of the hiker who finds himself on paths never before explored, but this doesn't last, thanks to the discipline and seriousness with which I am working"' (C. Lanchner in Joan Miró (exhibition catalogu🅘e), The Museum of Modern Art, N♐ew York, 1993-94, p. 17).

 

Fig. 1, Max Ernst, Monument aux oiseaux, 1927, oil on canvas, Musée Cantini, Marseille

Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Femme, 1930, oil on panel. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 3^rd May 2011

Fig. 3, Joan Miró, Peinture, 1933, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Fig. 4, Joan Miró, Peinture, 1933, oil on canvas, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, on loan from the collection of Maria Dolors Miró Juncosa -

Fig. 5, Alexander Calder, Big Bird (maquette), 1936, sheet me♌tal, wire and paint, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven