The true story of Joan Miró and his Constellations Miguel Orozco 1 “In art and life, Joan Miró (1893-1983) was an escapologist. He took everything the 20th century had to throw at him, wriggling free of all entanglements, ideological and other” Alex Danchev 2 The true story of Joan Miró and his Constellations is an abridged English language version of the book La Odisea de4 Miró y sus Constelaciones: El pintor y sus marchantes (WorldCat No. 967285228, ISBN 9788498956757), published in 2016 by Visor, Madrid. The author’s purpose in rewriting in English his text is to facilitate access to non Spanish-speaking readers. He apologizes, however for the language errors it may contain. Cover illustration: Portrait by Enric Cristòfol Ricart of Joan Miró as a soldier in the Spanish Army that put down the 1917 Revolution in Barcelona. Joan Miró Foundation Museum 3 To my grandchildren María, Mateo, Miguel, Elisabeth and Alicia 4 Introduction 5 1st Part: THE ESCAPES OF MIRÓ 1. From Catalonia to the mecca of culture (1920) 8 2. The flight from revolutionary Catalonia (1936) 30 3. The return to Franco’s Spain (1940) 60 2nd PART: THE CONSTELLATIONS AND THE FIGHT FOR APPROPRIATE REMUNERATION 4. The Constellations or how to tame monsters (1940-41) 75 5. Skipping his dealer: the failed exhibition at MoMA (1941-1945) 85 6. Little paintings for women: The contempt of dealers, collectors and MoMA 117 7. The journey of the Constellations since 1945 136 8. Forcing Matisse: the chimera of the exhibition in Paris (1945-1948) 175 3rd PART: ECONOMIC SUCCESS AT SIXTY 9. Ultimatum to his dealers (1945) 184 10. The third man (Maeght) or late life opulence (1948-) 200 11. Breton jumps on board as the Constellations are reborn (1958) 207 12. Octogenarian Militantism (1970-1983) 223 Bibliography 246 Names Index 253 5 Introduction The Constellations series by Joan Miró is one of the most popular works of art of the twentieth century and is constantly reproduced in books and posters. It is also the best known work of the painter, who asked for the only one he kept to be placed on his headboard two days before his death on Christmas Day 1983. The celebrity of the 23 gouaches that compose it is such that only a few have changed owners in the last 30 years –the last sale we have documented is Femme et oiseaux, sold in June 2017 for 24,571,250 GBP (over $30 million)– and only a few Museums in the world have a copy. The previous auction sale of a constellation was in 2001 from the Stanley Seeger collection when Nocturne sold for $5.6m. Miró’s own country Spain –a land of museums– only has one gouache: The Morning Star, which Miró offered to his wife Pilar Juncosa, who gave it to the Miró Foundation in Barcelona. The rest of the originals are found in their vast majority in museums and collections in the United States. And this masterpiece of world painting was conceived and painted in the hardest period of the painter's life: his only income at almost 50 years of age was the monthly stipend of less than fifteen hundred dollars of today, corrected for inflation, that he received from his dealer Pierre Matisse, who kept on exchange for this payment almost all his artistic production. In reality, if his gallerist 'did as if he paid him', Miró reciprocated 'pretending to send him his canvases'. But for what Miró kept he had no buyer because he was totally ignored in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the rest of Spain. He was thus forced to live with his wife and daughter at their parents home – first at his wife’s parents' house in Palma de Majorca and then in at his own parents’ home in Barcelona. His precariousness was such that he had to stop painting oils on canvas, since the material to make them was out of reach for him. The Constellations series has been extolled since 1945 and it has been said ad nauseam that the gouaches were sold 'as donuts', constituting the proof of the brilliant success of the painter. But the reality was very different: the series did not reach the market until more than three years after being painted; Miró was going through a period of conflict with his only dealer; he tried without success to get round him by selling the gouasches through the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which rejected the idea; his gallerist took over the gouaches but did not sell them so well and Miró received practically no remuneration for the series, to the point that it has been said that the only payment he received for the twenty-three paintings was 'a fridge'. In fact, and against what has been said for more than half a century, the series was underestimated by the MoMA, which refused to exhibit or sell it, by critics and also by his dealer, who only promoted it to his clients as small works, suitable minors to give to a lady. And the affront to Miró did not stay in the United States, the painter suffered the same disdain on the part of the French museum establishment, this time also –as in the case of MoMA– mainly because of the amateurism of his advisors, who chose inadequate intercolutores, procedures and attitudes to interest the museums. 6 The series was also ignored by the main American art collectors. Some of these had bought Miró canvases in the past, but when the Constellations were exhibited in the Pierre Matisse gallery they refused to acquire any of the gouaches, which were saved from oblivion thanks to a series of art-loving women, whose good taste and intuition built a legend around the series that elevated it to the top as a masterpiece of modern painting. The data and sources that allow to sustain this thesis so in contradiction with the paradigm that has dominated the Miró studies since 1945 did not begin to come to light until, following the death of Pierre Matisse and the closure of his gallery in 1989, his archives were deposited at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where they began to be made available to researchers. In the first decade of this century, the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, which had been collecting all the correspondence of Miró –a process in which the author of these lines contributed copies of numerous letters from the painter– launched an ambitious project of compilation of all his correspondence, including also his enormous private correspondence, which provides a counterpoint to the documents of the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery and to the epistolary exchanges between painter and gallerist. However, the new available elements have not changed the texts that continue to be published about Miró, which are all still based on the historiography prior to the opening of the archives, written mainly in the 70s of last century, and whi8ch created the Miró myth, a mainly fictional construction to which the painter collaborated with enthusiasm. He tried to transmit to the world an image of a more political artist,' progressive 'and even anti-Franco freedom fighter. In the process of rewriting the biography of the painter known crucial facts were ignored, other facts of fundamental nature were concealed and the exercise turned to give interpretations of his work that hardly match the historical reality, as in our understanding occurs with the so-called savage paintings, which in light of the facts that we reveal in this book, deserve a radically different reinterpretation. The deforming effort continues even today, as shown by the exhibition The Escape Ladder of 2011. Even the voluminous catalog and study published by MoMA on the occasion of the great Centennial exhibition in 1993, which were prepared having access to the archives of Pierre Matisse, repeated bulk errors, avoided changing its analysis on the basis of what was found and gave very unconvincing explanations, particularly as regards the museum's attitude towards the Constellations. It is these contradictions between the main essays about Miró and the reality of the events that has prompted the author of these line to embark on this adventure. Fortunately for all art lovers of Joan Miró, the celebrity that was acquiring the series since 1945, along with the pursuit of profit of gallerist Pierre Matisse, pushed him to bring it back to the market in 1959, this time in the form of a portfolio with 22 of the 23 gouaches –we will explain later why one was missing– exquisitely reproduced in hand-painted pochoirs of a very slightly different size to distinguish them from the originals. In this unique initiative which intricacies we reveal in this book, the new Constellations were made with such care and attention that even for a museum curator it was difficult to differentiate them from the original gouaches that Miró had painted. This limited edition, which is valued today in the art market in six-figure dollar 7 amounts, is what has allowed millions of admirers around the world to enjoy the painter's art, perhaps at his most inspired moment. In fact, the 23 gouaches were only exhibited together once: in the mentioned MoMA exhibition of 1993. The closest record was de April 2017 exhibition at Acquavella Galleries in New York, which managed to reunite 22 of the 23. 8 1st PART: THE ESCAPES OF MIRÓ 1. From Catalonia to the mecca of culture (1920) Joan Miró i Ferrà was born in 1893 in Barcelona under the zodiac sign of Taurus. His father, Miguel Miró, was the son of a modest blacksmith from the Tarragona village of Cornudella. After learning the trade of watchmaker and goldsmith in Reus, Miguel settled in Barcelona in 1880. His jewelry The Acuárium, near the Plaza Real, is soon successful and Miguel, who possessed a keen sense of social status, thus managed to become a part of the middle class. Although in the rewriting of Miró’s biography in the 70s the painter will pretend that his father, for whom he never showed any devotion, was not a jeweler, but a simple 'watch repairer'. In 1891, at 32 years of age and already with a good social position, Miguel married Dolores Ferrà, daughter of a successful a Majorcan cabinetmaker. Of the four children they had only two survived: Joan and Dolors, born in 1897 and to whom the painter will always feel very close. As befits his class, Joan will attend a private establishment, the San Antonio school, but with poor academic results. In the midst of the conflictive social situation in Barcelona, where in 1902 there was a revolutionary general strike supported by ultraconservative and Catalanist Carlists1 that caused 12 deaths, Miró finished his primary studies in 1905. His results in secondary school will still be very bad, and the child only showed interest in drawing. Two years later, Joan is forced to drop out of high school because of bad grades. His father then decided that he had to learn a trade and enrolls him in the Barcelona School of Commerce to become an accountant. His idea is that once his studies finished, Joan will go to London as a meritorious to his maternal uncle. But Joan only accepts the plan if his parents agree to his going in the afternoon to La Llotja School of Fine Arts, where he will coincide with his neighbor Joan Prats, son of a prestigious hatter. The social climate in Barcelona is becoming increasingly tense. Catalanists, Carlists and revolutionaries are grouped in 1906 in Solidaritat Catalana and in 1909 an insurrection erupts that gives rise to the Tragic Week, which leaves a balance of 78 dead and 112 buildings burned, of which 80 belonging to the Catholic Church, many of them near Miró’s home. But at the same time, the family continues to prosper and goes one step higher in status. The painter's parents acquired in 1910 from the Marquis of Montroig, an agricultural property with its Manor house in the center, the Mas Ferratges, near Miguel's hometown. The property, relatively large, converted into the Mas Miró, will be immortalized in the painting The Farm (1921-22 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.). Although in a deceptive way, since what Miró painted was 1 Carlism is a traditionalist reactionary political movement seeking the establishment of a separate line of the Bourbon dynasty on the Spanish throne 9 not the manor itself, but the part dedicated to the residence of the masoveros 2 and the farmyard, thus concealing the true building of the manor: a unique, stately, outstanding building at both historical and architectural level. The colonial style building –the grandfather of the Marquis had made his fortune in Cuba– with its elegant cars path, two floors and central tower, as well as adjoining buildings, gave an aristocratic image. The hacienda acquired a prominent social role in the village. Concerts are held and the owners and peasants of the neighborhood go every Sunday to the mass celebrated in its great Neo-Gothic chapel, and sometimes the altar has to be taken out due to excessive attendance. Miró completed his studies in that same year of 1910, at 16 years of age. His father immediately placed him in the Can Dalmau i Oliveres drugstore on Las Ramblas. His job is to make notes, add the figures and pass them to the accounting books in a dark back room. And all this for a teenager who had proven allergic to arithmetics. He will only endure the job for a few months, because after communicating to his parents his decision to quit and devote himself completely to painting, and to their refusal, the young man fell into a state of depression that, combined with typhoid fevers, had him prostrate for several months. In view of the state of their son, Miguel and Dolors accept that he dedicates himself to painting, although he is recommended that in order to earn a living he either becomes a priest or enters the army. In fact, his father will do more than recommend him to become a soldier: when he is called up, he did not pay a total exemption as the men of his class did, so Joan will have to join the ranks and will appreciate what a military career, even as a simple soldier, could contribute in the sense of achieving economic stability. In 1912, when José Canalejas, president of the Spanish government, was assassinated by an anarchist, Miró entered the Francesc Galí Art School, where he learned more than at the previous one and coincided with Joan Prats, Enric Ricart and Josep Rafols. There he developed his first personal and characteristic pictorial style, very close to the Fauvism that Matisse, Derain and Braque had developed in France since 1905. Having obtained the right to devote himself to painting, the young Miró faces what will be his main difficulty over the next four decades: to live of his art and well enough to access a social status at least similar to that of his parents, thus showing his strict father that his choice had not been wrong. To achieve his goals he needed to work tirelessly and establish relationships with dealers who could sell his work. His 2 Tenant farmers 10 first step was to join the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc in 1912, where he participated in his first collective exhibitions. Two years later he will rent his first studio, shared with his friend Ricart. Miró will leave the group in 1918, when after the insurrection of the previous year, its members distance themselves from the conservatism and religiosity of the painter. Although he does not obtain results at the level of sales of paintings, Miró maintains in those years an unshakeable confidence in himself. The phenomenal economic bonanza enjoyed by Catalonia during the First World War feeds his optimism. In 1914, the outbreak of hostilities produced a positive impact for the city: a considerable economic bubble was fattened and Catalan manufactures exported non-stop to the belligerent countries. The war and the economic boom push dozens of Catalan artists who had settled in Paris to return to the city. Art dealers such as Ambroise Vollard, and painters such as Albert Gleizes, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia. also arrive to the enriched Barcelona. Catalan dealer Josep Dalmau, who had already exhibited Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger in 1912, turns his establishment into a meeting point for these artists. Dalmau adopted Miró in 1916 and a year later introduced him to Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Also in 1917, Vollard organizes in the Catalan capital a large exhibition of French painters –Manet, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Bonnard– to gain access to the Catalan bourgeoisie that had been enriched by the war. And also in that 'glorious' year of 1917, the Russian ballets of Diaghilev visit the city, where Miró can admire Parade, fruit of the collaboration of Picasso, Erik Satie, Léonide Massine and Jean Cocteau. But the economic bonanza has brought with it a very high inflation that affects mainly the working classes, who take to the streets led by anarchists and socialists in the revolutionary general strike of the summer of 1917. In Barcelona the Catalanists join the rebels, provoking a revolt that will leave a deep impression: the insurrection left 37 dead in Catalonia, more than half of the total number of victims in Spain. Miró, who served at that time in the Spanish army, lived the events very closely. In a letter to Enric C. Ricart of August 26, 1917, just when the insurrection that began in June is over, Miró does not have a word of identification with the rebels. His concern focuses on possible casualties in the army of which he was a part and is relieved when the latter uses the artillery to end the insurrection: “Fortunately nothing has hasppened; during the first days of the revolt my battalion was in Barcelona, in charge of the surveillance of the capital, while the second battalion was in Sabadell, confronting the people there with harshness. The company of that battalion that entered into combat had eight wounded and two dead; fortunately the artillery arrived in time to help them, otherwise there would have been many casualties. Afterwards, my company was ordered to go to relieve the force that was in Sabadell, and there we went. When we arrived everything was over and we did not have to shoot. Not even with the rifles, we only suffered the inconvenience that campaigning represents”. Years later, in Paris, Miró became a regular at the residence of the Duchess of Dato, widow of the Spanish Prime Minister Eduardo Dato, who had ordered the intervention of the army and was assassinated in 1921 by three Catalan anarchists. In 2011, London Tate Modern's 11 curators Matthew Gale and Marko Daniel will pretend instead that this military experience would explain the leftist 'radicalism' of Miró 3. What Miró has retained from all the events of 1917, what he highlighs in his letter to Ricart, is the financial aspect: “A memorable thing for me and worth knowing for you: While I have been a soldier, these days of state of war , I have earned 0.40 pesetas a day in addition to the meals. In all, I've earned a living, so I can get married. When will you earn 0.40 pesetas painting dolls? To be a soldier is better than being a painter". The political and social situation in Catalonia continues to disturb Miró, who begins to contemplate leaving the country. This intention is only confirmed the following year, when Dalmau offers his first individual exhibition, with more than sixty paintings and drawings, from February 16 to March 3, 1918. The exhibition constitutes a resounding failure. Very few visitors, the critics are negative and there is a huge scandal. Prestigious painter and critic Feliu Elies publishes a ruthless criticism and promotes an open letter from a group of 'congested visitors' inviting to revolt against Miró. The exhibition was vandalized and some exhibited works were destroyed by an angry public. The fiasco had a clear impact on the painter, who closed his 'fauve' period and started a more classic period. He also took the firm decision to leave Catalonia, which had humiliated him before his father. In September 1919 he wrote to his friend Enric Ricart: "I do not give a damn about tomorrow, what interests me is today. In addition, I would prefer a thousand times –and I say this with all sincerity– to totally and absolutely fail in Paris rather than continue suffering in these dirty and stinking waters of Barcelona.” 4 The decision by the conservative and religious Miró to flee from the revolutionary atmosphere he breaths in Catalonia becomes definitive with the new general strike of 1919 put down by Catalan general Joaquín Milans del Bosch and the beginning of the gun law in which employers and workers resort to terrorism. The painter, determined to leave, prepares his escape in detail. He is perfectly aware of how much the stay in Paris will cost him: "for a study... you have to count from 1,500 to 2,000 francs per year... unassuming lodging 20 francs a day ... I am completely determined to go to Paris this winter." 5 Miró tries to sell his paintings in collective exhibitions at the City 3 Gale, Matthew and Daniel, Marko 2011. p. 22. Letter from Miró to Enric C. Ricart 14.09.1919. Reproduced in Epistolari 2009, pp. 141-142 5 Letter to Enric C. Ricart 14.09.1919, Reproduced in Epistolari, p. 141-142 4 12 Hall of Barcelona, the Layetanas Galleries and the Courbet Association. But he can not collect even a fraction of the funds he needs to settle in Paris. From his parents, Miró obtains some money for the trip and to pay the hotel for a few days. It is not enough and the 26-year-old man resorts to selling to gallerist Josep Dalmau, for the amount of one thousand pesetas (about $ 2,300 in 2016), all the works painted until then. The dealer also commits himserf, and this is important for Miró, to organize an individual exhibition in Paris. Although he has bulk sold his canvases, Miró already has a first reserve to undertake his plan. But, prudently, he limits his ambition to spending a few months in the French capital, returning to the economic security of his parents the rest of the year. At the end of February 1920, a few weeks after turning 27, the painter arrived in Paris, landing in a cheap hotel where his friends Artigas, Ricart and Josep Pla were staying. Together with Ricart, Miró visits Picasso, with the pretext of handing him a bun that the painter’s mother has prepared for him in Barcelona. Pablo receives Joan with great cordiality, gives him advice and Miró is seduced. In a letter from Montroig of July 25 to Josep Françesc Ràfols he says: "Josep de Togores and Pablo Picasso are the only two with whom I speak and I see now in Paris, which is life. Picasso, at first, naturally, reserved with me. Now lately, after knowing my work, very effusive; hours of talk in his study, very often. In Catalonia, we need passion and heroism, because art is this. Believe me, if you want to be a painter, do not move from Paris. I completely agree” 6. Miró spends his first months in Paris establishing contacts and practicing drawing at the La Grande Chaumière Academy. In June he returns to Barcelona and Montroig, where he spends the summer. The social climate in Catalonia continues to deteriorate, with the bloody confrontation between the thugs of the so-called 'free union' created by the employers with the support of Milans del Bosch on one hand and the anarchist militants of the CNT and other radical organizations on the other, leaves 200 dead in the streets of Barcelona in the year 1920 alone. After having been in Paris, Miró finds Barcelona unbearable. In a letter to Picasso dated June 27, 1920 in Montroig, Miró shows his contempt for Catalan intellectuals: "I spent a few days in Barcelona. Very overwhelming effect, after having lived in Paris. The intelligentsia lives with 50 years of retard and the artists give the impression of amateurs. Lack of temperament and many pretensions! I think I've become stupid here ... a dream stuns all those wretches who spend their lives here. I agree with you, in order to be a painter you have to stay in Paris. They may call us here bad patriots, Europe and the countryside ! Two stimulants for our sensibility and brain. Acting abroad is more patriotic than those who act at home, without a view to the world” 7. Three weeks later he writes to Enric Ricart, also from Montroig, in very similar terms, affirming that before reaching the town he had spent twelve days of terrible torment in Barcelona. "Nothing but savages and peasants, with 50 years of retard in intellectual life. Definitely, never more Barcelona. Paris and the countryside, and this till death. I 6 7 Epistolari 2009, p. 193 Epistolari 2009, p. 187 13 do not know what is it that makes those who lose contact with the brain of the world fall asleep and mummify” 8. Convinced of not wanting to stay in Catalonia and that artistic success can only be achieved through deepening and expanding his contacts in Paris, Miró returns to France in February 1921. Picasso visits him at his hotel and agrees to send his dealers Paul Rosenberg and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,, who actually do visit him, but to no avail. Miró suffered from his installation in Paris the disdain of the main art dealer of the time: in 1922, Kahnweiler visits the studio of Miró at number 45 Blomet street. The painter was then 28 years old. But the dealer, after looking carefully at all the works he shows him, left the studio without saying a word. It is a resounding 'no' and without appeal, the same that will continue in force throughout his life, without ever making the effort to understand Miró’s painting. The humiliation will continue in later years. But if he did not have no luck with dealers, the network of contacts and friends of Miró in Paris is expanding, meeting and becoming intimate with poets Max Jacob, Tristan Tzara and Pierre Reverdy, very influential in the Parisian intellectual and journalistic media. Dalmau's promise to organize an individual exhibition in Paris is quickly fulfilled: on April 29, 1921, the exhibition was inaugurated in the La Licorne gallery, founded the previous year by collector and dentist Maurice Girardin. Despite getting good reviews from his friends, the exhibition constitutes a new fiasco for the painter: there are hardly any visitors and, as happened in Barcelona, not a single sale. For more misfortune, Dalmau does not have money to pay the gallerist the expenses of organizing the exhibit, the result being that Miró's paintings are retained by Girardin. The painter is even inflicted an additional humiliation: the Catalan gallerist will finally choose not to pay and leave in La Licorne all the early work of Miró. We have found a set of unpublished letters from Miró to Dr. Girardin, between June and September of that year of 19219 that give us a very close idea of Miró’s thorough preparation for the stay in Paris, his efforts and his state of mind. And at the same time they offer us a complete vision of one of his first unsuccessful episode of relationship with a dealer, in this case Girardin himself. In the first of the letters, written from Hotel Namur in Paris, and probably dated on Thursday, June 2, he announces to the person he considers his new dealer that he has finished a series of canvases and invites him to come and see them at his studio, since they are not yet dry and he cannot take them to La Licorne. In the second letter, dated in Montroig on July 5, Miró tells Girardin that he plans to install his studio permanently in Paris and gives notice of the preparation of two paintings. One of them we have identified clearly as 'The Farm', in which he worked for nine months, first in Montroig and then in Paris. “I have started two landscapes that I think will occupy me all the season, given my determination to finish my canvases well. I'm very encouraged and I hope to manage.” He also indicates that he has passed through Barcelona and has broken with Dalmau: “He has not finally clarified the haze that has always surrounded him. He wanted to get all my work for two years. I can not 8 9 Epistolari 2009, p. 192 Sold by Tajan, París in Sale Manuscrits et Livres, 17 November 2015. Lots 78-81 14 accept that, because I do not want to be chained, and on the other hand I prefer to establish direct relations in Paris. I act thus encouraged by the excellent reception I have found among dealers and art critics and by your kindness.” Miró asks Girardin to go to his bank to pay the balance of his debt with the painter: “I think that will be more comfortable and will allow me to have cash in Paris, in order to cover the expenses of the studio that I have commissioned friends to look for me, because on my next trip I must find myself installed in Paris.” And the painter asks his gallerist if he has plans for his canvas Glove and Newspaper, which he had just painted and had left deposited in La Licorne. The next letter, also dated in Montroig a month and a half later, on August 21, indicates that the gallerist did not respond to the previous one nor did he deposit money in the bank. Miró tells Girardin that he is still busy with the two 'landscapes', in which he continues to work with the aim of “finishing them well and explaining them well”, adding that they will have him busy for a long time. “I am very encouraged and I would be happy to show them to you. My slow work has prevented me from accepting your kind invitation to send you some canvases for the Autumn Salon.” But he adds that he will send paintings: “In my opinion, it would be convenient, both for you and me, to make a very important shipment”. Next, Miró deals with money issues, begging Girardin to go to the Spanish Bank of the Rio de la Plata, on the Avenue de l'Opera in Paris, to check the balance of his account “and add the amount of the Glove and Newspaper if he is interested”. He also tells him that he has already warned a bank employee (Mr. Pérez Jorba) of his visit. This is writer, critic and correspondent Joan Pérez-Jorba (1878-1928), who had written a laudatory chronicle of Miró in the newspaper El Día Gráfico in Barcelona10 and who also worked at the bank. But Girardin continues to ignore his letters and request for payment, and on September 10, 1921 Miró wrote again from Montroig complaining about the lack of response to his letters and asking him to pay the amount of 450 francs owed to him. He adds that if the canvas of the glove and the newspaper does not interest him, he should hand it to his "agent" Pérez Jorba or else add to the total owed to Miró another 300 francs for the painting. In short, after his first great failure in Paris and the lack of response from the only gallerist he has access to at that time, Miró offers him a large canvas of 116.8 x 89.5 cm (MoMA Still Life - Glove and Newspaper Catalog No. 18.1955 ), for an amount that equals –taking inflation into account– $ 325 in 2016. An overwhelmed Miró is back in Barcelona with his head down. Once again he has not achieved the success he wanted to show his father. But he does not despair, he continues to paint and although he has not been able to rent a new studio, he returns to Paris in April 1922, to the study that sculptor Pablo Gargallo had let him at number 45 of rue Blomet, where he establishes friendship with André Masson, the Surrealist protegé of Kahnweiler, Ives Tanguy and writers such as Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Jean Dubuffet –who will not start painting until two decades later–, Michel Leiris, Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert and Marcel Jouhandeau. Return to Montroig in the summer and return to Paris in March 1923 where he continues to paint and 10 Pérez-Jorba, Joan Crónica de París: Joan Miró y su pintura en El Unicornio, El Día Gráfico, Barcelona 6.05.1921 15 expand his circle of friends to Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Benjamin Péret and Robert Desnos. He obtains some income through direct sales or on deposit at L'Effort Moderne Gallery owned Leonce Rosenberg, or with his brother and also Picasso dealer Paul. But the bulk of his livelihood continues to come his family, despite the fact that the painter is already 30 years old. The year 1924 also passes without the painter obtaining the success he craves for, and he only exhibits in the Madrid collective show of the Society of Iberian Artists, which he joins. But in that year there is an event that will change the fortune of Miró: on December 1st, the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste is launched, an initiative of Benjamin Péret and Pierre Naville. The first issue contains texts by Éluard, Desnos, Péret, Aragon and Reverdy, as well as illustrations by Masson, Picasso, De Chirico and Max Ernst and the announcement of the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto written by André Breton. André Masson writes immediately to Miró in Barcelona, who sees in the new movement the opportunity he has been looking for for years. The painter does not wait till spring to make his annual pilgrimage to Paris. He is there at the beginning of January 1925 and takes with him dozens of works painted in Montroig. In March Masson introduces him to André Breton, supreme leader of the surrealists, who immediately adopts the young painter, acquires two of his works (Le Chasseur and Le Gentleman) and sponsors him. Masson also introduces him to Éluard, Aragon and Naville and Miró unwittingly joins the group, with whose support he gets in April his first contract: dealer Jacques Viot, manager of the Galerie Pierre, offers him and Max Ernst 1,500 francs a month for all their production. Although he had said three years before that he did not want to be bound, Miró does not hesitate a second: he immediately accepted the proposal, although decades later he complained that it was very little money, “barely enough to survive and buy canvases”. One thousand five hundred francs of 1925 correspond to about $ 1,540 of 2016 in purchasing power. In any case, this contract does not make him independent from his parents. Miró considers that he has taken the first step to consecrate himself and can now live as a bourgeois and prove to his father that, in spite of still needing financial support, he has managed to establish himself among the French artistic and economic elite, which implies consequential spending in public relations. We can not forget that we are in the Golden Twenties and that when Miró arrives in Paris and meets Picasso, the Malaga painter has been married to Olga Khokhlova for two years and lives through his most bourgeois period, which Max Jacob called the Duchess era. And Miró's aspiration is to be able to live like Picasso, to be able to spend like him. Salvador Dali says in his memoirs that when he 16 arrived in the city of light, Miró's first concern was for him to get a tuxedo, and when he had it, Miró took him for lunch at the Duchess of Dato’s: “Miró, imprisoned with a pumped-up shirt as rigid as a breastplate, kept silent, but watching everything and thinking. After lunch we went to drink a bottle of champagne at the Bateau Ivre. Miró paid the bill with an easyness that I envied and then we walked back home.” 11 Although Viot paid relatively little, he fulfilled his main function: exhibiting Miró. With the support of the surrealist leaders, he organized an individual exhibition at Galerie Pierre from June 12 to 27, 1925. The preface to the catalog of the exhibition was signed by poet Benjamin Péret. Attending the inauguration at midnight on June 12 were the signatories of the invitation, that is, those who summon the public to attend the exhibition, among whom Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, André Breton, René Crével, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, André Masson and Benjamin Péret. And this time, the exhibition is a great success of critics and public and sales actually happen, including some from major fashion designer and collector Jacques Doucet, who had just bought Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Miró is beside himself with joy. He could not have imagined such a resounding triumph. But there is still more: in November of that year, Miró is also included in the collective exhibition La peinture surréaliste at Galerie Pierre. And here accompany Miró his admired Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, André Masson, Man Ray and Pierre Roy. New critic and public success. He also participates again in Madrid in another collective exhibition of the Society of Iberian Artists. In that year he also paints some of his best surrealist works, such as The Harlequin's Carnival. It is the definitive consecration, Miró thinks. And he takes advantage of the acquired fame to try to make some cash, selling work directly to collectors like the Belgians Camille Goemans and René Gaffé. He can do it because his ruined Parisian dealer Jacques Viot flees abroad in July 1926, and until he signs a new contract with Viot's partner, Pierre Loeb, he will have the possibility of selling the paintings he has in his possession Those already in the gallery warehouse are –once again– sequestered by justice, since the gallery was formally in the name of Viot and not of Loeb. Miró offers his acquaitances to perform any work. The first of these side jobs leads him to his first clash with 11 Altamira, Luis E. La estrategia parisina de Miró http://diarioalfil.com.ar/2013/04/22/laestrategia-parisina-de-miro/ 17 the Surrealist group. Thanks to Picasso, who sent to Miró's studio librettist Boris Kochno and dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar – Serge Diaghilev’s lovers– the businessman orders from Miró and Max Ernst the sets for the Romeo & Juliet piece of his Ballets Russes. It’s only 3,000 francs for the two (about $ 2,850 in 2016) and involve a lot of preparation work, design and assembly supervision. But it includes travel expenses and it is good money for two painters in need. The modest remuneration does not prevent the revolutionary surrealist dogmatists from accusing them of selling themselves to capital and expelling them from the group. Breton and Aragon publish in number 7 of the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste, the article Protest in which, not daring to charge against bourgeois but powerful Picasso, they try to demolish Ernst and Miró, denouncing as inadmissible “that intellect be at the service of money. There is no year, however, that does reveal the submission of a man we believed irreducible to the powers he opposed until then”. For the surrealists, the action of the two painters is equivalent to accepting “the domestication of dreams and the revolts of physical and intellectual hunger for the benefit of the international aristocracy.” 12 On May 18, the play is performed at the Sarah Bernhardt theater in Paris. The surrealists try to sabotage the representation by throwing leaflets with the text of the article into the stalls. The attack from the two surrealist bosses will not do much damage to Miró, because it gives him great publicity, which is precisely what he needs, and allows him to make himself known beyond Parisian circles. And as soon as the scandal breaks out, he sells several paintings to René Gaffé. Breton will soon realize that his attempt to punish Miró, whom he knows does not share the revolutionary ideology of the group, has done nothing but benefit the 12 Aragon, L y Breton, A. Protestation, La Révolution Surréaliste nº 7, Paris 18 June 1926, p. 31. Text: “Il n'est pas admissible que la pensée soit aux ordres de l'argent. Il n'est pourtant pas d'année qui n'apporte la soumission d'un homme qu'on croyait irréductible aux puissances auxquelles il s'opposait jusqu'alors. Peu importent les individus qui se résignent à ce point à en passer par les conditions sociales, l'idée de laquelle ils se réclamaient avant une telle abdication subsiste en dehors d'eux. C'est en ce sens que la participation des peintres Max Ernst et Joan Miró au prochain spectacle des Ballets russes ne saurait impliquer avec le leur le déclassement de l'idée surréaliste. Idée essentiellement subversive, qui ne peut composer avec de semblables entreprises, dont le but a toujours été de domestiquer au profit de l'aristocratie internationale les rêves et les révoltes de la famine physique et intellectuelle. Il a pu sembler à Ernst et à Miró que leur collaboration avec M. de Diaghilew, légitimée par l'exemple de Picasso, ne tirait pas à si grave conséquence. Elle nous met pourtant dans l'obligation, nous qui avons avant tout souci de maintenir hors de portée des négriers de toutes sortes les positions avancées de l'esprit, elle nous met dans l'obligation de dénoncer, sans considération de personnes, une attitude qui donne des armes aux pires partisans de l'équivoque morale. On sait que nous ne faisons qu'un cas très relatif de nos affinités artistiques avec tel ou tel. Qu'on nous fasse l'honneur de croire qu'en mai 1926 nous sommes plus que jamais incapables d'y sacrifier le sens que nous avons de la réalité révolutionnaire. Louis Aragon, André Breton. 18 mai 1926”. 18 painter. After the intervention of Paul Éluard, he readmits Miró to the group without demanding from then on that he adheres to its postulates or manifestos. But the dissensions within the surrealist group will continue to grow and Miró will keep distancing himself from them. The first victims of the disagreements will be, as always happens, publications, such as La Révolution surréaliste, Le Grand Jeu, La Lutte de classes, Distances, and L'Esprit. To save what he could, Breton and Aragon on February 12, 1929, when they had already joined the Communist Party, sent a questionnaire to Surrealists and fellow travelers, asking them about their position regarding collective action13. The letter is sent to seventy-four intellectuals and artists. Miró did not hesitate, he was closer to Rimbaud, who seeks to 'change his life' through 13 Monsieur, Vous ne vous désintéressez pas absolument, autant que l'on sache, des possibilités d'action commune entre un certain nombre d'hommes que vous appréciez plus ou moins, les ayant plus ou moins connus, ayant eu plus ou moins l'occasion de les juger sur tel ou tel acte privé ou public, et désespérant ou espérant, à tort ou à raison, plus ou moins d'eux. Peut-être jugerez-vous opportun de procéder à une confrontation générale entre les différents points de vue qui sont les leurs et qui, peut-être, aujourd'hui les opposent diversement. Les questions personnelles, dont il a toujours été admis que chacun faisait bon marché, peuventelles ou doivent-elles prévaloir contre les raisons que ces hommes auraient d'agir ensemble, si l'on considère l'importance et l'efficacité d'un accord susceptible de s'établir à nouveau entre eux, ou une partie d'entre eux ? Y a-t-il antinomie foncière entre ce qu'ils pensent ? Nous nous permettons d'attirer votre attention sur ce fait : il ne paraît presque plus rien qui nous intéresse, les uns ou les autres. On annonce bien une revue marxiste, une revue d'opposition communiste, une revue de psychologie concrète, etc., mais il semble que ces publications éprouvent des difficultés à paraître, et en revanche La Lutte de Classes, Le Grand Jeu, Distances, L'Esprit, La Révolution surréaliste, etc., ne paraissent plus. Devrons-nous permettre qu'on en tire des conclusions et que nos ennemis communs tablent de plus en plus sur l'impossibilité où nous sommes de concerter, sur quelque base que ce soit, une action commune ou renoncer à nous compter autour d'un certain nombre d'idées, positives ou négatives, après tout assez bien déterminées, et dont la portée seule est sujette à discussion ? Un certain nombre d'entre nous se refusent de croire à la nécessité, à la fatalité de l'éparpillement de nos efforts et à la spécialisation outrancière qui en résulte. C'est pourquoi vous êtes prié de répondre par écrit aux questions suivantes : 1. - Estimez-vous que, tout compte fait (importance croissante des questions de personnes, manque réel de déterminations extérieures, passivité remarquable et impuissance à s'organiser des éléments les plus jeunes, insuffisance de tout appoint nouveau, et par suite accentuation de la répression intellectuelle dans tous les domaines), votre activité doit ou non se restreindre, définitivement ou non, à une forme individuelle ? 2. - a) Si oui, voulez-vous faire à ce qui a pu réunir la plupart d'entre nous le sacrifice d'un court exposé de vos motifs ? Définissez votre position. b) Si non, dans quelle mesure considérez-vous qu'une activité commune peut être continuée ou reprise ; de quelle nature serait-elle ; avec qui désireriez-vous, ou consentiriez-vous, à la mener ? Les réponses devront être adressées, avant le 25 février 1929, à Raymond Queneau, 18, rue Caulaincourt, Paris ; elles fourniront les bases d'un débat, pour lequel des convocations seront ultérieurement adressées à tous ceux qui, indépendamment de ce qui peut les engager déjà dans des sens différents, auront pris la peine de répondre au questionnaire précédent, signifiant par là qu'utopique ou non, l'entreprise actuelle, qui a priori les comprend, nécessite de leur part un aveu ou un désaveu actif. 19 poetry, than to revolutionary surrealists or communists, who want to 'transform the world'. In order not to hurt susceptibilities, Miró does not de-authorize politicians, but he excludes himself in his response: “There is no doubt that when action is carried out, it is always the result of a collective effort. However, I am convinced that individuals whose personalities are strong or excessive ... these people will never be able to yield to the military discipline that community action necessarily demands”. Aragon and Breton will also bother Picasso, but he has sufficient resources to ignore the wriggles of the writers. No. 2 of La Révolution Surréaliste, dated January 1925, published part of the drawings contained in the Carnet de Juan-les-Pins of 1925, which constitute in some way an advance of Miró’s Constellations. It is a series of 24 pages of designs, a part of which are composed of lines joined by dots that outline to the extreme different topics. The linear drawings of the carnet give rise to various interpretations, especially by his Surrealist friends. But Picasso is quick to cut them clean, taking advantage of a tasty text in which he tries to disprove the theories of critics who seek to explain Cubism through scientific or ideological considerations. It is the 'Letter on Art' that begins with his famous boutade "I do not look for. I find ", published in Moscow on May 16, 1926 in the magazine Огонёк (read Ogoniok, The Light) 14. Picasso ridicules the surrealists who "found with surprise in his album sketches and ink drawings in which there were only points and lines" and gives a totally simple explanation for these designs: "The fact is that I admire astronomy charts a lot. They seem beautiful to me, regardless of their ideological significance. Therefore, one day I started to draw a group of points, joined by lines and spots that seemed suspended in the sky. My idea was to use them later, introducing them as a purely graphic element in my compositions. But those clever surrealists have discovered that these drawings responded exactly to their abstract ideas." Picasso will use these graphic elements in the creation of a whole new arbitrary aesthetic as from 1948, designed precisely to get rid of the pressure of the communist party, which wanted him to stick to the rules of socialist realism. His two main achievements in this regard will be the lithographs of the artist's book Le Chant des Morts in March and the oil on canvas La Cuisine, in its two versions, both from November 1948 15. Unfortunately for Miró, in 1927 the economic bonanza that France had been experiencing since 1924 reached its end. The country developed a very high inflation (30% per year) that implied less purchase power for the remittances the painter continues to receive from his family. On the other hand, his father died and the family's income is severely affected. Besides, Miró is engaged with young Maria Pilar Tei and needs a minimum of financial stability to settle with his future wife in Paris. The dissociation between the painter and the surrealist group affects his pocket. With the support of the surrealist bunch he had obtained the two 1925 exhibitions and had 14 Translated into French by the art review Formes in its Nº 2, February 1930 pp. 2 - 5). http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6101980w.image (Consulted 05.21.2013) 15 See chapters 8 & 9 (El Chant des Morts y su estética and La cocina de todas las salsas) in Orozco 2015. 20 Pierre Loeb hire him for 2,000 francs a month for his entire production (about $ 1,900 in 2016). It was very little in comparison, for example, with Marc Chagall, who in 1926 sells each gouache –from a series of 120– to Ambroise Vollard at one thousand or two thousand francs. But Miró does not receive his stipend for long. After his estrangement from Breton, Loeb does not organize Miró’s next solo exhibition until 1927 and another one in May 1928, at the Galerie Georges Bernheim. Loeb's payments are becoming more and more erratic, and Miró must cancel his marriage with María Pilar Tei a few days before the expected date of the wedding. The reason given is that the young woman is too modern for the conservative Miró. But the painter, who is now 36 years old, is determined to find a wife, and with the help of his conservative family he finds her in Pilar Juncosa, a 25-year-old daughter of a prosperous furniture merchant. She is demure, religious and traditionalist like him. Pilar was a close relative of Miró, because her mother Enriqueta Iglesias Oromi was first cousin of Miró's maternal grandmother, Josefa Oromi. In fact the kinship 'sense' was even closer, because the grandmother of the painter raised Pilar’s mother of as a daughter when she became an orphan. Miró’s mother thus considered Enriqueta, Pilar's mother, as her own sister, and therefore Joan Miró saw in Pilar a first cousin. Enriqueta had also married 'in the family' Lamberto Juncosa Massip, an employee of Miró’s grandfather Josep Ferrà, who later built the first furniture factory in Majorca. They will marry on October 12, 1929, a few days before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that marked the beginning of the Great Depression. But the Mirós have not yet realized the importance of the event and settle in a rented apartment in Paris. The painter responds to Loeb's defaults by not giving him all his work and trying to sell to other dealers. But attempts to place his paintings with other gallerists in Paris are unsuccessful, particularly because the main one, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, persists in ignoring him. In 1929, the dealer speaks contemptuously of Miró as 'smallfry'in a letter of June 15 to the painter José de Togores. For Kahnweiler, “Miró demonstrates a surprising lack of inventiveness. He has been spinning for years without advancing. To believe, according to a widespread idea, that Miró imitates Paul Klee is to give him more credit than he deserves, because in reality he is inspired by Francis Picabia, to the detriment of his own rather naturalistic original style” 16. The year after he wrote such hard words, in 1930, the dealer visited an exhibition at the Pierre Colle gallery, and he just commented that the works of Miró exposed seem very 'pretty' but that he has the impression that the painter turns around in a vicious circle, that 'perfects' an oeuvre whose only value should be its spontaneity17. The argument would be developed later by Picasso, who in 1948 told Françoise Gilot: “Miró has been for a long time running behind a hoop, dressed like a child” 18. Which does not mean that Picasso did not appreciate his painting. In fact he acquired for his personal collection early works by Miró, among others the famous Self-portrait of 1919 (Picasso Museum in Paris). The andalusian would never get to see The Constellations, starting point of the period that did not convince Picasso. He was not in New York when the exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1945, nor in Paris when 16 Galerie Louise Leiris Archives. Cited in Assouline 1988, p.319 Assouline 1988, p.267 18 Gilot & Lake 1998, p. 262 17 21 they were exhibited in the Berggruen Gallery between January and March 1959. In these days Picasso did not leave the French Riviera at any time, producing non-stop drawings , lithographs, linocuts, oil paintings and sculptures. The andalusian had a new opportunity to see the gouaches in 1968, this time next to home, when the Maeght Foundation exhibited in Saint Paul de Vence –26 km from Mougins– some of the Constellations between July 23 and 30. But he did not make the trip to the home of his unappreciated Maeght, staying all that time in his residence of Notre Dame de Vie, where he was executing dozens of his prints of the 347 Series. Kahnweiler gets even more rude with Miró. While describing Dalí as “always the same, applied, manic and for me very School of Fine Arts”, the judgment on his colleague is much harder: “Miró, very Catalan, that is to say quite vulgar, but in the usual spirit. The objects also completely idiotic”19. Kahnweiler, despite representing André Masson, will always be antipathetic to surrealism in painting and, as Pierre Assouline recalls, he will make the phrase of Maurice de Vlaminck his own: “the surrealists are people who have a telephone installed and who immediately cut the cable” 20. Despite his rejection and ignoring the recommendation of Michel Leiris and Masson to invite Miró to work with him, Kahnweiler will give him the illusion three years later that he could exhibit in his Galerie Simon, but this was within a purely financial operation. It was the Artistic Mutual AidUnion, an 'invention' of the art dealer to get round the economic crisis. But the offer to Miró is not firm nor does it lead to anything. The gallerist writes to the painter on April 16, 1935 and asks him without any reason: “What is your situation from the point of view of business? Are you free or have commitments?” 21 He tells Miró that he has plans for him, but does not give him more details and demands the most absolute secrecy on the matter. A few weeks later, in a letter dated May 9, to Armand Salacrou, a journalist for the L'Humanité Communist Party newspaper and a member of the shopping club, the gallerist says: “I will see Miró at the end of the month and I will try to make him enter the art purchasing group. I think it would be excellent to have Miró so that we can truly group all the important painters of the young generation” 22. But six months before the letter to Salacrou Kahnweiler had reiterated the contemptuous opinion he has of him. In a letter to British critic and collector Douglas Cooper dated November 6, 1934, he says that he still thinks that Miró is “a little figurative Catalan painter who does not lack talent but owes having become surrealist to Masson... A capable little painter, but one who ignores his limits and throws himself into adventures that far exceed his strength” 23. The result is that despite having aroused the painter's hopes, every time Miró shows up at 29 bis on Rue Astorg, where the gallery is based, to ask what’s new about his work, the dealer responds in such a dry way that the painter must leave empty-handed. 19 Letter to G. L. Roux on 17.12.1932 Cited in Assouline 1988, p.319 Assouline 1988, p.267. 21 Assouline 1988, p.318 22 Assouline 1988, p.318 23 Assouline 1988, p.319 20 22 Kahnweiler's contempt for Miró was maintained in later years. When, after the end of World War II, the dealer settles down to live with his stepdaughter Louise and her husband, the poet Michel Leiris, one of the painter's best friends, the only source of friction with his hosts is a large painting by Miró, La Baigneuse from 1924, which Leiris had bought from Pierre Loeb. Every time he passes, Kahnweiler unhungs it, until Leiris puts it back in its place, and then it's back to square one. Miró realized then that he had exploited the French market to the limit and that he needed an alternative outside the country that generated the income he could not get in Paris. As in Germany and the United Kingdom the market was also controlled by the Jewish dealers based in Paris (Rosenberg, Kahnweiler, Loeb, etc.) and in Spain he could not sell even a single painting, the interest of the painter turned to the other side of the Atlantic. The United States had become, since the end of the First World War, the great emerging power, great fortunes had been formed there, and the art market had risen like foam. It was there you had to go. His first foray into the North American market will be to participate in the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York organized between November 1926 and January 1927 by the Societe Anonyme. The group had been founded in 1920 by Katherine S. Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and was along with the Gallery of Living Art of millionaire Albert Eugene Gallatin, the main promoter of European art in the United States in the 1920s. In 1927, Miró met young critic James Johnson Sweeney, who will be named eight years later curator in MoMA. And in the spring of 1930, Miró, newly installed in Paris, also meets the man who catapulted him to fame and took his work to the main museums of the world: Pierre Matisse. He was the son of Henri Matisse and had lefts France in 1925 for the United States with the firm determination to become a gallerist and with him the painter will work for more than five decades. Pierre was born in 1900, in one of the least economically buoyant times for his father, and although the son painted from a young age, spent a lot of time making copies in the Louvre and came to exhibit at the Salon des Independants in Paris, his father wanted that he learned to play the violin to avoid precariousness. At 23, and after dreaming of becoming a diplomat and traveling the world, Pierre is placed in the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, where he was fortunate to meet writer Henri-Pierre Roché, the author of the novel Jules et Jim that narrates the amorous triangle that he formed with model Helen Grund and German Jewish writer Franz Hessel –the parents of Stéphane Hessel, author of 'Time for Outrage!'. Roché,, who in the first decade of the century had been a member of the Picasso band, spent part of the 14-18 war in the United States, as a member of a French military mission, and when the conflict ended he settled in New York as art dealer, working mainly for John Quinn, the first great modern American collector who convinced Congress to abolish the '1909 Tariff Law' that imposed tariffs on the importation of works of art of less than twenty years of age. Roché, thinks that Pierre Matisse will be a gateway to his father, with whose paintings Parisian dealers speculated in the happy twenties leaving their price beyond the reach of American gallerists. Pierre, on the other hand, learned from Roché, and other Americans who visited the Barbazanges gallery that the real art business was on the other side of the Atlantic, especially if one had direct access to the artists and one or 23 two intermediaries could be avoided. So in December 1924 the young Matisse disembarked in New York, without a canvas to sell under his arm, but with a portfolio of works on paper and the determination to make a niche in the American art market. His first exhibition in New York was of lithographs and drawings by his father in the modest bookshop of Eberhard Weyhe at 794 of Lexington Avenue in March-April 1925. It was a small first success, with reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker, but works were sold from $ 25 each (about $ 340 today counting inflation). American dealers thought that Pierre would give them access to his father's œuvre, but Henri was from 1909 under contract with the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which took all his works except eight a year kept by the artist. And Matisse needed the ones he kept to have a stock in 1926, when expiured his contract, which he did not intend to renew. Pierre's path as a gallerist will begin by establishing a friendship with Valentine Dudensing, son of the owner of the Dudensing Gallery. Valentine allowed him to start organizing small exhibitions in the gallery, always with the title “Pierre Matisse presents ...”. In November 1925, guessing that Pierre is going to give him the keys to success, Valentine decides to emancipate himself from his father and open a new gallery in New York, the Valentine Gallery. And in January 1926, John Quinn's collection was sold after his death, at an auction in which Pierre Matisse began to play hard by buying a still life from Henri Matisse and an oil painting by Rousseau le Douanier for a total of $ 22,400. the guarantees being provided by collectors. In this brief and successful operation, Pierre charged a commission of almost ten percent (some $ 30,000 in 2016). The association with his friend in the Valentine Gallery of 43 East 57th Street in New York gave more than satisfactory results for both, selling for example in 1929 more than $ 300,000 in works of art (more than four million dollars of 2016). But the division of labor they had established gave all the visibility and contacts with customers to Valentine. Pierre's job was to spend half a year in France acquiring paintings in small galleries or directly from the painters, while his friend was responsible for organizing the exhibitions and selling. And if Pierre wanted to be an important dealer one day, the essential thing was not to get work, but to organize exhibitions and build a portfolio of clients. This reason, together with the fact that the owner of the gallery was Valentine, who made him understand who was the boss on occasion, pushed Pierre to create his own establishment in 1931. The initial capital to launch it was his share of the stock of paintings of the Valentine Gallery, composed of works by Matisse, Braque, De Chirico, Derain, Dufy, Laurencin, Modigliani, Picasso and Utrillo, valued at $ 39,000 (about $ 610,000 in 2016) and with a sale price of more or less double that amount. But the moment of the separation –decided by Pierre to match the opening of his gallery with a large Henri Matisse retrospective organized by Alfred H. Barr. at MoMA– could not have been more ill-timed. Two years had lapsed since the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the economic situation, even for rich collectors, did not stop deteriorating. And on the other hand, a movement begun before the Great Depression had produced the rejection of European painting and called for support for American modernism. Pierre was not discouraged and decided to persevere, while opening a new line of work. The problem with working with confirmed painters was that he depended 24 on other gallerists in Europe to provide him with works, which raised the cost of acquisition during his summer stays in France. To deal with this problem, Pierre decided to use the thrust provided by Barr .and his new museum, inaugurated two years earlier, to promote among his best clients –among which were A. Conger Goodyear, Stephen Clark, Samuel A. Lewisohn and Albert C. Barnes himself, the patron of the arts... and antiseptics– new painters whose work he could acquire directly at infinitely lower prices than those practiced by the Parisian art dealers. As we will see, the elevation of new painters to the top of the artistic scene –thus multiplying the value of the acquisitions by the museum's patrons– had been the founding motive of MoMA, and Pierre Matisse was one of the dealers who best knew how to take advantage of the new vein of the market. Photo: Pierre Matisse with Picasso and Sabartés at the Brasserie Lipp, Paris 1939 Joan Miró was the archetype of the painter with whom Pierre Matisse sought to build his new prosperity. He was 38 years old in 1931, while the most sought-after painters all combed gray hair. Miró was also part of the group of surrealists who pushed hard in Europe and Barr. defended; and he enjoyed a certain prestige in Europe and the United States, having participated in several group exhibitions in 1926, 1927, 1929, 1930 (two at MoMA) and 1931, in addition to exhibitions at the Valentine Gallery in 1930 and 1931. But what made Miró especially attractive to Pierre is that he knew that the Spanish painter obtained little economic benefit from Pierre Loeb and was much more ambitious for his work than his dealer, an old acquaintance of Matisse. Miró was under contract with Loeb since 1926. But in 1934, 14 years after settling in the art capital, what Miró obtained from his dealer was only 2,000 Francs a month (about $ 1,560 today) in exchange for the totality of his work. It was not much, if we take into account that Kahnweiler paid André Masson since 1923 3,000 Francs per month 24 and that even in 1938, when the art market was completely sunk, he still paid 2,500 Francs to Masson and Francisco Bores 25. In addition, Loeb had great difficulty in maintaining the contract with Miró in force due to lack of customers. The Depression had made its mark on the French art market, and the painter does not have enough with his mother's remittances to live with his wife and daughter in Paris. They were thus forced in 1932 to return to Barcelona, settling at the address of Miró's mother. Mironian historiography tends to hide this episode. Domènec Ribot Martín points out for example that if he returned to Barcelona it was because his new contract “with Pierre Matisse freed him from staying in Paris” 26 . The precarious financial situation, a constant in his life until 1949 or 1950, will make the painter cry out in 1978: “If people knew that I painted all these canvases when I was half starved !”27. From Spain, Miró tries to maintain ties, at least epistolary, with his French friends and contacts, among other reasons because through them he could get all kinds of orders 24 Levaillant 2012 p. 5 Assouline 1988, p.343 26 Ribot Martín, 2010, p. 116. 27 Amón, 1978. 25 25 that may allow him to earn some cash. We have found, for example, an unpublished letter of 1933 to Prince Aleksandr Shervashidze, set designer for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo with whom he had collaborated a year earlier in the ballet Jeux d'enfants, with music by Georges Bizet and choreography by Léonide Massine. Miró asks him directly for any news he can give him about work and the future plans of the company, no doubt to remind him that he is available to make costumes and sets 28. We have also found another unpublished letter from the artist dated August 2, 1933 to Greek publisher Efstathios (Stratis) Eleftheriades (Ευσταθιος Στρατης Ελευθεριαδης), better known by the pseudonym Tériade, who had been between 1926 and 1931 in charge of modern painting at Cahiers d 'art, the review owned by his compatriot Christian Zervos. After separating from Zervos, Tériade joined Sephardic Jew Albert Skira, who had just launched Minotaure magazine. Miró tells him in this letter that he has taken the trouble to find a point of sale for the magazine in Barcelona, suggesting that he does not entrust it to a bookseller, but to the ADLAN group that his friends Joan Prats, Josep Lluís Sert and Joaquim Gomis had just founded in the city. Miró was very interested in keeping contact with Skira and Tériade, because they had published Les métamorphoses d’Ovide two years before, illustrated with thirty original etchings by Picasso. The following year, 1932, they had repeated with the publication of Poésies by Stéphane Mallarmé, illustrated with twenty-nine etchings by Henri Matisse. Miró knew that Skira had plenty of funds and wanted to be the third illustrator. He thus indicated in his letter that “For the illustration of the book that we have talked about with Mr. Skira, I would prefer that you tell me the writers you want to edit and you think I can illustrate. The work would be more exciting for me because it would create a new problem that would excite my imagination even more than if I had to think of a writer before.” The wealthy Skira had started his career by showing up before Picasso offering him to illustrate a book about Napoleon. The andalusian did not pay any attention to him, but at the insistence of the young publisher, he agreed to illustrate a book, demanding that it be a mythological subject. Miró will not achieve his purpose of obtaining the publishing contract, and the third book by Albert Skira Editeur in 1934 will be illustrated by Salvador Dalí with forty-two etchings (Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont). Miró also refers in the August 1933 letter to his collaboration with Minotaure, stating that "I also intend to make some drawings for your magazine and a cover this summer. I will keep you informed of all this and also of the studies I will do for the etching, as I promised." Actually, Tériade belittled Miró, whose presence in Minotaure was limited to the cover illustration of No. 7, dated June 1935 and some drawings, while other painters, such as Picasso, Matisse, Masson or Derain occupied much more space in the magazine. And this despite the fact that the painter had helped to finance it in an exercise of disinterested crowdfunding, precisely with the engraving referred to in the letter, entitled Daphnis et Chloé (Dupin 9), published in 1933 with a print run of 110 numbered copies signed by the painter. Nor was Miró more fortunate with the following project of Tériade, the Verve magazine, launched in 1937 that, with funding from Hearst Corporation, William 28 Letter to Prince Aleksandr Shervashidze of Abkhazia del 03. 21.1933 26 Randolph Hearst ‘s conglomerate, associated the strongest artistic and literary movements of the time, using the most advanced printing techniques of the moment. Artists like Matisse, Braque, Chagall, Borés, Masson, Picasso and many others were directly involved in the success of the Verve adventure. But in the 23 years of publication of the magazine –26 issues in total– Tériade did not dedicate one single issue to Miró. He simply used three lithographs by the artist, among them the wonderful The Dog Barking at the Moon published in No 27-28 of 1952. His surrealist companions also abandon Miró in these difficult times. Miró writes on Christmas Eve 1932 to André Breton, after apologizing for not having paid a visit to him before leaving for Spain, to inform him that Paul “Éluard has just written to me to say that it is impossible for him to write an article about my exhibition in the Colle Gallery, as I had requested, for Cahiers d'Art (number that will appear in February) “. He then asks if Breton could write it in his place. Finally, he adds: !If you were too busy, do you think you could ask Peret or Crével?” 29 There will be no review of the exhibition with a prestigious signature in Cahiers d'Art. The troubled Miró, who after confirming that “the world has changed a lot” encourages Belgian painter Alice Frey in a letter of November 2 to “continue to advance bravely, especially at this time, in which, no matter the cost, you have to stay on your feet, without batting an eye” then tries to get Paul Rosenberg take over Loeb's contract, without results. And after an exhibition organized by Loeb at the Georges Bernheim Gallery in Paris in November 1933 (The last works of Joan Miró) in which nothing was sold, Miró wrote to Pierre Matisse from Hotel Recamier in Paris asking him to exhibit those same paintings in New York and insinuating him to take charge of his career in the United States 30. The gallerist wants to get hold of Miró and does not waste time. A month and a half later, the Joan Miró exhibition opens at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, with a catalog with texts by Ernest Hemingway and James Johnson Sweeney, obtaining numerous favorable reviews. But on January 18, 1934 the exhibition closes and not a single sale has been produced. The dealer does not recoil, and takes the same exhibition (Paintings by Joan Miró, March 16-30) to the Arts Club of Chicago, founded by Elizabeth 'Bobsy' Fuller, who later would acquire a Constellation. At the same time, Matisse proposes Loeb to take over 50% of Miró's production, freeing the Frenchman of the obligation to pay 1,000 Francs a month to the painter ($ 780 of 2016), with an option for another 25% and with exclusivity of sales throughout the Americas and especially to American customers, wherever they were. The proud Loeb wants to get rid of the burden, but he does not want Matisse to become an equal, thus he proposes that Miró be shared among four dealers, each paying 500 francs to the painter in exchange for 25% of his production. And he contacts Kahnweiler, who reacts late and will propose to Pierre Matisse, in a letter dated June 24, 1935 to join him to handle the 'Miró affair' 31. 29 André Breton Archives. Référence 7035000 Letter to Pierre Matisse 11.5.1933, Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives. MA 5020: Box 18, Folder 19 (Correspondence, 1930–1935). Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, The Morgan Library & Museum. New York, N.Y. Hereinafter, documents from this Archive will be quoted giving its initials plus box and folder numbers, i.e., PMGA 18.19 31 Assouline 1988, p.319 30 27 The letter –a copy of which is kept in the Archives of the Louise Leiris Gallery– does not even appear registered in those of the Pierre Matisse Gallery conserved in The Morgan Library & Museum of New York. Matisse does not accept in any case to deal with Kahnweiler nor the 25% that Loeb proposes, and insists on sticking to the proposed 50% of the production, with an option for another 25% more. Meanwhile, the painter, who saw the European market sinking and had great difficulty in collecting Loeb's stipend, accepted the 50% proposal, not without noting in a letter dated April 29, 1934 to Pierre Matisse that he had accepted such modest conditions “given the difficulty of these present times and the sacrifices that we shall all have to make, each in his own way, until success comes our way” 32. Pierre Loeb, who was also unable to afford the thousand francs that corresponded to him, finally offered to give Matisse three quarters of Miró's production. Another great advantage that Miró represented for Matisse was his iron discipline, his availability, his reliability and his flexibility to satisfy the needs of his dealer and the market. John Russell recalls how any request from the gallerist was immediately satisfied by the artist: “If Pierre had a client who wanted a painting by Miró with a dog barking at a kite in the sky, Miró was happy to go along” 33. The painter handed over to his dealer the work produced in Matisse’s annual trips to Paris, and in April 1936 spells out all he will carry to their annual meeting: a total of 156 works, adding that he expected to finish another 25 paintings during the summer. 32 33 PMGA. 18.19. Reproduced in Russell 1999, p.114 Russell 1999, p.119 28 2. The flight from revolutionary Catalonia (1936) In the nineteen thirties, Miró’s work underwent a profound transformation that according to the New York Museum of Modern Art “included a partial return to illusionism and the pursuit of what he called ‘aggressiveness’ through color”34. After the series of Dutch interiors and imaginary portraits from 1928-29, the painter had made a group of more than twenty large collages that constitute for him the counterpoint to the previous series. Then he executed between January and May 1930 a series of large paintings with white backgrounds. As from the summer of 1930 he will give his œuvre a new turn, turning to make until 1932 wooden objects combined with painted figures, and that he refused to call sculptures. The sinuous shapes of some of the figures are reminiscent of those of his friend and studio neighbor Jean Arp. In 1933, a year after his forced return to Spain due to lack of resources to live in Paris, the painter began a series of eighteen pairs of collages with geometric figures cut out of magazines and newspapers and paintings based on them in which those figures transform into abstract or biometric shapes painted with a palette absolutely typical of Miró. Then, between August 1933 and June 1934, the painter made another series, this time of collages of kitsch character taken from postcards glued on surreal drawings made on papers of different texture and color. At the beginning of 1934 that series is transformed into pure collages, even adding aluminum foil that produces a mirror effect in part of the work. At the same time he paints large oil paintings on canvas whose style resembles the Constellations gouaches of 1940-41, such as Hirondelle, amour (199 by 247 cm) that Nelson A. Rockefeller acquired in Matisse's gallery and then gave it to MoMA. But his style and themes are going to change radically that same year of 1934. Miró is not calm, he has been uneasy due to the atmosphere reigning in republican Catalonia, and the threats he perceived for his tranquility and that of his people, as well as for the continuity of his main economic sustenance. For Miró, the Montroig estate is not only a sure source of income, but the land on which he has unfolded his roots and which serves as inspiration for its artistic imaginary. In 1928 he had declared to Francesc 34 MoMA press release Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937. New York. Nov. 2, 2008 29 Trabal: “All my work is conceived in Montroig, everything I have done in Paris is conceived in Montroig”35. The estate and farm represented everything for the painter. On April 14, 1931, Francesc Macià, leader of Esquerra Republicana de Cataluña (ERC, Catalan Republican Left), had proclaimed the Catalan State in Barcelona, a move he withdrew a few days later after an agreement with the Republicans of the rest of Spain. Miró, forced for economic reasons to reside in Spain, is completely disinterested in the events that occur in Catalonia, but they do worry him. In the aforementioned letter to his friend, Belgian painter Alice Frey, dated February 11, 1933, he says: “As for my work, I produce non-stop, with faith, and I often make trips to Paris. It goes without saying that Paris is my point of attack, Spain does not count for me anymore and I am not here to do anything other than work”. On the death of Macià in December 1933, Lluís Companys, the founder of the Unió de Rabassaires farm tenants union, went on to lead the party and to preside the Generalitat. On Monday April 14, 1934 Companys promulgates the Law of Cultivation Contracts, which facilitated access to the property for land tenants, bypassing the regime that limited the duration of land rental contracts, thereby weakening the power of the landlords. As we have seen, two weeks later, on Tuesday, April 29, Miró writes to Pierre Matisse asking him to take charge of his work, with the hope of having a secure source of income outside of Spain. But the lobby of the farm landowners was determined to prevent the application of the law, and with the support of the conservative Regionalist League, challenged it before the Spanish Court of Constitutional Guarantees. The court annulled it and this created a confrontation between the republican government in Madrid and ERC, which withdrew its deputies to the Spanish parliament and fomented an insurrection. The Catalan parliament voted again the same law text and on September 30, 1934, the official gazette of the Generalitat published the implementing regulations. On October 5, the Socialists had proclaimed the revolutionary general strike throughout Spain in order to overthrow the government of the republic, composed after de 1933 elections of the monarchist right (CEDA) and the republican center-right (the Republican Radical Party). The Workers' Alliance of Catalonia joined the uprising. The next day, Companys proclaimed once again the Catalan State and asked army units stationed in Catalonia to place themselves at his orders. The captain general of the region, General Domingo Batet, a republican Catalan who in 1936 would be shot for opposing the Franco uprising, refused to obey the order of the Generalitat, and after consulting with the president of the Republican government of Madrid, Barcelona deputy Alejandro Lerroux, proclaimed the state of war. The insurgents deployed their forces and built barricades in the center of Barcelona, but in just a few hours Batet obtained their surrender after some fighting. The violence started when a group of shop assistants began firing at an infantry company and a battery of the artillery regiment while army officers read the state of war proclamation on the Rambla de Santa Mónica, a short walk from Miró's house, resulting in the death of one sergeant and the wounding of seven other soldiers. 35 Trabal, Francesc, Una conversa amb Joan Miró, La Publicitat, Barcelona, July 14,1928. Cited in Minguet Batllori 2000, p. 25 30 In total, there were forty-six deaths in Barcelona, of which thirty-eight were civilians and eight were military, almost all within a perimeter of a few hundred meters from Miró's home (Via Layetana, Plaza de San Jaime, Ramblas). The painter had planned to come to the city to attend the inauguration on October 7th of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia, but the disturbances kept him in Montroig. But in the rest of Spain, especially in Asturias, the attempted socialist coup was much more bloody: between 1500 and 2000 dead, of which about 320 were members of the police or army and about 35 priests. Once the rebel Generalitat was dissolved, the republican authorities annulled the Law of Cultivation Contracts of ERC and almost three thousand eviction lawsuits of 'rabassaires' and sharecroppers were processed 36. The impact of these events, increased by the presentation of them in the press, which treats the rebels of “beasts, monsters and infra-men” 37 leaves a fulminating impact in the work of the conservative, religious and moderate republican that was Miró. As Professor Martín Martín points out, “As the days go by and the crisis situation becomes more and more tangible, Miró feels how his optimism is breaking, and new and homunculous characters are born under the sign of the grotesque” 38. Suddenly, the collages with kitsch images, the hats in homage to Joan Prats and the oil paintings full of poetry give way in Miró's work to the aggressiveness that MoMA speaks of, to the monsters. They are the paper pastels that initiate the so-called savage paintings of 1934-36. For Roland Penrose, they “suddendly spoke of new and terrirying experiences... The biomorphic shapes in pure colour, which had moved in a rhythmic dance in the compositions of 1933, now became solidified into fierce emboduiments of female monsters seen in brilliant colour”. According to the British surrealist and radical, “It becomes obvious from these pastels alone that Miró had been deeply affected by political events over which he had no control and about which he was compelled to unburden his disquiet”39. And the monsters with big heads and sharp fangs appear exactly after the revolutionary general strike and the proclamation of the Calalan State in October 1934. For the right-wing press that Miró read, the revolutionaries were vermin, and even the liberal daily El Sol called for the death penalty “for beasts capable of monstrous events that not even a degenerate is capable of imagining”, a request that was echoed by La Vanguardia in Barcelona40. These savage paintings have been the part of his œuvre that Miró least wanted to talk about. When at the end of the 50s the painter –pushed by Maeght– invited German critic Walter Erben to Majorca, to write a monograph about him like the one he had just published on Chagall, the professor ignores this period, and even goes so far as to say in his 1959 book: “The style of this fresco (The Reaper of 1937) presages the savage paintings to which Miró will consecrate much later” 41. A monumental error. Later, and now incapable of burying the 1934 date anymore, historiography has tried 36 Cárdaba Carrascal, 2001. pp. 43-44 García Fernández 2003. 38 Martín Martín 1982; p.175 39 Penrose 1992 p.p. 77-79 40 La Vanguardia, October 19, 1934, p. 20 41 Erben 1960. p. 138 37 31 to hide the direct link between these paintings and the October revolution. Rosa María Malet, for example, points out when speaking of the savage paintings that “their first manifestation is a series of fifteen large pastels executed in the summer of 1934” 42, that is, between June and September, which excludes any relationship between the proclamation of the Catalan State and the Miró terror. The Miró Foundation is even more imprecise, dating the pastels simply in 1934 43. Even Jacques Dupin, in the 2012 edition of his monumental monograph on Miró insists on dating the pastels in the “summer of 1934” 44. What the members of the Miró clan cannot hide is that, as MoMA pointed out in the 2008 exhibition, Miró himself inscribed on the back of all these pastels a date: "October 1934" and that, this date “makes a direct connection to a particular historical moment... October was a traumatic month for Spain that year. General labor strikes erupted throughout the country, a state of war was declared, and the army was authorized to violently suppress the rebellion... The engorged, luridly colored, and illusionistically modeled anatomies of what he later described as his ‘savage’ pastels signal a rupture with the past that is proportional to the highly charged political situation”45. We can be even more precise than MoMA, noting that the pastels were painted precisely during the days of the revolutionary general strike and the proclamation of the Catalan State and the brief repression that followed. The proof is that just after finishing the paintings, on October 12, Miró writes to Pierre Matisse, who had already confirmed that he would be his exclusive dealer, to announce his sending of the paintings 46. The pastels, dated in Montroig, were therefore painted precisely in the days preceding Friday, October 12. Once the operation of rewriting Miró's biography and creating his myth has been launched, the tale that will explain these paintings will be based not on the events experienced by Miró and Spain in October 1934, but on their 'prophetic character', premonitory of the civil war, implying that they do not reflect the impact of the 1934 revolution on the painter, but his intuition of what was to come. Penrose, who received all the explanations of an already revisionist Miró in 1969, says in his 1970 biography that the savage paintings were “a prophecy of the crescendo of horror that was to begin with the Spanish Civil War two years later” 47. For Joan Punyet Miró, writing in 1993, his grandfather projects in the savage paintings “visionary images of suffering and death, those of the 1936 civil war” 48. Erben himself will correct his 1959 blunder and will register himself, with the help of the painter, as an adept of the prophetic paradigm when quoting Miró in 1989: “I had a 42 Malet 1983, p. 15 http://www.fmirobcn.org/col-leccio/catalogo-obras/21690/personaje (Consulted 9.8.2015) 44 Dupin 2012 p. 185 45 MoMA presents the first major museum exhibition to focus on the transformative decade of joan miró’s work between 1927 and 1937, MoMA Department of Communication, New York, October 27, 2008 Press release announcing the exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937 46 PMGA 18.19, reproduced inRowell 1992 p. 124 47 Penrose 1992, p. 77 48 Punyet Miró.& Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p. 55 43 32 subconscious feeling of disaster threat ... It was more a bodily sensation than an intellectual perception. I sensed a catastrophe, which would happen soon, but I did not know which one: it was the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War...” 49. Domènec Ribot points out in 2010 that from 1934 “his œuvre testifies of a human drama that was to come”. He adds that “his human figures express a certain drama, as if he foreshadowed the terrible misfortunes of the war that was coming” 50. Ribot recalls that in the savage paintings, Miró “creates an atmosphere of anguish” in which “the monsters appear everywhere”, thus reflecting “a terrified world” 51. Professor Boix Pons points out that the savage paintings reflect his profound rejection of the political and social crisis... premonitory of the terrible disasters of the wars that will soon come 52. But the painter himself had previously confirmed the link between the events of the time and the savage paintings, affirming in 1962, before his biography was rewritten, that these paintings “mark the beginning of the cruel and difficult years that the world lived through. They swarm with oppositions, conflicts, contrasts. I call them my ‘savage paintings’. Thinking abour death led me to create monsters that both attracted and repelled me” 53. Miró will also comment in 1978, referring this time to his Still-life with old shoe: “I was conscious of painting something terribly grave ... The composition is realistic because this atmosphere of terror had paralyzed me and I could not paint almost anything” 54. And the death fear of the painter's leads him to paint the whole series of savage paintings, which for Professor Martín, define a common note: “their monstrous appearance and the certainly wild aggression that his persons present... Iconographic characteristics that reflect the inner tension and the anguished state of the author in that bitter period of his life” 55. The question to be elucidated is what produces the terror in Miró, who are the monsters, who the painter fears, and the answer of the historiography has been that what Miró tried in the period 1934-36, and also in the works of 1937-38 in which the same terrifying persons reappear, is simply to denounce the oppression of the peasantry and the rise of fascism. The monsters are therefore the fascists. For Miró's biographers since 1970, the savage paintings are evidence of the painter's antifascist commitment. According to Punyet Miró, before the outbreak of the war, Miró, already “shut away in his farm, joins in thought the republicans and fights with the weapon that is still his: art” 56. Thus, when Miró painted on January 2, 1935 Head of a Man, an oil on cardboard of 104 by 74 cm in which he represents an extremely deformed face, and which is a continuation of the pastels of October 1934, his grandson claims 49 Erben 1989 p. 80 Ribot Martín 2010. p. 126 51 Ribot Martín 2010. p. 128 52 Boix Pons, 2010. p. 128 53 Chevalier, Denys Miró, Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture, Paris, November 1962. Reproduced in Rowell 1992, pp. 262-271 54 Rowell 1992 pp. 290-295 55 Martín Martín 1982. p.175 56 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, p. 57 50 33 that it is “the direct impression felt by the artist in the face of the hunger and fear of the peasants ... a man shouting his anger, as a prelude to the fear and despair that will mark the coming years” 57. As late as 2008, Jacques Dupìn still adhered to the premonition theory. Writing about Miró’s works from late March to early April 1936: “The premonition, the foreshadowing of the Spanish civil war, as well as the horrors of the Nazis and Franco drastically changed his manner of painting and drawing. Fear and cruelty took over his forms and colors. Deformations were pronounced to the point of metamorphosis. Monstrous beings unfurled and blossomed in an exacerbated eroticism […].Miró’s monsters did not come from elsewhere, they were not taken from some distant or legendary mythology, but rather were transmuted excerpts from the close at hand and familiar”58. Terror will continue to dominate the work of Miró in the following two years, in which the differences between right and left are sharpening in Spain and Catalonia and positions are being radicalized until the conflict erupts. The bipolarization that had produced the October revolution had no turning back. The monsters are repeated in his paintings on cardboard of 1935, as Person in the Presence of Nature, of February 1, 1935; Rope and People I, dated March 27; or the monstrous Two Women, of April 13, 1935, all filled with violence and terror. For Professor Martín, these works “are part of a naughty universe where ferocity, deformation and strong chromatic contrasts reign” 59 . But in an example of reinterpretation, his grandson Punyet Miró claims that in Rope and People I, “the symbolism of the painting illustrates both physical and political struggle. The peasant's rope, glued in the middle of the canvas, is like an image of coercion and lack of freedom. Oppression, captivity and repression of ideals....” 60. It seems to us, however, that the rope represents the feeling of oppression Miró felt himself in Catalonia in 1935. That reminded him of an anecdote two years before that 57 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, pp. 55-56 Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Drawings, Paris, 2008, vol. I, p. 11, no. 598 59 Martín Martín 1982. p. 176 60 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, p. 56 58 34 Man Ray will later describe: “We were many visiting Max Ernst's studio. Miró was very taciturn; it was hard to make him talk. A violent discussion arose and we asked Miró to give his opinion. But he was stubbornly silent. Max took a rope, passed it over a wooden beam, made a slipknot and put the rope around Miró's neck, while others tied his hands. Max threatened to hang him if he did not speak. Miró did not resist and continued with his mouth closed. He was delighted to be the subject of so much attention. When he came to pose for me, in an act of perfidy I hung a rope behind him, as an accessory. He did not comment, but the theme of the rope was included in the paintings he painted thereafter.” 61 The chimeras are still present in the following series by Miró, that of small paintings on masonite, made from October 1935. On February 16 and 23, 1936, the last general elections of the Second Spanish Republic were held, won by the Popular Front. In Catalonia, Esquerra Republicana obtained most seats. Unlike in 1933, this time the winners are the revolutionaries. Precisely between the 15th and the 29th, Miró painted –with the colors of the Republican flag– his phantasmagorical Personages Attracted by the Forms of a Mountain, with their monstrously fantastic figures that, no matter how hard James Thrall Soby insists, do not sustain his affirmation that “Miro's mood seems to have been especially joyful at this moment” 62. The series will close at the end of May with the disturbing painting on massonite Personages and Mountains. As Domènec Ribot points out, “if the image of the monstrous had appeared a short time ago, it was now evident in reality itself” 63. The figure of Joan Miró in relation to the Spanish civil war and the Franco dictatorship has been forever engraved in public opinion through the pochoir Aidez l'Espagne and the mural The reaper that decorated the Spanish republic pavilion in The Universal Exhibition of Paris 1937. Miró would have been a Republican militant and a victim of Franco that was forced to exile in Paris by the civil war. James Thrall Soby, even granting that “Among his friends Miro is known for his almost total lack of interest in political matters”, points out that “At the same time, he cannot have failed to have been outraged by the atrocities of General Franco’s Fascist and Nazi allies.64. The ‘republican’ interpretation, now spelled in catalan nationalist terms, reaches its exasperation in a book by U.S. art historian Robin Adèle Greeley, from the Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies of the University of Connecticut and specialized in marxism, ‘post-colonialism’ and Mexican muralists who, after spending some time in Catalonia, funded by the Miró Foundation, published in 2006 ‘Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War’. Greeley presents in this work the contrast between a fascist Dalí, a communist Picasso and a Catalanist Miró immersed in the revolutionary anarchist and Trotskyist currents of Catalonia in the first third of the 20th century. In order to get there, she departs from an assumption: the alleged state of subjugation of the region, “that had become a sort of vice-royalty in which the action of the military authorities went unchecked” 65. Her main source is none other than the 61 Man Ray 1964, p. 224 Soby 1959 p. 80 63 Ribot Martín 2010. p. 131 64 Soby 1959 p.80 65 Greeley 2006, p. 22 62 35 historian of Catalan nationalism Albert Balcells, director of the Història dels Països Catalans. The historian insinuates that if Miró left for Paris in 1920, it is not because he wanted to flee the stinking waters of Barcelona, but as a protest against the rejection by Madrid of the statute of the Catalan Commonwealth of 1919. Next, Greeley pretends that the 1921-22 painting The Farm and the surrealist and lyrical Head of a Catalan Peasant series from 1924-25 constitute Miró's attempt to claim the Catalan identity and promote nationalism in the face of 'Spanish repression'. To back her assertion, Greeley cites as alleged source articles by Josep Carner i Puigoriol, “prince of Catalan poets” and Spanish diplomat in La Veu de Catalunya. This was the newspaper of the conservative Regionalist League, in which wrote, among others Francesc Cambó, Josep María Junoy, Eugenio d'Ors, Josep Pla, Carlos Sentís or Ignasi Agustí, all Catalanists who, at the time of the war, passed in block to the Francoist side. For Greeley, Miró uses his 1920-25 work to materialize the political meaning of his assassination of painting project by incorporating politicized symbols of Catalan identity, particularly representations of the Catalan peasant, whether the object of the painting has to do with Catalonia or if not. The Catalanist sentiment and support for nationalist political movements thus become important parts of Miró's production in the period 66. According to the scholar, during the October Revolution and the riots that followed the proclamation of the Catalan State in 1934 – pompted according to her by the CEDA “extreme right” party’s intention to follow Hitler and Mussolini– Miró, who “like most Spaniards” could barely be informed of the “brutal repression” of the Madrid government, reacted to the imprisonment of “30,000 to 40,000 political prisoners” by collaborating from Paris (Sic) with the Catalan nationalists in a special issue –made by J. Lluis Sert and Joan Prats– of the magazine D'Aci i d'Allà, sending an original gouache, Personnages Devant la Mer (Figures by the Sea) that would by reproduced in pochoir 67, and reproductions of other works of his from the peintures sauvages series. For the author, and despite the fact that, according to her, censorship prevented any direct reference to the issue of Catalan nationalism, there is no doubt that, as “leftist critic” Magì A. Cassanyes wrote, Miró deals in this series of works with “Catalanism and the specific historical moment of crisis that threatened his home 66 Greeley 2006, pp.22-27 Sert will keep the original gouache and will donate in 1964 to the Fogg Art Museum (Object Number: 1964.58) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the museums of Harvard University where he worked between 1953 and 1969. 67 36 country” 68. Actually, D'Aci i d'Allà was a snobby magazine of the Catalan bourgeoisie that tried to imitate Vanity Fair and Vogue; the special issue of the magazine was simply dedicated to Modern Art; Cassanyes was a right-wing critic who, like other friends of Miró, joined the Franco National Movement; and nothing that can support Greeley's thesis appears in this whole issue of the magazine 69. For the historian, Miró's aesthetic reaction to the October revolution (the savage paintings) must be read as “a negative criticism of the Republican government's swing to the right, and to its extreme measures of repression” 70. The singular interpretation by Greeley will not fall on deaf ears, and will be part of the great exhibition of 2011-2012, whose curators, Matthew Gale and Marko Daniel will claim that “the small farmers and tenants of Mont-roig were among the burgeoning classes. Locally inclined towards autonomy, some were politically motivated toward separatism and some, even, towards the communalism and anarchism that had swept through Spain”, adding that in 1917 Miró's portraits “announced a more generic revolutionary allegiance to the manual worker”. They also emphasize that his 'Catalan' paintings from 1923-25 are politically significant in explaining Miró's 'radicalism', given that they repeat “the peasant's red hat, the barretina, associated with liberty”.71 When the civil war breaks out, the monsters disappear. Miró, who is trapped in the Republican zone, does not dare to paint more scarecrows, perhaps to avoid being singled out. The new masonite paintings he creates between July and October in Montroig and Barcelona are abstract compositions whose stillness contrasts with the tension of the previous ones. Miró himself will explain it this way: “When we observe the 'painting' on agglomerate of the summer of 1936, we notice that I was already in an extremely dangerous impasse, and from which I saw no possible way out. The war of July 1936 ensued, which led me to interrupt my work and concentrate on my spirit”72. But for his grandson, the 27 paintings on masonite will constitute his first protest against the uprising of Franco “echo of the struggle of the Spanish people. Miró chooses this construction material because it is that of the peasants ... It is a violent and exacerbated reaction against the rise of fascism”, from which he insinuates Miró has fled, just like “all the politicians, writers and persecuted painters (who) have found in Paris not only a refuge, but a true headquarters to combat fascism” 73. But the paintings that accompany this description in Miro’s grandson book are not the abstract ones of summer, but the savage ones on masonite and copper from February to May, possibly in reaction to the victory of the popular front of which we spoke earlier. The only explanation given at the time of the departure from Spain and the exile in France of the painter appears in an article entitled "Miró and the Spanish Civil War" 68 Greeley 2006, pp. 33-37 D’Aci i d’Allà, número extraordinario Vol. 22, Núm. 179, December 1934. Available online at: http://mdc2.cbuc.cat/cdm/compoundobject/collection/DacidAlla/id/9251/rec/179 (consulted on 04.22.2015) 70 Greeley 2006, p. 43 71 Gale, Matthew & Daniel, Marko 2011, p. 22 72 Cuadernos F.J.M. 4398-4437 1941 73 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, pp. 57-58 69 37 published in the magazine Partisan Review of February 1938 74. The magazine, of leftist ideology, was edited by James Johnson Sweeney and was a publication of limited print run but of wide impact in the North American and even European literary and artistic circles. At the end of the Second World War it was widely financed by the CIA through the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, within a campaign to which we will refer later. The article is of artistic and not political content, but it is commented therein how the painter has been forced to go into exile in France, adding as a complement of information that “we have learned that Miro's brother-in-law has been shot by a fascist firing squad”75. The author of the article was abstract painter George Lovett Kingsland Morris, who often traveled between Paris and the United States. He had also founded the English/French bilingual magazine Plastique in 1937, together with American collector and painter Albert Eugene Gallatin, Jean Arp and Sophie TaueberArp. The information about Miró’s reason to flee Catalonia was not used much more, but the fact is that someone in the painter's circle –or Miró himself– had to provide it. What is more important, it confirmed the painter's 'anti-fascist commitment', while explaining his exile in France in a way that could not but satisfy the intellectual circles which Miró frequented in Paris and also the Americans. In fact, we believe that the source of the information was the painter himself because we have proof that, just after arriving in Paris, Miró went to see the editor of the magazine, Sweeney, an interview he reported in a letter dated November 12 to JV Foix76. Miró also saw in those days Douglas Cooper, who on November 28, 1936 dedicated one of the photos that Man Ray had made, and Albert Eugene Gallatin, who photographed him with the 'savage' masonites of February-May. What happens is that the information of the Partisan Review was false, Miró's brotherin-law was not killed by the Francoists, but by Republican militiamen, as we have learned from a recent study. Miró did not flee from Franco either, but from the horrors suffered in Republican Catalonia, in the firm belief that his life in his beloved Montroig was in danger precisely because of the uprising of peasants, communists and anarchists. The political environment, especially in Catalonia, had considerably deteriorated in 1936. In February, the Front Català d'Esquerres, a Catalan version of the Popular Front composed, among others, by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the Unió de Rabassaires and the Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista, is constituted. And Miró, who fears that family income from the Montroig estate are in danger and is still allowed to go abroad, makes a discreet trip to Paris to prepare the getaway. On February 16 and 23 the general elections are held, which give victory to the Popular Front, which launches a first wave of revolutionary actions, including, of course, the restoration of the controversial land use law –Llei de contractes de conreu– (on March 2), the annulment of the evictions of peasants who had not paid the agricultural rents (March 14) and the principle of review of the rents (April 25). Meanwhile, Miró is still 74 Morris 1938 p. 32-33 Morris 1938, p. 32 76 Epistolari 2009, p. 565 75 38 preparing the flight. In June he travels back to Paris to take the maximum possible of finished works, whose commercialization could allow him to survive when he succeeds in getting his family out. At the end of the month, after going to London for a surrealist exhibition, he returns to Barcelona, where the atmosphere continues to worsen. On July 12th and 13th a republican lieutenant, José Castillo, and the leader of the conservative opposition José Calvo Sotelo are assassinated. This will precipitate the outbreak of the war. Miró and his immediate family take refuge in the Montroig property just as his sister and her husband take refuge in their estate in Vic. As Marciano Cárdaba points out, the outbreak of the revolution –on July 19– led to the reapplication of the law of cultivation contracts. It was thus possible to “put an end to the social and economic privileges of the great landowners. Sometimes they also put an end to their lives”77. Miró's sister and brother-in-law will then be involved in a dramatic episode, of the many that were lived in Spain during the 1936-1939 civil war. The incident was taken out of oblivion thanks to a study by Tona historian Carles Puigferrat78. Even in 2016 an omertà about the incident still reigns in the region in which it occurred. On July 21, a detachment of members of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias that Lluís Companys had just formed, armed with rifles, invade their property. The group leader was sugar industry magnate Josep Suñol i Garriga, who was also ERC deputy to Cortes in Madrid and president of FC Barcelona. They forced entry into rhe manor of Riambau, near Tona, ten kilometers south of Vic, in the Osona region. In that magnificent property had taken refuge landowner Jaume Galobart Sanmartí, his wife Dolores Miró, the painter's only sister, and some servants. Suñol, owner of the newspaper La Rambla in Barcelona, married to a woman from Tona, Gloria Soler Elías, was there at the time of the outbreak of the war. Galobart was possibly Suñol’s main local enemy, not only for political reasons, but most likely for land disputes and also by a lawsuit that came from well back. In 1922, on the death of his first wife Carme Quintanes i Vilarrúbia, Galobart had remained as plenipotentiary administrator of her enormous properties, that would pass to the heir he could have in a future marriage. In the absence of a heir, the inheritance would pass to the Church and beneficence. Galobart wanted to ingratiate himself with the Church and built the first soccer field in the area adjacent to the parish. But once married to María Dolors Miró, the landowner, who then hopes to have offspring, thinks better, closes the soccer field and returned the land to agricultural use 79. Businessman and Catalan soccer patron Josep Suñol and his armed escort communicate to Galobart and his wife that their house has been seized and they are expelled from it, authorizing them to take only some clothes and personal belongings in an improvised bundle made with a bed sheet. Immediately the expropriation of all their properties takes place for the befefit of the union of tenants, decided by the Antifascist Committee of Tona, composed of representatives of the PSUC, UGT, 77 Cárdaba 2001 p. 45 Puigferrat i Oliva 2009 p. 265-296. (Text availableon-line in http://www.centremiro.com/planes/textCartes.php?idioma=es-es (consulted on 10. 14.2014) 79 Garcés i Estalló 2002 pp. 214-215 78 39 CNT, and Unió de Rabassaires. Galobart was indeed a great landowner, including the manors in Riambau, Vila and Bassas in Tona and Quintanes in Masies de Voltregà. The representative of the tenants' union would later confirm that the origin of the expropriation was the arrival on Monday July 20 of Suñol, who personally requested the intervention of the Committee to arrest Miró's brother-in-law. The armed force finds in the farmhouse shotguns and some other weapon –something perfectly normal at the time– and decides to arrest him and impose bail, which Galobart refuses to pay. The republican militiamen then decide the confiscation of all their assets, including land, houses and cars, letting the victims of the expropriation settle in Tona at the home of José Buixaderas, married to a sister of Galobart ('Pepeta') and who worked for him. The family was under house arrest for more than 20 days, although they were without doubt in contact with the Miró family in Montroig. Although Galobart and Buixaderas were warned that it was better for them to escape because their lives were in danger, they did not and stayed in the house, subject to the exactions of the Republicans, which according to Miró's sister included the obligation to pay them 5,000 pesetas in cash and the theft of many valuables from the Riambau manor, including a painting by Joan Miró. Josep Suñol did not have much luck. While Galobart and Buixaderas were still being held in Tona, he was on the 6th of August on a visit to the Guadarrama front in Madrid when his driver passed the militia outposts on the slope of the Puerto de los Leones. In spite of the warnings of the last republican positions, the car continued until crossing into territory controlled by the Franco army, where the vehicle was intercepted. Suñol was immediately identified and shot along with his bodyguard lieutenant of militias and a senior official. It has also been said that he carried over 25,000 pesetas to sign players from Betis, Racing and Oviedo football teams for Barcelona and another 50,000 Ptas. For 'war care' 80. The news will take a week to reach Catalonia. On the evening of Thursday, August 13, that is, exactly when the news of the death of Suñol arrives in Tona, the members of the Antifascist Committee return to the home of José Buixaderas, taking him and Galobart under the pretext that Miró's brother-in-law had to go to another manor on his property to pay the wages of some masons. That same night the driver who was driving them returned, but without the two detainees. They had been sent to Vic, where they were joined by another prisoner, Carlist worker Josep Soldevila Griera, who had been arrested that same afternoon. The three were taken to the slope of Malla, on 80 García Candau 2007 pp. 225-228 40 the road between Vic and Tona, where they are forced to get out of the cars and are riddled with bullets in the gutter. Miró's brother-in-law resists and, although wounded by a bullet in one arm, manages to escape through a dense corn field. Galobart reaches Mas Gurumbau –now a golf club– about 600 meters from the road, where the tenant lets him in and offers a mattress to rest. But the farmer sends his sons to inform the tenants of other farmhouses around that he has in his house, wounded, the great landowner of the county. Shortly afterwards, a large number of militiamen appear in the house, finding the landlord lying on the mattress. They order him to get up and leave the house, but Galobart resists. Finally he accepts to leave and runs, dropping dead three or four meters from the door, victim of the militiamen’s shots. Miró’s sister and Buixadera’s wife Pepita Galobart Sanmartí would be immediately expelled from the village by the Antifascist Militias. The murders of Tona, which take place more than three weeks after the expropriation of the Miró's brother-in-law estates, could have constituted a revenge for the death of Josep Suñol, executed on Thursday, August 6. As indicated by the archives of the football club, the news of the death of the deputy did not arrive in Catalonia until Thursday, August 13 81, hours before the Tona militia kidnapped and killed Galobart. 2015 was declared by the FC Barcelona Sunyol Year, multiplying in Catalonia acts of homage of that national hero of Catalonia, from which the son of the honoree ostensibly distanced himself, as he did not recognize the Catalanization of his surname. After the Events of May 1937, in which the Antifascist Militias are defeated by the government of the republic, the denunciations of relatives of many of the thousands murdered in 1936 led to the opening of some judicial processes. One of them took place in Vic. The identification of the perpetrators of the murders was not difficult, because they had boasted in public of having done so. Five people were therefore arrested quickly. The problem was that three of the defendants were members of the communist PSUC, which together with ERC had been the true winner of the May events. Another was an ERC Catalanist and president of the Tenants Union. The pressures of the two parties are soon felt, and the president of the agrarian union and a PSUC militant were released immediately. Shortly later, and after receiving a delegation from the party in Vic, the Minister of Labor and Public Works of the Generalitat Rafael Vidiella (PSUC ) declares that the last meeting of the Generalidat had agreed that judges could not admit suits “about facts of revolutionary character” nor “when they come from individuals whose flat, house or lands have been 81 See biography of Josep Suñol i Garriga at Barcelona Futball Club site: http://arxiu.fcbarcelona.cat/web/castellano/club/historia/presidents/josepsunyol.html (consulted on 10. 07.2014) 41 confiscated or who can be described as fascists, or who had abandoned their properties themselves”. For the member of the government of the Generalitat, judges must only admit complaints about “individuals who, instead of acting in a revolutionary way, have done so in pursuit of profit”. In any case, two of the three authors of the murders who had been imprisoned were released for good behavior and in March 1938 the Special People's Court No. 1 of Barcelona declared everyone innocent, releasing the last of the murderers of Joan Miró's brother-in-law, the CNT anarchist militant Vicenç Coma Cruells, known as the 'matador of Osona' 82. The episode of the murder of his brother-in-law and the fact of Miró's escape from revolutionary Catalonia are hidden by all the biographers of the painter. As time passes, Miró transits in his revelations to the biographers from a total denial to a partial one. In 1960 Walter Erben claims that in 1940 the painter had been living in Paris “for twenty years” 83. There is therefore no escape from Spain. Penrose argues in 1970 that Miró had not left Paris in 1932 and that in 1936 he was still living there, so there is no escape or move: “In 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out; Miró was not to revisit Spain until 1940”84. It is not until 1977 that Raillard laconically says that in 1936 “He left Spain and settled in Paris with his family”85. And Rosa María Malet points out only in 1983 that “In the autumn of 1936 Miró returns to Paris” 86. Jacques Dupin only says, in 1993, that “Miró is back -in Paris- in November 1936”, without mentioning the reason, but implying that the lack of precision comes from the fact that Miró “has never wanted to talk about the war in Spain, as if by a kind of modesty, or rejection, of events that are both too intimate or too thorny” 87. Finally, in 2003 Lluís Permanyer recognizes the flight saying that “it is not true, as had been said until now, that he was in Paris to finish the works he had to send for the retrospective exhibition of the New York gallery”. He admits that he fled Montroig when he was warned that anarchists “of FAI want to kill you”. And ends up making an indirect reference to the event of Tona claiming that the threat surprised Miró, who explains awkwardly the reason for the persecution as well: “My sister was married to Jaume Galobart, an imbecile of the extreme right. I was at the wedding and a local newspaper had published the guest list, in which I was”. Although Permanyer then clarifies the painter's late life harshness to his brother-in-law, quoting Pilar Juncosa, who describes the person “assassinated by the FAI” (Sic) as follows: “He was a good man, very rich, he had properties and he was very devote, he had his workers pray the rosary” 88. In any case, the 2003 revelation by Permanyer will not find echo in the studies on Miró published since then, and especially in the itinerant 2011-2012 exhibition that 82 Puigferrat i Oliva 2007 p. 213-247 Erben 1960, p.139-140 84 Penrose 1992, p. 85 85 Raillard 1998, p. 275. 86 Malet 1983, p. 15 87 Dupin 2012, p. 207 88 Permanyer 2003, pp. 117-119 83 42 pretended to demonstrate Miró’s political commitment for the republicans against Franco. Curators Matthew Gale and Marko Daniel hide in the essays and chronology of the voluminous catalog of the show both the episode of Tona and the fact that the painter fled republican Catalonia, limiting themselves to stating that “when the masonites were complete, he went to Paris to show them” 89. And the concealment continues in the Catalan collected letters published in 2009 by the Miró Foundation, which states that “Joan Miró had gone to Paris to present, in the Pierre Gallery, his latest works, 27 paintings on masonite, made in Montroig during the summer. On July 18 the Spanish Civil War had broken out and Joan Miró took the decision to stay in France” 90. It goes without saying that the manipulation of historical facts naturally extends to works of dissemination, be they television documentaries, books or pamphlets. Rosa María Malet laconically points out that “In the autumn of 1936 Miró returns to Paris...” 91. And in the mass circulation book Joan Miró, by Susan Hichoch, the flight is again denied, the departure of his wife and daughter being attributed to the fear of Franco's armies, stating that “The military uprisings and the threat of more bloodshed throughout Spain forced his wife and daughter to move with him to Paris in 1936” 92. Still, Joan Miró was not in July 1936 in Paris, but in Spain. He is at the worst moment of his life and does not have the support or solidarity of his Surrealist friends. All without exception are on the side of the most radical elements of the republic. While he is hiding in his farmhouse in Montroig, Benjamin Péret is in Barcelona igniting the fire. In a vibrant letter to André Breton, Péret tells him on August 11, 1936: “If you saw Barcelona as it is today, adorned with barricades, decorated with burnt churches of which only the four walls remain, you would be as ecstatic as I am. It all starts with just crossing the border. The first house that is located in Spanish territory, a large mansion surrounded by a park, has been confiscated by the workers' committee of Puigcerdà. When we arrived in this city we heard a very loud noise: it was a church which the workers, not happy with having burned it, destroyed with a rage and a joy that it was a pleasure to watch. In Catalonia and along the horrible journey with the scrap bus that I took to go from Puigcerdà to Barcelona –that I thought was a fairy walk– you could only see burned churches or without bells. In Barcelona there is no police, the red guard circulates in cars requisitioned by the FAI, the POUM. and the PSUC. Great care must be taken in having everything in order as you risk going to jail where the offender is shot without any kind of process” 93. While the events of Tona happened, Miró, his wife and daughter were hiding in their Montroig property, estimating that the risk of being attacked there by anarchists or peasants was lower than that of falling victims of the chaos and violence in Barcelona Peret refers to. But at the same time Miró makes all the efforts he can to leave Spain. In reality, the revolutionary events take place in Montroig with a surprising parallelism 89 Gale, Matthew & Daniel, Marko The Tipping Point : 1934-9, in Gale & Daniel 2011, p. 85 Epistolari 2009, p. 565 91 Malet 1983, p. 15 92 Hichoch 2005, p. 32 93 Reproduced in Courtot, Claude Introduction à la lecture de Benjamin Péret. Le terrain vague, Paris 1965 pp. 27-31. (consulted on 05. 16.2014) 90 43 with respect to those of Vic, distant almost 200 km: on those same days, while Miró's sister and brother-in-law are under house arrest, on July 23 a group of Montroig anarchists burned the village's old church. On the 27th the same militiamen went up to the Ermita de la Mare de Deu de la Roca and took out all the images, chairs, benches and the image of the Virgin which had escaped the looting of the French troops in 1811, and made with all a bonfire in the square. And on August 13, the same day that Galobart is killed in Vic, the militiamen murdered nine conservative people of Montroig 94. Miró is terrified. The victims of the militia’s paseo (promenade) murders in Montroig were possibly close to the Miró family, from which it is possible to deduce the feeling of fear that the painter felt. In the Baix Camp district of Tarragona, 203 people (3.6% of the population) were murdered in the first days of the war, of which 70% were clergymen, merchants, industrialists, professionals or farmers. It was precisely in Tarragona that Pope Francis promoted in October 2013 the most numerous beatification in the history of the Catholic Church, where 522 Spaniards were proclaimed ‘beatos’ (blessed), officially considered “martyrs of religious persecution in the twentieth century in Spain”. Of the more than two hundred murdered in the Baix Camp county, the number of victims in Montroig was eight 95. Josep Miquel Martí Rom points out however that there are nine murdered, giving the name of each of them: the priests Ramón Artiga Aragonés and Pere Rofes Llauradó, Francesc Brú Aragonés, Joaquim González Aragonés, Laureà Jove Rai, Enric Puñet Barceló, Miquel Gassó Ferratjes and Francesc Gassó Domingo 96. The latter, 52 years old, was an landowner member of the CEDA party and founder of the Agricultural Union of Montroig (employers) 97. Miró had shown interested in the union of agricultural owners of Gassó, and in a letter of August 31, 1919 to Enric Ricart, he said: “I was hoping to send you the regulations of the Montroig Agricultural Union. As they do not have in printed form, the secretary has offered to make me an extract of the regulation. When I have it, I'll send it to you” 98. He had to send the document immediately, since two weeks later he wrote again to his friend and began the letter saying “It was easy to get a copy of the Union Regulations. We made it between my father and me. I dictated the text from the original and my father wrote it”99. 94 Martí Rom 2010, p. 7 The events in Montroig are described in Martí Rom 2006. p. 10. Villarroya i Font 1988. pp. 433-434. Available on-line in http://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/handle/2445/35535 96 Martí Rom 2006. 97 Martí Rom 2010. 98 Epistolari 2009 pp. 139-140. 99 Epistolari 2009, pp. 141-142. 