Lot Essay
Miró's first trip to Paris in 1919 had a profound and lasting effect on him: "I was completely disoriented for one entire year. So much so that I tried to go to an art school and I couldn't even draw a line. I set myself up in front of the models but I couldn't draw a thing. I had lost the hang of it and I didn't get it back until I went back to Montroig the following summer, and I immediately burst into painting the way a child bursts into tears. I was mostly influenced by Picasso and the Cubists, and when I got back to the Tarragon countryside I was seized with a mad desire to work and I produced a number of things, including a self-portrait and La Table. Dalmau introduced me to Picasso, and when I was back in Paris Picasso told Dalmau I was going to be a success, and I know that Picasso started talking about me to people he knew and that was obviously a help. Picasso has a self-portrait which I did at Montroig,...but what really got him interested in my work was La Table...Because of that painting Picasso sent me a lot of dealers. It was an extremely dense, disciplined canvas that hinted at the way my work would go in the future." ("A conversation with Joan Miró" by F. Trabal, in La Publicitat of 14 July 1928, repro. in Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. M. Rowell, London 1986, p. 92).
Miró was born in Montroig, near Barcelona in 1893. Educated at the School of Fine Arts, and then at the Gali Academy, he developed a strong feeling for his native Catalan landscape and heritage, which became the focus and inspiration for much of his early work. In his early years the local dealer Joseph Dalmau was a particularly strong influence, introducing him to Dada and the work of the Cubists. The Cubists clearly effected the young Miró and several paintings pre-dating the present picture already show him assimilating the vocabulary of cubism into his work. However it was only when he visited Paris in 1919 that he developed a real flavour for the works of his French contemporaries. Recalling his early visits to Paris, Miró wrote: "On my arrival in Paris in March 1919, I stopped at the Hôtel de la Victoire, rue Notre Dame des Victoires. I stayed in Paris all that winter. That summer I went back to Spain, to the country. The next summer I am back again in Paris. I stopped at another hotel, number 32 Boulevard Pasteur. It is there that I had a visit from Paul Rosenberg. Picasso and Maurice Raynal had spoken to him about me. Sometime later Pablo Gargallo, who was spending the winter in Barcelona teaching sculpture at the Beaux-Arts school, turned his studio over to me. It was at 45 Rue Blomet, next door to the Bal Nègre, still unknown to Parisians at the time as it had not yet been discovered by Robert Desnos. André Masson had the studio alongside. Only a partition separated us. In the Rue Blomet I began to work. I painted Tête d'une Danseuse Espagnole which now belongs to Picasso, the Table au Gant, etc." (from "I Dream of a Large Studio", in XXe Siécle, Paris, May-June 1938, repro. in Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. M. Rowell, London 1986, p. 161).
Through André Masson, Miró encountered the Surrealist movement in its embryonic stages and was drawn into the artistic circle of Michel Leiris, Georges Limbout, Robert Desnos, and Antonin Artaud. The years at the Rue Blomet, between 1920 and 1924, were ones of intense freedom and creativity; where reason, tradition and convention were deemed the enemies of authentic expression. Miró worked extremely slowly and painstakingly, returning to his home in Montroig for the summer and spending his winters amongst the struggling artists of the Left Bank in Paris. He produced only four paintings in 1920, namely Le Carte da gioco spagnole (Cowles Collection, Minneapolis), Il cavallo, La pipa e il fiore rosso (Miller Collection, Downingtown), La gréep (whereabouts unknown) and the present painting. By his own account it was this work which won him recognition from his contemporaries.
