?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
JOAN MIRÓ (AFTER) Le Chien bleu.
Color aquatint and etching, 1959. 617x480 mm; 24 3/8x19 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 160/300 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Crommelynck, Paris. Published by Maeght, Paris. A very good impression with strong colors.
Le Chien bleu is based on an untitled oil on canvas by Miró (1893-1983) from 1949 (see Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, Vol III: 1942-1955, 2001, page 133; number 827).
According to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the retrospective exhibition, "Joan Miró" (October 17, 1993–January 11, 1994, shown at The MoMA), "The political climate of the times and the Civil War in Spain made the latter half of the 1930s a turbulent period for Miró. On a visit to Paris in late 1936, he found himself unable to return to Spain and thereafter lived in involuntary exile in France until mid-1940 . . . Hoping to escape the threat of imminent war, Miró settled in the small village of Varengeville on the coast of Normandy. There, in 1940, he began a series of twenty-three paintings, mostly in gouache and oil, on uniform sheets of paper. His work on the paintings, collectively known as the Constellations, was soon disrupted by the Nazi advance on France, and he and his family sought refuge in Palma de Mallorca. There, Miró continued working on the series; he completed the last three at [his] farm in Montroig.
Within the precisely articulated lines of these small-scale works, the artist compressed the whole of his knowledge and vision, giving the paintings a sense of immensity despite their small size. He wrote, 'When I was painting the Constellations, I had the genuine feeling that I was working in secret, but it was a liberation for me in that I ceased thinking about the tragedy all around me.'
By the end of the war, in works such as Women Listening to Music,1945, Miró had established the calligraphic, magical imagery of women, birds, stars, and wiry figures for which he was to become renowned. He returned to poetic, whimsical titles, such as The Bird Boom-Boom Makes His Appeal to the Head Onion Peel, 1952, which recall his early 'painting-poems' of the 1920s.
From the 1940s through 1960, Miró focused increasingly on sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking; from the late 1940s on, he was involved in a number of public commissions, including murals and sculptures executed on a monumental scale . . . [including] Mural Painting, 1950–51, which, commissioned for a Harvard University dining room, measures nearly twenty feet in length." Maeght 1714.
