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Lot Essay
Jacques Dupin has confirmed the authenticity of this gouache.
The present painting was painted in the same month as Personnage (see lot 128), and likewise reflects Miró's response to the political tensions in Spain as the country teetered on the brink of civil war. In contrast to the male figure in Personnage, who is the apparent perpetrator of violence, the dominant figure in the present work is female and the victim of a frightening surprise. She stands pigeon-toed in black boots with her little sausage-shaped dog at her side. She recoils in horror as a serpent jumps up like a jack-in-the-box in front of her. The serpent has whiskers, an unrealistic addition that in Miró's iconography is meant to ally him with beasts of many kinds. The black box from which he springs represents the earth and is also a mysterious symbol of the future or the unknown. The repetition of phallic shapes, including the girl's nose, hints at a psycho-sexual dimension that is vague and threatening.
The black box in the present work also appears in the gouache Shooting Star, Moon, Woman and Landscape, painted around the same time (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 194, fig. 211), where the artist clearly identifies it as representing the landscape. In this version the shape of the serpent has been transformed into the trail of a shooting star, which is traditionally a prophetic event. Both works show the quicksilver manner in which the artist improvises with his pictorial elements, morphing one symbol into another, like a creature that reappears in one dream after another, but in different guises. The gray wash in the background of the present composition reinforces the sense of veiled and ominously stormy surroundings, creating an appropriate stage for the violence that unfolds.
In the gouaches done during the summer and early fall of 1935, Miró assumes the roles of witness and seer. Dupin states:
It had devolved upon [Miró] to raise his own voice in protest - a protest soon to be that of Spain and the entire planet, progressively more haunted by the specter of coming disaster. A world filled with the screams of madmen, the curses of murderers, and the wailing of the tortured--a living hell where bestiality takes possession of the human body, where elemental forces rise in a revolt that threatens to engulf the entire planet--this is the world, the hell Miró set out to portray with the same scrupulous care, the same painstaking meticulousness with which he had always addressed himself to the tasks of art. (Ibid, p. 199).
The present painting was painted in the same month as Personnage (see lot 128), and likewise reflects Miró's response to the political tensions in Spain as the country teetered on the brink of civil war. In contrast to the male figure in Personnage, who is the apparent perpetrator of violence, the dominant figure in the present work is female and the victim of a frightening surprise. She stands pigeon-toed in black boots with her little sausage-shaped dog at her side. She recoils in horror as a serpent jumps up like a jack-in-the-box in front of her. The serpent has whiskers, an unrealistic addition that in Miró's iconography is meant to ally him with beasts of many kinds. The black box from which he springs represents the earth and is also a mysterious symbol of the future or the unknown. The repetition of phallic shapes, including the girl's nose, hints at a psycho-sexual dimension that is vague and threatening.
The black box in the present work also appears in the gouache Shooting Star, Moon, Woman and Landscape, painted around the same time (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 194, fig. 211), where the artist clearly identifies it as representing the landscape. In this version the shape of the serpent has been transformed into the trail of a shooting star, which is traditionally a prophetic event. Both works show the quicksilver manner in which the artist improvises with his pictorial elements, morphing one symbol into another, like a creature that reappears in one dream after another, but in different guises. The gray wash in the background of the present composition reinforces the sense of veiled and ominously stormy surroundings, creating an appropriate stage for the violence that unfolds.
In the gouaches done during the summer and early fall of 1935, Miró assumes the roles of witness and seer. Dupin states:
It had devolved upon [Miró] to raise his own voice in protest - a protest soon to be that of Spain and the entire planet, progressively more haunted by the specter of coming disaster. A world filled with the screams of madmen, the curses of murderers, and the wailing of the tortured--a living hell where bestiality takes possession of the human body, where elemental forces rise in a revolt that threatens to engulf the entire planet--this is the world, the hell Miró set out to portray with the same scrupulous care, the same painstaking meticulousness with which he had always addressed himself to the tasks of art. (Ibid, p. 199).