La Table was executed in Montroig and the roots of the painting, though strongly influenced by the French, are sunk deep in Miró's Catalan heritage. In his native landscape Miró was continually reminded of his attachment to Catalan primitive art, notably the Romanesque frescoes from the 9th Century which he had admired as a boy. It is not far-fetched to see the expressive simplification of these flat, formalised tempera murals in the stylised still-lifes of 1920. Moreover, the precise, emphatic detail in works such as La Table implies a passion for realism which had long been prevalent in Spanish art. Soby proclaimed this piece to be "a major work of (Miró's) early career" weighing up how: "Traces of Cubism may be felt in the background, but the objects on the table, among them a live rabbit and a rooster, have a new and cohesive strength. The picture has what George Hugnet, called "the insolence of candour". Its extreme realism conveys the artist's unabashed delight in his hard-won technical mastery, its colour is as vigorous and special as that of the Catalan primitives to whom Miró has so often turned for guidance." (Joan Miró, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York 1959, p. 28). Miró's Catalan sensibilities are consistently strong and in this very same year Miró wrote,"I have absolute confidence that Catalan art will be our saviour. - When will Catalonia allow her pure artists to earn enough to eat and paint? Catalonia's rough way of treating things might be the Cavalry of redemption. - The French (and Picasso) are doomed because they have an easy road and they paint to sell."( Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. M. Rowell, London, 1986, p.72)
Dupin has also pointed out how although Miró had initially borrowed from cubism he swiftly transcended it, of the still-lifes of 1920 he wrote: "These are highly elaborate canvases, extremely dense, in which a precise and sometimes naturalistic realism vies with a stylised, decorative Cubism. Miró never cared for Cubist theory; he remained cool to the deeper significance, the aesthetical and philosophical consequences of the explorations of Picasso, Braque and Gris. Their problems were never his, and it is quite logical that he should approach Cubism from the outside only, that he should borrow from it only what it can give him, that is techniques of representation...he borrows straight lines, angles, overlapping planes; and other facets of analytical Cubism, because they abolish perspective and because they have decorative value...In Still Life with Rabbit (La Table), for example, a rooster, a fish, and a rabbit - all treated in a spirit of realism - are arranged on a table against a background that is very characteristic of Miró's Cubism. Incidentally, this canvas brings to mind pyramids rather than cubes, and we may note that they appear wherever there promises to be a movement in depth or a vanishing place (background, floor, surface of the table). Cubist devices serve in such instances to sidestep perspective and keep the picture two-dimensional. When representation of objects does not involve such elements of perspective (the cock and the rabbit), they are treated in a purely realistic manner. By contrast the pitcher is broken up geometrically, because it is a rounded object and thus shows its volume too easily, and because it calls for perspetive modeling...Is this Cubism? At most it is a kind of Cubism employed by Miró solely to confine objects to the single plane of the picture surface.. Furthermore, Miró's palette is the very opposite of that of the Cubists, typically Catalan in its clashes and contrasts which, for all the excess of light, produce no more than a dull, concentrated, mat surface. The colours are pure tones set one beside the other, and they follow the design strictly, whether it is realistic or geometric. Continual variations of tone produce a lively sustained rhythm that mobilises the entire surface and contributes to the unity of the painting...In Still Life with a Rabbit, colour is deliberately sacrificed to design. For the geometric elements, the painter uses a sober, subdued scale of ochres and other earth colours. The objects treated realistically, however, call for local tones, which provide more colour accents: for example, the reds of the rooster's comb and the red pepper, the green of the vine leaf, the pink of the onion." (J. Dupin, Miró, London, 1962, pp. 104, 129, 130).
Thus La Table marks a point of synthesis in Miró's style between cubism, realism and Catalan art. There is harsh, purist-derived stylisation. The stark frontality of the composition is distinctly Romanesque: the table slopes dramatically towards us, with the rooster and rabbit outlined in profile. However, the suave ornamentation of a number of the objects depicted counterbalances this austerity. There are lyrical details: the Baroque hyperbole of the furniture, no doubt derived from art nouveau styles prevalent in Barcelona; and the detailed naturalism evident in the fur of the rabbit or the feathers of the rooster, are inspired touches. Miró no doubt realised when he was painting these still-lifes how much further Picasso, Braque and Gris had gone in the direction of flatness and simplification of pattern, however he still wanted to stay close to the weight and texture of the objects. The relation between the disparate elements is perfectly orchestrated: the curves of the onion leaves correspond to the arabesques of the table legs, the scales of the fish correspond to the pattern on the creased napkin. Such concerns reveal an artist still very much interested in the plasticity and material texture of objects. Miró quite clearly wanted to go beyond prevalent artistic trends and invent an idiom that would be authentically his own.
