Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/169626
Joan Miró 1893 - 1983 L'issue dérobée, 1974 Signed Gouache and monotype on Japanese paper 13 x 19 ¾ in, 33 x 50 cm Provenance Galerie Maeght, Paris Galerie Guereta, Madrid-Barcelone Sotheby's NY, 10 May 1989, lot 247 Literature This work will be reproduced in the 'Catalogue Raisonné of drawings volume IV' being prepared by Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud This work is one of 15 original gouaches and monotypes created for Jacques Dupin's collection of poetry L'issue dérobée ('the concealed exit'), published in 1974 by Ed Maeght, Paris. The art critic Dupin was Miró's close friend and biographer. During the 1920s and 30s Miró's studio in Paris was frequented by numerous poets, playwrights and writers with whom he became friends. Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos and Tristan Tzara, amongst many others, would gather to discuss literature and ideas. Miró immersed himself in the ideas and verse of these avant-garde writers, declaring: "I make no distinction between painting and poetry. ... [Both] are done in the same way you make love". The visual and dreamlike works created by his writer-friends sparked Miró to invent his own pictorial vocabulary, filled with shapes and symbols. In this painting strongly drawn black circles, with smaller red circles and black dots, signify a pair of eyes. Peering eyes recur throughout Miró's work, including in his Constellations series. Typical of his later works, Miró combines deliberate signs with spontaneous gestures. He has applied paint with a semi-dry paintbrush, as well as throwing it and dragging it across the paper in an Abstract Expressionist manner. From the 1960s onwards Miró's work was also filled with increasing colourfulness. This painting is dominated by Miró's use of contrastive pairs of intense primary and elementary colours, emphasised through their juxtaposition with expressive black markings.