95 44 The new Republican masters of Montroig installed themselves in the main buildings and set up road controls. In spite of everything that happened, an elderly Miró, but deeply immersed in his own myth, will pretend in statements to Permanyer that once the farm was occupied and he fled to France, “my mother stayed in Montroig, where she lived with the militiamen, which seemed to her original and even good-natured”100. In Miró’s Manor there was a cohabitation between the militiamen who occupied it since August, the Miró family –his mother and sister took refuge in it after the murder of Galobart– and the ‘masoveros’ (tenants/guards), the Calaf family, who took care that the Miros did not lack food 101. The painter has only one idea in his head: to escape from revolutionary terror and go into exile with his family. The problem is that in order to do so he required permits and help, either from the revolutionaries or from the authorities of the Generalitat, the two poles of power in republican Catalonia. Among the revolutionaries he could ask Benjamin Péret, whom he sees in Barcelona without obtaining help. The gap between the Surrealists and Miró had been accentuated by the Spanish Civil War and is already insurmountable. But in Barcelona all the persecuted or potential victims of the revolutionaries know that there is a Scarlet Pimpernel who helps save the lives of innocent right-wingers and provides safe-conducts for them to escape from the country. According to the government of the Generalitat in 2014, the secret campaign benefited 9,206 people, who were able to escape from republican Catalonia, including the Cardinal and Archbishop of Tarragona Francisco Vidal y Barraquer. A key piece in this antirevolutionary conspiracy is the poet Ventura Gassol, co-founder of Esquerra Republicana, who is at that time Minister of Culture of the Generalitat and number two of Lluis Companys. Gassol was native to La Selva del Campo, a town in Tarragona located 28 km from Montroig. Miró, as soon as he learns of the detention of his brother-in-law, undoubtedly establishes contact with the Minister of Culture, either directly or through Joan Prats. In fact Ventura Gassol was very well informed of the events in Vic, because on July 22 he had presided over an emergency meeting in his office, where the burning of the cathedral had been discussed. Two days later, the Generalitat decreed the seizure of all the artistic and religious heritage of Catalonia, formally to prevent its destruction and looting. One of the main promoters of the initiative, and participant in the meeting of July 22 was architect José María Gudiol i Ricart, a native of Vic, whom Miró will ask years later to help him bring the Constellations to the United States. Under the authority of Gassol,, Gudiol tries to extinguish the fire of the cathedral, but the Antifascist Committee of Vic does not accept the authority of the Minister of Culture. Gudiol leaves the cathedral in flames, concentrates in extinguishing the fire of the museum, and leaves immediately for Barcelona, where he obtains that Gassol send a detachment of militiamen. But when they arrive in Vic they joined those who were looting and burning the cathedral 102. 100 Permanyer 2003, p. 119 Juncosa Vecchierini 2011, pp. 44-46 102 Cañameras Vall 2013 p.90 101 45 Miró’s escape aim is difficult to achieve, because it involves not only the physical exit of several people from Spain, but the exfiltration of voluminous works of art and the transfer abroad of the maximum amount of money possible from the family assets. On September 28, Miró leaves Montroig and goes to Barcelona to finalize his escape plan, most likely through Gassol,. He uses as a pretext the need to send his paintings to his dealer in the United States, but he does not obtain the necessary permission. Things are getting difficult for Gassol, who under a dead threat himself, is forced to flee to France on October 23, 1936. The decree of Collectivizations and Workers Control of Catalonia is approved the next day, and Miró knows it will affect to the manor and estate in Montroig and possibly the building owned by the family in the Pasaje del Crédito in Barcelona. The decree required the collectivization of large agricultural properties and compulsory unionization of small farmers. A new decree of the Generalitat prohibits the payment of any rent or lease to landowners. And the members of the Union of Rabassaires in Montroig set to burn the parish and town hall registers and occupy the estate of the Miró family. On October 28, five days after the decree of collectivization was published, Miró flees to Paris, leaving hundreds of paintings in Barcelona. The flight was undoubtedly carried out with the help of the he Propaganda Ministry of the Generalitat that head minister Josep Tarradellas had created on October 3, placing it under the command of writer and ERC leader Jaume Miravitlles Navarra, friend of Dalí and Buñuel whom Miró had undoubtedly met during the writer's exile in France between 1925 and 1930. Miravitlles had been General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Antifascist Militias and their press chief, implying a certain ascendancy over the most radical revolutionaries. The CCAM was composed of five members from CNT-FAI, three from ERC and UGT and one from PSUC, Unió de Rabassaires, POUM and Acció Catalana. Although Miravitlles always approached the subject with discretion, he did have an important role in the exfiltration of clergymen, intellectuals and other persecuted persons 103. When alluding to the reason why he helped soprano Conchita Badía to flee from republican Catalonia, Miravitlles himself explained: “She could do more for us outside than inside”104. In any case, Miravitlles could never speak of his help to the painter, because according to the official myth Miró had never fled Catalonia, but was 'already in Paris' when the war broke out. We can not forget either that in those days, the main preocupation of Miravitlles was the international concern over the excesses of the Catalan revolutionaries and the destruction and plundering of the artistic heritage of the church. In response to that concern, Miravitlles, which had organized a propaganda campaign, orchestrated in France by Christian Zervos , focused on counteracting the impact of the scandal. Within the campaign, which we will describe later, many friends of Miró visited Barcelona, among them the Zervos, Roland Penrose, David Gascoyne and Luis Fernández. The main local contacts of the Zervos group were Joan Prats and Gudiol. They no doubt interceded also on behalf of the painter before Miravitlles. 103 Batalla i Galimany 2010 pp. 425-431 Miravitlles, Jaume Homes i dones a la meva vida Edicions Destino, Barcelona 1982, p. 60. Cited in Batalla i Galimany 2010, p. 428. 104 46 As soon as he arrived in Paris, Miró continued his efforts to get his family out of Republican Catalonia, again through the Miravitlles Ministry. The government agency had its own infrastructure in Paris and began to carry out propaganda work. On Thursday, November 19, Miró has everything ready and writes to Joan Prats from Paris saying: “I would appreciate it if you tell Pilar that I insist on doing what I have asked for, which is extremely convenient, and that on Monday 23rd at exactly three thirty she must be with the girl in the Propaganda Ministry of the Generalitat of Catalonia –Diagonal 442. I will phone her from the Delegation of the Generalitat here” 105 . Miró will try later in his life to hide the intervention of the Propaganda Commissioner, arguing that if Pilar and María Dolors, “who could not obtain a passport and I could not help”, managed to escape was because “Pilar, since she knew the office where one had to ask for help at the Paseo de Gracia, decided to meet an anarchist named Corxet and explain the case to him”106. Pilar and Dolors finally got away from Catalonia with the help of Miravitlles and joined Miró in Paris on December 16th. The painter’s mother and sister, who had stayed in Spain, took refuge in the Mas Miró. And in 1938 Miró will try to take them out of republican Catalonia, entrusting the negotiations to Joan Prats. But the operation could not be carried out, both because his friend has not secured the safe conduct, and because Maria Dolors, already engaged to builder Lluís G. Ylla i Cassany and focused on recovering the fortune of her late husband, prefers not to flee, as such a move would compromise those efforts 107. For their liberation they must still wait a few months until, at the beginning of January 1939, Franco's troops enter Montroig and return the estate to its owners. The Pimpernel that helped Miró and his family escape from republican Spain will soon pass the bill, but the painter will pay in kind and this will not bother him at all, although this will give rise to some difficulties years later when he returned to Franco’s Spain. The price that Miró will have to pay will be three paintings. In Mironian historiography, including Dupin himself 108, it has always been said that the now famous pochoir Aidez l'Espagne is the second commission he receives from the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the first being The Reaper. But it is incorrect. Actually, the gouache design is Miravitlles' first order and it is placed in the wake of his family’s arrival to Paris after their exfiltration from Catalonia. In fact, on March 7, 1937, Miró writes to Pierre Matisse to tell him: “I am enclosing a photo of a design I made for a stamp that is supposed to be printed to give a little aid to poor unfortunate Spain”109. One month and a half later, on April 25, Miró again refers to the gouache in a letter: “The stamp has still not been printed”. And it is precisely this letter in which the painter informs the dealer that he has just offered to decorate the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 exhibition 110. 105 Epistolari 2009 p. 567 Permanyer 2003, p. 119 107 Juncosa Vecchierini 2011, p. 47 108 Dupin 2012 p. 458 109 PMGA 18.22. Reproduced in Rowell 1992, p. 148 110 PMGA 18.22. Reproduced in Rowell 1992, p. 157 106 47 The origin of the initiative to print the stamp Aidez l'Espagne has to be found both in the Parisian representation of the Propaganda Commission and in Christian Zervos himself, and the reason is pecuniary as well as political. As is well known, in 1936 there had been a widespread occurrence in many places in Spain, but especially in Catalonia, of the burning, destruction and looting of an important part of the artistic heritage of the Catholic Church. As will happen at the beginning of the 21st century with the destruction of works of art by Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, Mali, Iraq, Syria, etc., the events caused great consternation throughout the world in 1936, and many institutions sent delegations to Spain to assess the extent of the disaster. As we have seen, Ventura Gassol, was already mobilized since July. As a result of his action and the contacts he had in France, a Committee for the Safeguarding of the Catalan artistic heritage was set up in Paris, Christian and Yvonne Zervos immediately taking control of it. It is through this initiative that painter Luis Fernández, very close to Zervos , stays in Catalonia between August and December. The Generalitat realized the potentially disastrous consequences that the information circulating in Europe could have for the prestige of the Republican and Catalanist causes, and as soon as Jaume Miravitlles took over as Commissioner for propaganda, he launched with Joan Prats’s help a campaign that will bring various personalities to Barcelona, especially from the artistic world, to try and show the world that the Generalitat was not responsible for the excesses, but was in fact doing everything it could to save the artistic heritage. Miravitlles decided to pull the boat out and announces to Christian Zervos that there is no budget limit. The editor rubs his hands, because his finances had been dry for years: in 1934 he had been forced to sell his art collection at an auction to avoid the bankruptcy of his publishing house Cahiers d'Art. Zervos sets off and prepares a large exhibition in Paris with works taken from the churches and transported to France with the help of Joan Prats, an initiative that will cost Prats a few months in jail once the war was over. This exhibition would then move to London. The industrious Zervos also offers to publish, at the expense of the Generalitat, books in several languages defending the action of the Catalan government and denying veracity to all the information that had circulated. And he also suggests that funds can be collected through initiatives such as Miró's stamp. Miravitlles is responsible for bringing to Catalonia people like David Gascoyne and Roland Penrose –accompanied by his wife Valentine Boué– providing them with travel, accommodation, safe conduct and all the support they need. The mission of Penrose is clearly explained in a letter of presentation that is delivered to him in Barcelona, dated on October 28, 1936 and signed “Jaume Miravitlles, Propaganda Commissioner, Generalitat de Catalunya”: “whose mission is to make a graphic record of the social and economic reality in factories, workshops, etc. so as to carry out propaganda actions in our favor through an upcoming exhibition in London ... and to emphasize the noble constructive spirit of our revolution”111. It was about inverting the equation and presenting the Generalitat not as guilty of the destruction of the artistic heritage but as its defender against the 111 The Roland Penrose Papers, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Escocia. Reproduced in press release for exhibition Lee Miller, Picasso in Private, organized by the Instituto de Cultura del Ayuntamiento de Barcelona (June 1st to a 16th September 2007), pp. 31-32. 48 “fascist enemy of culture”. Despite the fact that the destruction and pillage came from the revolutionary side, Professor Robin Adèle Greeley states that “Exhibitions of Catalan medieval art held outside Spain were advertised as upholding art against the fascist threat to destroy all culture” 112. Christian Zervos gets down to work. During his trip to Catalonia, paid for by the Propaganda Commission, and of which photographic testimonies are available113, and with the help of Joan Prats, prepares the expedition of antiquities to France, ostensibly to organize an exhibition that will coordinate Ventura Gassol, and will take place in the Jeu de Paume museum in MarchApril 1937 with the title L'art catalan à Paris. Zervos will publicize the event with an article published in the latest issue of Cahiers d'Art of 1936 114. The exhibition was then taken to the Château de Maisons-Lafitte, on the outskirts of Paris. Zervos meets in Barcelona Gudiol, who hands him the manuscript of a short book on the evolution of Catalan art. Zervos then offers Miravitlles to publish several editions of this text, illustrated with photos by him and accompanied by a preface also by him and statements defending the attitude and results obtained by the Generalitat by intellectuals who were part of the mission115. It was said at the end of the war that Miravitlles paid Zervos for the book the amount of 300,000 francs (more than $ 270,000 of 2018) 116. Three editions of the profusely illustrated book were published: the first in french 117 with a big print run and propaganda statements by Zervos and Penrose; another one in English with the same content and a larger print run as it was destined to the British and U.S. markets 118 and a third one in German, this one without propaganda texts, since it was to be distributed in Nazi Germany. Only 2.000 copies of this last edition were printed. 119 112 Greeley 2006, p. 42 In some, one can see Yvonne Zervos and Joan Prats removing the Tapiz de la Creación from Gerona cathedral. 114 Zervos 1937, pp. 213-256 115 Cañameras 2013, p. 202 116 Utrillo Vidal, Miguel. «Fantasmones rojos. Un falso gotiesta: Josep Gudiol». Solidaridad Nacional 8 de novembre de 1939. 117 L’art de la Catalogne de la seconde moitié du neuvième siècle à la fin du quinzième siècle Editions "Cahiers d'Art", Paris, 1937 118 Catalan Art from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Centuries, William Heinemann Ltd, London & Toronto, 1937 119 Die Kunst Kataloniens Baukunst - Plastik - Malerei vom 10. bis zum 15. Jahrhunder, Schroll, Viena 1937 113 49 While this propaganda offensive was developing, the smuggling of works of art stolen from the churches was flourishing. The pieces reached collectors from all over Europe, and especially from the United States. As Rebeca Saavedra points out, “during the Spanish Civil War there was a considerable increase in the illegal traffic of works of art and antiquities ... the plundering of ecclesiastical buildings and the uncontrolled seizure of property was a constant that allowed many individuals and, fundamentally, the workers' committees and militias to take control of a great amount of artistic objects that out of all regulated control ended up in the black market” 120. This contraband for the global black market, similar to that at the beginning of the 21st century with works stolen in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, had its epicenter in Catalonia, not only because of the border with France, but also because it was in this Spanish region where there were more assaults on churches and because the committees and militias that led the plunder were precisely those in charge of public order. And in August 1936, a delegation of three senior officials from the Fourth International arrived in Catalonia, led by Benjamin Péret, who ends one of his letters to French surrealist patron André Breton with a request to seek ways to place stolen goods. “On the other hand, could you take care of selling old church objects of precious metals (obviously for the benefit of the revolution!) and give me an answer by answering urgently yes or no ?” In that same letter he had informed Breton of his frustration at the 'gentrification' of Communists, anarchists and Trotskyists 121. This plundering attitude was not shared by all the members of the Surrealist group, which even supporting the republican forces in Spain, starts to split in those years between those who are aligned with the more radical movements like Benjamin Péret, André Breton and Georges Bataille and the most pragmatic ones, like Paul Éluard and Michel Leiris who get closer to the communist party. The Miró devotee of Romanesque art can not but accept to participate in a project led by the man that has just exfiltrated him and his family from the revolution in Catalonia and that is coordinated by his friend Prats. Miró also sees with sympathy the initiative to recover the goods stolen by the militias that murdered his brother-in-law and forced him into exile. He thus accepted the invitation of Zervos to make a drawing that would be reproduced in a stamp of 1 Franc to benefit the campaign of recovery of the plundered goods. Finally, the seal was not made and Zervos converted the gouache that Miró had made and that represented a Catalan militiaman with a barretina hat that raises his arm with his fist held high, into a small pochoir printed on the right side of an insert of 31 by 49 cm in Cahiers d’Art. To serve the purpose of propaganda sought by the Generalitat, which financed the entire operation, Miró had to transcribe in his own handwriting at the base of the drawing the text: “In the current struggle I see, on the Fascist side, obsolete forces, and on the other, the people, whose immense creative resources will give Spain an impulse that will amaze the world”. The text was inspired by the proclamation that Louis Aragon had just published in the magazine Europe, in 120 Saavedra Arias 2012.p. 29. and Álvarez Lopera 1984 pp. 533-593. Letter to André Breton dated 09.05.1936 Availableble on-line http://www.fundanin.org/peret2.htm (consulted on 05. 