Miró would indeed soon discard cubist principles completely, in later still-lifes he adopted a more purist approach; more schematised realism is already apparent in works painted only a year later such as Table au Gant (fig. 1) now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (fig. 1). Table au Gant is made up of more sobre browns and ochres, the composition is iconically frontal as in La Table but all traces of cubism have vanished. The flattened forms seems larger than life, stretching to the very edges of the canvas. There is a gain in the direction of monumentality, but a loss of decorative detail.
A year after finishing La Table Miró painted La Ferme, now in the National Gallery, Washington. It displays the same colouristic tendencies and analytical realism we see in La Table. Miró's working method was even more prolix than before, but through it he achieved the same precise layout and luminous coherence visible in La Table. The still-life elements in the right of the picture recall that of La Table. The geometricity of the composition appears stricter due to the size and variety of his landscape. What is more than apparent in both these works is that Miró is moving closer to his own distinct style of painting, in July 1920 he had written to Ráfos: "I am working hard; going toward an art of concept, using reality as a point of departure, never as a stopping place." (M. Rowell, ibid., p.72)
Miró's unabashed realism actually brought him closer to Surrealism, and a few years later Breton would admit, "Miró may pass for the most surrealist of us all," there were "None like him for combining the uncombinable, for breaking up indifferently what we do not wish to see broken up." (repro. in G.Picon, Surrealists and Surrealism, Geneva, 1977, p. 102). Miró presents us with the elements of reality: household objects, animals, and any number of earthy rural things into which he breathes an otherworldly character which lifts them from the every day to the surreal.
La Table was exhibited at Miró's first Parisian one-man show at Galerie La Licorne in 1921. Many critics spoke favourably of the works on view, including Picasso. Maurice Raynal, at the forefront of the avant-garde, wrote a far-sighted foreword to the printed catalogue which recognised in these early paintings Miró's promise. "Miró teaches us in a categorical fashion how effectively, in the case of an artist as gifted as he, chance contributes to the play of the imagination. Miró is full of daring, but it is never a provocative daring. Perhaps he is sometimes temerous, but is not temerity the true face of courage?...it is when he is at his most audacious that Miró executed his most striking paintings..." Raynal saw in Miró "the features of a painterly temperament already asserting itself" and assured him, "You possess all the necessary baggage to travel far. Run then without hesitation, after your shadow."
Miró was born in Montroig, near Barcelona in 1893. Educated at the School of Fine Arts, and then at the Gali Academy, he developed a strong feeling for his native Catalan landscape and heritage, which became the focus and inspiration for much of his early work. In his early years the local dealer Joseph Dalmau was a particularly strong influence, introducing him to Dada and the work of the Cubists. The Cubists clearly effected the young Miró and several paintings pre-dating the present picture already show him assimilating the vocabulary of cubism into his work. However it was only when he visited Paris in 1919 that he developed a real flavour for the works of his French contemporaries. Recalling his early visits to Paris, Miró wrote: "On my arrival in Paris in March 1919, I stopped at the Hôtel de la Victoire, rue Notre Dame des Victoires. I stayed in Paris all that winter. That summer I went back to Spain, to the country. The next summer I am back again in Paris. I stopped at another hotel, number 32 Boulevard Pasteur. It is there that I had a visit from Paul Rosenberg. Picasso and Maurice Raynal had spoken to him about me. Sometime later Pablo Gargallo, who was spending the winter in Barcelona teaching sculpture at the Beaux-Arts school, turned his studio over to me. It was at 45 Rue Blomet, next door to the Bal Nègre, still unknown to Parisians at the time as it had not yet been discovered by Robert Desnos. André Masson had the studio alongside. Only a partition separated us. In the Rue Blomet I began to work. I painted Tête d'une Danseuse Espagnole which now belongs to Picasso, the Table au Gant, etc." (from "I Dream of a Large Studio", in XXe Siécle, Paris, May-June 1938, repro. in Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. M. Rowell, London 1986, p. 161).
