Joan Miró Spain, 1893-1983
Tête, 1974
Gouache, watercolor and charcoal on paper
100 by 69.9 cm (39⅜ by 27½ in.)
Signed 'Miro' (lower right); signed 'Miro' (on the verso)
66294
© 2020 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Further images
Executed August 7, 1974. Tête is a vibrant and inventive example of Joan Miró’s paintings on paper and reveals the artist’s unique aesthetic that blends figuration and abstraction. Toward the...
Executed August 7, 1974. Tête is a vibrant and inventive example of Joan Miró’s paintings on paper and reveals the artist’s unique aesthetic that blends figuration and abstraction. Toward the end of his career, Miró positioned paper as a medium central to his practice, prizing it for its material possibilities. In the present work, Miró applied brilliant hues of red, green, blue, and teal watercolor and gouache using a splatter technique to create the appearance of a kaleidoscopic aqueous pictorial surface. To contrast this bold use of color, Miró used charcoal to delineate the strong contours of the figure’s face, filling in some passages to create a playful relationship between positive and negative space. The spontaneous quality of the application of materials to the surface of the paper reflects the primacy of the Surrealist practice of automatism, in which art is created without conscious thought, in Miró’s body of work.
Provenance
Galerie Maeght, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Harcourts Gallery, San Francisco
Sale: Sotheby's New York, May 11, 1988, lot 198
(Probably) Sale: Hôtel Drouot Paris, June 1995
Private Collection, France
Private Collection (by descent from the above)
Exhibitions
P. Gimferrer, Miró colpir sense nafrar, Barcelona, 1978, no. 130, illustrated in color p. 138 (medium listed as gouache on paper)
J. Dupin and A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Drawings, Volume IV: 1973-1976, Paris, 2013, no. 2591, illustrated in color p. 97