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Lot Essay
The mutual exchange of ideas between American abstract painters and Miró in the postwar years, following the artist's trips to America in 1947, 1959, 1961 and 1964, is well known. An event of equal significance was the artist's first trip to Japan in the fall of 1966, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition that was being shown in Tokyo and Kyoto. Miró's painting had long been admired in Japan; the poet Shuzo Takiguchi wote the first monograph on the artist in 1940, although this is still untranslated in the West. "The encounter was overwhelming. Greeted like a king, welcomed as a friend, he [Miró] visited the temples and museums, and viewed their dazzling collections of paintings, sculptures, ceramics and calligraphy. Befitting a first visit to Japan, Miró was also witness to a tea ceremony, a sumo wrestling match, a demonstration of Ikebana - the art of arranging flowers - and perused one of oldest private collections of erotic prints. More importantly, Miró, along with Artigas, spent countless hours in a village for potters and ceramicists" (J. Dupin, op. cit., 1993, p. 323).
Miró had been drawn to the gestural element in American abstract painting, and shared the interest of many American artists in the austere but deeply expressive qualities in Japanese calligraphy. Indeed, with his background in the Surrealist movement, and his knowledge and long practice of automatist writing, Miró had special insights into the nature of calligraphic gesture that went much deeper than the usual Western attraction to the decorative aspects of this ancient art. Miró understood the connection between the Surrealist practice of entering a state of trance prior to automatic writing or other forms of creation and the intense contemplative void sought by followers of Zen. Margit Rowell touched on this subject in a 1970 interview with the artist:
Margit Rowell: Did you find interesting or useful your trip to Japan and your firsthand acquaintance with Japanese painting: the method of concentration to a state of trance and then an execution at lightning speed?
Miró: Absolutely. I was fascinated by the work of the Japanese calligaphers and it definitely influenced my own working methods. I work more and more in a state of trance, I would say almost always in a trance these days. And I consider my painting more and more gestural.
(M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 279)
The present painting is one of series of works that the artist executed on June 5, 1968 (see Dupin, nos. 1317-1325). Coming at the beginning of this sequence, it announces the artist's intention of marrying pictorial gesture, language and idea. Here the poet's words are looping ribbons of back paint speedily applied with a wide, loaded brush. Created in a state of contemplative trance, they comprise an ideogram that describes a fundamental emotional state preliminary to writing as we normally know it. In the ensuing sequence of six paintings titled Lettres et chiffres attirés par un étincelle (Dupin, nos. 1320-1325), Miró stencils letters and numbers an apparently random manner around a central painterly accident on the canvas, hinting at poetry in some primordial state of genesis.
Miró declared, "I make no distinction between poetry and painting" (quoted in J. Dupin, op. cit., 1993, p. 431). His life's work was dedicated to the concept of peinture-poésie, in which the artist's pictorial imagination is inseparable from other creative faculties of the mind. "What Miro loved about poetry was its feverish lunges, the risks taken, the turmoil, and the way it had of radically wiping all slates clean. He was on the lookout for the sudden lightning flash of poetry which might tear through the skies of his painting" (ibid., p. 432).
Miró had been drawn to the gestural element in American abstract painting, and shared the interest of many American artists in the austere but deeply expressive qualities in Japanese calligraphy. Indeed, with his background in the Surrealist movement, and his knowledge and long practice of automatist writing, Miró had special insights into the nature of calligraphic gesture that went much deeper than the usual Western attraction to the decorative aspects of this ancient art. Miró understood the connection between the Surrealist practice of entering a state of trance prior to automatic writing or other forms of creation and the intense contemplative void sought by followers of Zen. Margit Rowell touched on this subject in a 1970 interview with the artist:
Margit Rowell: Did you find interesting or useful your trip to Japan and your firsthand acquaintance with Japanese painting: the method of concentration to a state of trance and then an execution at lightning speed?
Miró: Absolutely. I was fascinated by the work of the Japanese calligaphers and it definitely influenced my own working methods. I work more and more in a state of trance, I would say almost always in a trance these days. And I consider my painting more and more gestural.
(M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 279)
The present painting is one of series of works that the artist executed on June 5, 1968 (see Dupin, nos. 1317-1325). Coming at the beginning of this sequence, it announces the artist's intention of marrying pictorial gesture, language and idea. Here the poet's words are looping ribbons of back paint speedily applied with a wide, loaded brush. Created in a state of contemplative trance, they comprise an ideogram that describes a fundamental emotional state preliminary to writing as we normally know it. In the ensuing sequence of six paintings titled Lettres et chiffres attirés par un étincelle (Dupin, nos. 1320-1325), Miró stencils letters and numbers an apparently random manner around a central painterly accident on the canvas, hinting at poetry in some primordial state of genesis.
Miró declared, "I make no distinction between poetry and painting" (quoted in J. Dupin, op. cit., 1993, p. 431). His life's work was dedicated to the concept of peinture-poésie, in which the artist's pictorial imagination is inseparable from other creative faculties of the mind. "What Miro loved about poetry was its feverish lunges, the risks taken, the turmoil, and the way it had of radically wiping all slates clean. He was on the lookout for the sudden lightning flash of poetry which might tear through the skies of his painting" (ibid., p. 432).