Through André Masson, Miró encountered the Surrealist movement in its embryonic stages and was drawn into the artistic circle of Michel Leiris, Georges Limbout, Robert Desnos, and Antonin Artaud. The years at the Rue Blomet, between 1920 and 1924, were ones of intense freedom and creativity; where reason, tradition and convention were deemed the enemies of authentic expression. Miró worked extremely slowly and painstakingly, returning to his home in Montroig for the summer and spending his winters amongst the struggling artists of the Left Bank in Paris. He produced only four paintings in 1920, namely Le Carte da gioco spagnole (Cowles Collection, Minneapolis), Il cavallo, La pipa e il fiore rosso (Miller Collection, Downingtown), La gréep (whereabouts unknown) and the present painting. By his own account it was this work which won him recognition from his contemporaries.
La Table was executed in Montroig and the roots of the painting, though strongly influenced by the French, are sunk deep in Miró's Catalan heritage. In his native landscape Miró was continually reminded of his attachment to Catalan primitive art, notably the Romanesque frescoes from the 9th Century which he had admired as a boy. It is not far-fetched to see the expressive simplification of these flat, formalised tempera murals in the stylised still-lifes of 1920. Moreover, the precise, emphatic detail in works such as La Table implies a passion for realism which had long been prevalent in Spanish art. Soby proclaimed this piece to be "a major work of (Miró's) early career" weighing up how: "Traces of Cubism may be felt in the background, but the objects on the table, among them a live rabbit and a rooster, have a new and cohesive strength. The picture has what George Hugnet, called "the insolence of candour". Its extreme realism conveys the artist's unabashed delight in his hard-won technical mastery, its colour is as vigorous and special as that of the Catalan primitives to whom Miró has so often turned for guidance." (Joan Miró, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York 1959, p. 28). Miró's Catalan sensibilities are consistently strong and in this very same year Miró wrote,"I have absolute confidence that Catalan art will be our saviour. - When will Catalonia allow her pure artists to earn enough to eat and paint? Catalonia's rough way of treating things might be the Cavalry of redemption. - The French (and Picasso) are doomed because they have an easy road and they paint to sell."( Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. M. Rowell, London, 1986, p.72)
Dupin has also pointed out how although Miró had initially borrowed from cubism he swiftly transcended it, of the still-lifes of 1920 he wrote: "These are highly elaborate canvases, extremely dense, in which a precise and sometimes naturalistic realism vies with a stylised, decorative Cubism. Miró never cared for Cubist theory; he remained cool to the deeper significance, the aesthetical and philosophical consequences of the explorations of Picasso, Braque and Gris. Their problems were never his, and it is quite logical that he should approach Cubism from the outside only, that he should borrow from it only what it can give him, that is techniques of representation...he borrows straight lines, angles, overlapping planes; and other facets of analytical Cubism, because they abolish perspective and because they have decorative value...In Still Life with Rabbit (La Table), for example, a rooster, a fish, and a rabbit - all treated in a spirit of realism - are arranged on a table against a background that is very characteristic of Miró's Cubism. Incidentally, this canvas brings to mind pyramids rather than cubes, and we may note that they appear wherever there promises to be a movement in depth or a vanishing place (background, floor, surface of the table). Cubist devices serve in such instances to sidestep perspective and keep the picture two-dimensional. When representation of objects does not involve such elements of perspective (the cock and the rabbit), they are treated in a purely realistic manner. By contrast the pitcher is broken up geometrically, because it is a rounded object and thus shows its volume too easily, and because it calls for perspetive modeling...Is this Cubism? At most it is a kind of Cubism employed by Miró solely to confine objects to the single plane of the picture surface.. Furthermore, Miró's palette is the very opposite of that of the Cubists, typically Catalan in its clashes and contrasts which, for all the excess of light, produce no more than a dull, concentrated, mat surface. The colours are pure tones set one beside the other, and they follow the design strictly, whether it is realistic or geometric. Continual variations of tone produce a lively sustained rhythm that mobilises the entire surface and contributes to the unity of the painting...In Still Life with a Rabbit, colour is deliberately sacrificed to design. For the geometric elements, the painter uses a sober, subdued scale of ochres and other earth colours. The objects treated realistically, however, call for local tones, which provide more colour accents: for example, the reds of the rooster's comb and the red pepper, the green of the vine leaf, the pink of the onion." (J. Dupin, Miró, London, 1962, pp. 104, 129, 130).
