The erotic painting of Joan Miró that you cannot miss

BarcelonaParis was decisive for Joan Miró to become one of the most important artists of the 20th century. But he did not have things easy at all. In a letter dated September 1923, he explains to his friend Josep Francesc Ràfols that he was working "very much, with absolute regularity and method". "I have managed to free myself completely from nature, and the landscapes no longer have anything to do with external reality," he told Ràfols. All this, Miró did in complete poverty; sometimes he could only afford a handful of dried figs to get through the whole day. "During that period, hunger gave me hallucinations, and the hallucinations gave me ideas for painting," Miró later explained in an interview.

The suffering paid off: in the summer of 1925, he painted some of the first "oneiric" canvases in Mont-roig del Camp, one of which, Peinture-poème (Bonheur d’aimer ma brune) [The joy of loving my brunette], can be seen at the Fundació Joan Miró starting this Thursday, as part of the new loan from the Katsuta Collection, with which the foundation has a relationship that dates back to the celebration of the Joan Miró centenary in 1993. Peinture-poème (Bonheur d’aimer ma brune) is a rather recent acquisition by the collector Kazumasa Katsuta; he bought it for about 4.8 million euros at a Christie's auction in New York in 2019.

The "oneiric" paintings were the first major extensive pictorial cycle and are the works in which Miró represented one of the first sexual scenes of a couple of lovers. In the painting, there are united red triangular shapes that could evoke the peaks of Montserrat or a female pubis. Furthermore, this canvas could be the first composition in which Miró wrote a verse about the feeling of exaltation of being in love: "The joy of loving my brunette". The first owner of the work was the writer Raymond Queneau, with whom Miró collaborated in the 60s on the lithograph portfolio with a poem by the Frenchman titled Àlbum 19.

The new loan from the Katsuta Collection includes 37 works by Joan Miró and will last for ten years. Peinture-poème (Bonheur d’aimer ma brune) is one of the six that had not been part of any previous loan. According to the foundation's new director, Maribel López, the relationship between the works in the permanent collection and those on loan is a way to "continue discovering Miró's thought." And Kazumasa Katsuta's daughter, Akiko Katsuta, says that, although it "breaks her father's heart" to be far from these paintings and sculptures, she believes that "having them at the Foundation is what Miró would have wanted."

Joan Miró's experimentations

"A particularity of the Katsuta collection, which adds to the works that the family deposited at the Foundation, is that it shows a Miró who is in constant experimentation," explains to ARA the head of the collections of the Joan Miró Foundation, Teresa Montaner, which are especially rich from the 60s onwards. Now, in addition to Peinture-poème (Bonheur d’aimer ma brune) it receives another important earlier work –Pintura, from 1936–, which is part of the artist's masonite series. "The incorporation of this work will allow us to conduct research that will end in an exhibition focused on the paintings on masonite in the year 2028," says Montaner. It is planned that the curator of this exhibition will be Robert Lubar, the North American art historian who resigned from the Foundation's board following the appointment of Maribel López.

Starting this Thursday, 29 of the 37 works are on display, while the rest of the pieces that make up the deposit will be incorporated gradually, according to the rotation of the pieces in the permanent collection, renewed in March by Montaner herself and the artist and researcher Marta Ricart, with Miró's work processes as a common thread. Among other additions, Pintura (1927), The open sky gives us hope (1954), Landscape at night (1966-1974) and Song on white background (1966) –the Joan Miró Foundation does not have any similar work–, and two paintings from 1960, Pintura V/V and Pintura IV/V, stand out, which emphasize how Miró renounced his sign language to produce more cosmic works. "With the incorporation of the new works we can complement series of which we already have some work and delve deeper into them. One of the main characteristics of the Katsuta collection is that it reflects how Miró constantly interrogated matter, and how he went from the most material to the sense of spirituality through insisting on the material work," says Montaner.

The link between heaven and earth

Six of the works are sculptures, two of which are ceramics from 1962. "In our collection, we have few ceramics. One of those in the new deposit is circular, and it relates to Miró's idea of recovering the ancestral dialogue between heaven and earth. And, furthermore, it is also like a nod to a project that Miró had to make a ceramic circle in the sculpture room that, in the end, was never made," says Montaner.

The Kazumasa Katsuta collection is mainly formed by works by Joan Miró from the collection of Pierre Matisse, who was his art dealer in the United States from 1932. After Matisse's death, and coinciding with the centenary of Miró's birth, the Yokohama Museum of Art hosted the 'Joan Miró Centenary Exhibition: The Pierre Matisse Collection. A prominent part of the exhibited works, which had been owned by Acquavella Galleries since 1990, was acquired by Kazumasa Katsuta. The Katsuta Collection includes representative works from all of Miró's creative stages. Besides the core from the Pierre Matisse Collection, the Katsuta Collection has been expanded with works from other prominent collections, such as that of Raymond Queneau and that of René Gaffé.