Thus La Table marks a point of synthesis in Miró's style between cubism, realism and Catalan art. There is harsh, purist-derived stylisation. The stark frontality of the composition is distinctly Romanesque: the table slopes dramatically towards us, with the rooster and rabbit outlined in profile. However, the suave ornamentation of a number of the objects depicted counterbalances this austerity. There are lyrical details: the Baroque hyperbole of the furniture, no doubt derived from art nouveau styles prevalent in Barcelona; and the detailed naturalism evident in the fur of the rabbit or the feathers of the rooster, are inspired touches. Miró no doubt realised when he was painting these still-lifes how much further Picasso, Braque and Gris had gone in the direction of flatness and simplification of pattern, however he still wanted to stay close to the weight and texture of the objects. The relation between the disparate elements is perfectly orchestrated: the curves of the onion leaves correspond to the arabesques of the table legs, the scales of the fish correspond to the pattern on the creased napkin. Such concerns reveal an artist still very much interested in the plasticity and material texture of objects. Miró quite clearly wanted to go beyond prevalent artistic trends and invent an idiom that would be authentically his own.
Miró would indeed soon discard cubist principles completely, in later still-lifes he adopted a more purist approach; more schematised realism is already apparent in works painted only a year later such as Table au Gant (fig. 1) now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (fig. 1). Table au Gant is made up of more sobre browns and ochres, the composition is iconically frontal as in La Table but all traces of cubism have vanished. The flattened forms seems larger than life, stretching to the very edges of the canvas. There is a gain in the direction of monumentality, but a loss of decorative detail.
A year after finishing La Table Miró painted La Ferme, now in the National Gallery, Washington. It displays the same colouristic tendencies and analytical realism we see in La Table. Miró's working method was even more prolix than before, but through it he achieved the same precise layout and luminous coherence visible in La Table. The still-life elements in the right of the picture recall that of La Table. The geometricity of the composition appears stricter due to the size and variety of his landscape. What is more than apparent in both these works is that Miró is moving closer to his own distinct style of painting, in July 1920 he had written to Ráfos: "I am working hard; going toward an art of concept, using reality as a point of departure, never as a stopping place." (M. Rowell, ibid., p.72)
Miró's unabashed realism actually brought him closer to Surrealism, and a few years later Breton would admit, "Miró may pass for the most surrealist of us all," there were "None like him for combining the uncombinable, for breaking up indifferently what we do not wish to see broken up." (repro. in G.Picon, Surrealists and Surrealism, Geneva, 1977, p. 102). Miró presents us with the elements of reality: household objects, animals, and any number of earthy rural things into which he breathes an otherworldly character which lifts them from the every day to the surreal.
La Table was exhibited at Miró's first Parisian one-man show at Galerie La Licorne in 1921. Many critics spoke favourably of the works on view, including Picasso. Maurice Raynal, at the forefront of the avant-garde, wrote a far-sighted foreword to the printed catalogue which recognised in these early paintings Miró's promise. "Miró teaches us in a categorical fashion how effectively, in the case of an artist as gifted as he, chance contributes to the play of the imagination. Miró is full of daring, but it is never a provocative daring. Perhaps he is sometimes temerous, but is not temerity the true face of courage?...it is when he is at his most audacious that Miró executed his most striking paintings..." Raynal saw in Miró "the features of a painterly temperament already asserting itself" and assured him, "You possess all the necessary baggage to travel far. Run then without hesitation, after your shadow."