19.2014) 121 50 which he asked French intellectuals to mobilize in favor of the Spanish Republic 122. But, as much as Miró said in a letter to Joan Prats that the pochoir was accompanied by “some statements that I wrote to the margin and that seem very strong to me”123, we believe that the text could have been written by Zervos instead of Miró and that the words did not come from the painter, as they were in contradiction with his most intimate convictions. Miró had expressed his position on the conflict as soon as he arrived in Paris in an interview with art historian Georges Duthuit, (Henri Matisse's son-in-law) for the last issue of Cahiers d'Art of 1936. The critic wanted to obtain a statement from the painter in support of the republic in the Spanish civil war. But Miró, who has just deserted the republican zone, still has in his mind the horror he has suffered and does not allow himself to be pigeonholed in the republican side. The interview begins in fact with a striking statement by the painter: “Our generation lacks heroism and a deeply revolutionary spirit”. Duthuit, who supported the revolution in Catalonia like most Surrealists, then avails himself of the opportunity to tell him: “But it seems to me that in Spain, however ...” Miró does not let him finish, declaring dryly: “I limit myself exclusively to the domain of painting”. But Duthuit, does not let him slip away, pressuring him to pronounce his support for the Republican cause. Miró refuses, adding that “one must resist in all societies, even those that have not yet been born, if they try to impose their demands on us. The word freedom also has a meaning for me, and I will defend it at all costs”. The painter does not want to enlist in any of the two revolutions underway, the conservative or the proletarian, and lashes out in the interview against intellectuals, who have positioned themselves in their vast majority on the side of the revolution that has horrified the painter: “Academics are not as dangerous as intellectuals. Intellectuals are among the worst enemies of man. They should be treated as criminals and punished accordingly”. Miró does not leave politicians aside in his tirade of both sides when he adds: “Current leaders, bastard products of politics and the arts that claim to be regenerating the world, are going to poison our last sources of renewal. While they speak of nobility and tradition or, on the contrary, of the revolution and the proletarian paradise, we see how their stomachs are inflated and how the fat invades their souls”. Duthuit , presses again him, asking him “How can you be totally indifferent to the fate of your painting. How can you be so carefree and ignorant about who adopts it and what is done with it?” To which the painter replies: “You have asked yourself: Where to go? Who can you join? If historical events are strong enough, we follow them without knowing it. Joining one position or the other would be acting in a sloppy way” 124. The painter refuses to give his support to what at that time represented the Spanish Republic for the readers of Cahiers d'Art, that is the proletarian revolution. But this does not prevent those who have managed to get him out of the country to ask him for a first favor and for him to accede. 122 Aragon, Louis Ne rêvez plus qu’à l’Espagne ! Europe, XLII , n° 167 November 15 1936, pp. 353-361 123 Epistolari 2009, p. 584 124 Duthuit 1936. 51 The historiography has opposed to this statement Miró's response to a survey conducted three years later, also for Cahiers d'Art. The poll launched by Zervos, and to which Braque, Laurens, Léger, Masson and Miró responded, was aimed at obtaining militant statements denouncing fascism and aligning with the left. But in the case of Miró it fails again, as the painter solidly affirms that “One must not confuse the commitments proposed to the artist by professional politicians and other specialists of agitation with the deep necessity that makes him take part in social upheavals”. According to Miró, “In order to discover a livable world –how much rottennes must be swept away ! If we do not attempt to discover the religious essence, the magic sense of things, we will do no more than add new sources of degradation to those already offered to the people today, which are beyond number... To offer the masses no more than material satisfactions is to annihilate our last hope, our last chance of salvation” 125 . Definitely, this is not what Zervos wanted to obtain from his survey. Miró's intention to discover the magical side of things, the religious essence, will be captured by the painter immediately afterwards in his Constellations series, which also fulfill the role of burying the monsters that had invaded his work in the previous five years, dissolving them in a magical and powerful tangle filtered by the light that crosses the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of Palma de Majorca. The pochoir Aidez l'Espagne was inserted in No 4-5 of the magazine Cahiers d'Art of the summer of 1937 dedicated –it could not be otherwise in the case of Zervos, the cataloger of Picasso– to Guernica, that the artist had painted for the international exhibition. But it seems that the always calculating Zervos also made an unspecified number of additional copies of the insert, some of which have ended up in museums and private collections signed –belatedly– by Miró. The second work that will be delivered in payment for the service provided by the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat will be a canvas to which reference will be made in a letter to Joan Prats of March 27, 1937 126, in which he asks his friend to hand a photo of it to Jaume Miravitlles. And the third service that he will provide for the Commission was the mural for the Spanish pavilion of the "Exposition internationale des Arts et des Techniques appliqués à la Vie moderne", which would open on July 12, 1937. The work, The Reaper , is among those that best convey an image of tragedy in Miró's pictorial work. It represents as the pochoir a peasant, with the barretina hat and a sickle in his hand. He has a disproportionate head with its mouth wide open, showing fangs like knives. The rewriting of his biography and the construction of Miró’s national myth in Catalonia had at their base the images of The Reaper and the pochoir Aidez l'Espagne, turning them into the foundation of the theory of his republicanism, Catalanism and anti-Francoism. Miró could not refuse to carry out this second assignment, not only because he owed it to the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat that took him and his family out of Catalonia. But especially because it was a commission for a large mural (5.5 by 3.65 meters) that would be, in his view, the counterpoint to Picasso's Guernica (3.5 by 7.65 125 Réponse de Miro, Cahiers d’Art nº 1-4, Paris 1939 p. 73. Reproduced in Rowell 1992 p. 166 126 Epistolari 2009, p. 571 52 meters). At last –he believed– he was going to be placed on an equal footing with the great master, at the summit of painting. Upon receiving the order, on April 25, the painter writes to Pierre Matisse: “The Spanish government has just commissioned me to decorate the Spanish pavillion at the 1937 Exposition. Only Picasso and I have been asked; he will decorate a wall 7 meters long; mine measures 6. That’s a big job! Once the Exposition is over, this painting can be taken off the wall and will belong to us”127. Miró struts or has not been well informed: in fact the commission also included Calder's Mercury fountain, a large sculpture twelve meters high by Alberto Sánchez, two more sculptures by Picasso and another by Julio González, as well as other paintings from different artists. Besides, Miró makes clear before carrying out the work that the mural will only be lent to the Propaganda Commission and that it will belong to him once the exhibition is over, while it has been said since the 70s that The Reaper had been “Donated in an impulse of generosity to the republican government”128. Poet Juan Larrea, victim of the extraordinary exaltation that the revolution in Catalonia had caused among the left-wing intellectuals of the time –precisely those Miró denounces and asks them to be treated as criminals– sees in the horrible Catalan monster/peasant of Miró an explosion of happiness: “In vain those who have eyes not to see will be taken, in front of Miró's painting, to interpret as a deficient caricature what is nothing but an access of happiness, expressed in pictorial terms, of the new dawn. Happiness, happiness...”129. Perhaps, when talking about the critics of the mural, Larrea referred to Josep Renau, general director of Fine Arts of the republic, responsible for the pavilion –together with Luis Lacasa and Sert– and author of the essay Función Social del Cartel publicitario (Social Function of the Advertising Poster) 130. Renau could not under any circumstances find satisfactory a mural in which pretending to portray a peasant in rebellion, the image was a monster of sharp fangs like the ones he drew representing the fascist enemy in the posters he made. In a work with a propagandistic purpose, the monster is the enemy, like the snake of Renau's poster “Campesino: defiende con las armas al gobierno que te dio la tierra”. These same monsters, representing the enemy, populate the works of other magnificent republican poster designers, such as Manuel Monleón (Columna Iberia, CNT Comité Nacional A.I.T., Partido Sindicalista), Sanz Miralles (Hay que dar el golpe definitivo), Pepe Bardasano (Aplasta al Fascismo), Ramón Puyol (El acaparador, El bulista), Eleuterio Bausset (Columna de Hierro, Aprieta Fuerte, compañero). And the same Miró monsters populated the propaganda posters on the national side or the Nazis during the Second World War (Strijdt met ons mede!), always to portray the enemy. As Cirlot points out, the The Reaper mural is an example of how “on occasion, the substantial violence of Miro is declared in the thematic and arises in sadistic shapes” 131. 127 PMGA 18.22. Rowell 1992, p. 157 Punyet Miró y Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, p.61 129 Larrea 1937, p. 157 130 Renau 1937 131 Cirlot 1949 p. 42 128 53 In the interpretation made by Mironian historiography since 1970 of the series of savage paintings, and especially The Reaper, we can observe a curious phenomenon. There are three factors that should be addressed in these works: their violence, brutality and monstrosity; the mood of the painter when making them; and the supposed or real political interpretation and intentionality. Of the three elements, the one that has triumphed and has imposed on the others has been the third, often undermining the analysis that should have imposed the consideration of the other two factors and always based on an assumption, that is, that Miró aims to praise, not denigrate, Catalan revolutionaries. As explained by the painter's grandson, who ignores the brutality and the mood to concentrate on settling the Catalan paradigm, The Reaper is “a Catalan peasant who rebels, with both arms raised and holding a sickle ... A sickle and not a gun. For Miró, war is a struggle for freedom and tradition, expressed here in the ties with the land” 132. Miró himself will pretend in his old age that “I chose this character, with a blue star projecting on the surface, because the peasant, with a large sickle. is a great symbol of Catalonia, a character that draws its roots deeper into the earth, materializing with her”133. Robin Adèle Greeley, whose curious theories we referred to earlier, interprets, of course, The Reaper through the prism of Catalan nationalism. For her, the leap from the aesthetic approach of nationalism (aesthetics-nationalism equation) that she claims to see in his series of the twenties, to the violence of his works made during the civil war (The Reaper, Aidez l'Espagne, etc.) is explained by Miró’s will to align himself with the anarchist and Trotskyist extreme left, repressed even by the republic. This means the alignment of Miró with the postulates defended by Benjamin Péret in the letter of September 1936. According to Greeley, to do so the painter chooses a huge image of Catalan nationalism for the Spanish pavilion of 1937. And he chooses a peasant to signal his support for the movements of the left of the republican side, precisely when the republic itself and the Generalitat, not Franco, “has banned peasant organizations, has disarmed revolutionary peasants and social policies on land reform and rural labor conditions have failed”. According to Greeley, always under the protection of historian of Catalan nationalism Albert Balcells, “The Reaper’s hands raised in defiance and holding the catalanist symbol of the sickle signal the aggresive stand of a Catalan fighter defending his land”134. In view of what he had experienced only a few months before, Miró does not seem the most suitable person to represent the demands of anarchists and sharecroppers. 132 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, pp. 60-61 Martín Martín 1982; p. 173 134 Greeley 2006, p. 41 133 54 French art critics, under Maeght's pay, have been forced to assume –with greater or lesser emphasis– the Catalan nationalist paradigm of the Miró establishment, aided by the new leftists who proliferated in the rest of Spain in the 70s and who welcomed the celebrated Miró to the large group of alleged resistants to the Franco regime. But unlike the Catalans, they do not fail to underline that the aesthetic is violent and brutal, and they often refer to Miró's depressed mood throughout the period. Jacques Dupin, for example, reproduces the idea that has reached us today that the work represents Miró's rebellion “and his solidarity with his people in torment, The Reaper is again the Catalan peasant who rebels” 135. But he does not fail to point out that in reality, "the head is that of Miró’s monsters, with his wild eye, the double promontory in the form of a nose mallet and the barretina, his heavy prominent jaw and his three aggressive fangs” 136. Dupin can not ignore that, as Fernando Martín Martín points out, The Reaper is “the most tragic work of all that Miró has done in his copious production”137. This University of Seville professor included, in his paper on the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Exposition, one of the most detailed and complete descriptions of this work by Miró, and he had the help of the painter to decipher it. With his authorization, we will cite his work extensively: “What doing the ‘Payés catalán en rebeldía’ (Catalan farmer in rebellion, the name given to The Reaper in Catalonia) implied and signified has been revealed to us by Miró himself, with terrible words “the execution of this work was direct and brutal. A deformed and gigantic profile head capped with a barretina, emerges from the earth with extraordinary violence, brandishing in one of the hands of his outsize arms a defiant sickle. The environment is apocalyptic, a chaotic sky dominated by a fluctuating star, seems to serve as a counterpoint to a firmament in decomposition...”138. "Another very characteristic feature is the disproportionate and deformed head of The Reaper, whose cry of protest makes us appreciate some incisors teeth similar to dagger points. This aggressive symbol has many examples. Iconographically there is a precedent whose resemblance to 'The Reaper' is very cose, not only in the detail of the teeth, ... 'Two Personages' 1935 139 ... The head, like that of the peasant, is seen in profile, the chin is dislocated, the mouth open and dangerous, being topped by a prominent nose in the shape of a horizontal trunk. " "The first common note that 'The Reaper' has with his 'savage companions' is that extreme aggression in attitudes. Some of these characters are characterized by being in excitement, as if they were prisoners of a frantic diabolic dance that infuriates them and at the same time confronts them. For example The Two Philosophers or Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement. The Reaper in his irascible gesture raises his arms, long, filiform, like enveloping seaweed. This same gesticulation of arms in a clamoring attitude we 135 Dupin 2012, p. 214 Dupin 2012, p. 216 137 Martín Martín 1982. p.175 138 Martín Martín 1982. p. 177 139 Oil, enamel, nails, ball bearings, cheesecloth, string, and sand on cardboard, The Kreeger Museum, Washington DC 136 55 appreciate in works like 'Head of a woman' or in the main figure of Decoration of a Nursery”140. Interesting observation this one, because it includes in the analysis a hardly known painting of Miró and that usually is not included among his savage paintings. Perhaps because of difficulties of identification, since the canvas has been known by different names: Decoration of a Nursery, simply Nursery or Woman Haunted by the Passage of the Bird-Dragonfly Omen of Bad News. The painting was a gift from the painter to the children of Pierre and Teeny Matisse: Paul, Jacqueline and Peter. And one can not help but wonder how could Miró think of painting, precisely for the children's room a scene made of three terrifying figures. The only explanation we found is the painter's mental state in 1938, still influenced by his escape from Spain and the horrors of war. As Martín Martín reminds us, his paintings of this period “communicate to us in a higher degree his depression and pessimism”. Perhaps the sketch that Miró used for the overwhelming drawing of the Catalan peasant was lithograph No. VII of his Barcelona series, made with the report papers that Georges Braque recommended him to buy in Varengeville and that he took with him on his return to Spain in 1940, in our understanding already drawn. The series would be printed in 1944 in the city of Barcelona with money from Joan Prats. The Catalan historiography of the last 40 years pretends that lithographs are something else. For Miró’s grandson, the painter expresses in the series “once again his aversion to the Franco regime. Through these monstrous figures, he strongly denounces the horrors of the dictatorship and the ugliness of its authors” 141. Many other lithographs from the Barcelona series, for example those numbered XVI, XVII and XXI show the same monstrous character of The Reaper, of which Miró will say in 1977 –two years after the death of the dictator– that it represented General Franco: “I start a character without thinking about Franco and when I finish it I can say: this is Franco” 142. For Miró, the Catalan peasant who rises in arms, terrorizes him and forces his exile and the general who destroys the republic would be the two sides of the same monster. The mural will disappear after the exhibition, without Miró ever showing regret for the loss. In view of what Miró lived, of his way of being and his personal circumstances, the interpretation that has been given so far, both to his savage paintings of the 30s and later works including the Constellations, in the sense that the barbarism he paints, the horror he denounces, are the product of the Francoist uprising and fascism, becomes highly controversial. The revolutionary terror lived by Miró in the first decades of the century –that impelled him to flee from pestilent Barcelona–; the one he suffered in the same city during the revolution of 1934 and the one suffered later by his family and that prompted him to go into exile in 1936 was not that of the conservative reaction, but that of the communist, anarchist and catalanist revolutionaries. It seems therefore unconvincing that in reaction to the revolutionary violence he sould set out to denounce with his painting fascist barbarism, which he had not personally 140 Martín Martín 1982. p. 178 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, p. 73 142 Raillard 1998 p. 221 141 56 experienced. The crimes committed by the republican militias, regrouped by the leader of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and president of the Generalitat Lluís Companys in the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMAA) are those that have plunged Miró into one of his depressions and caused the hallucinations that are reflected in all that work. The CCMAA is attributed some 8,500 murders in the course of the war, most of which in the first four months of it, when they executed the painter's brother-in-law. But Miró is not a political man, he will not join or support any of the sides in conflict. His concern is the horror he has lived in Republican Catalonia. In a letter to Pierre Matisse dated January 12, 1937, Miró tells him: “We are living through a terrible drama, everything happening is Spain is terryfying in a way you could never imagine ... We are living through a hideous drama that will leave deep marks in our mind ”143. 143 Rowell 1992 p. 146, Umland 1993 p. 333 & Reus 2004, pp. 709-712. 57 3. The return to Franco’s Spain (1940) The German invasion of France inexplicably caught Miró, like many others, by surprise. France was at war with Germany since September 3, 1939 and a German attack was imminent for the entire duration of the drôle de guerre or 'joke war', no matter how much the first efforts of Hitler's army concentrated on completing the invasion of Poland and its repartition with Stalin. Since January 10, the allies are aware of the German plans of imminent invasion of Belgium, France and the Netherlands. On that day, a German staff officer carrying invasion plans with him landed by mistake in a Belgian town (Maasmechelen), next to the German border. The Belgian police got hold of the documents before they could be destroyed. But life in Paris went on as if nothing was happening, and Miró prolongs his stay in Varengeville, traveling from time to time to the French capital. He is for example in Hotel de Royal on Boulevard Raspail in Paris during the week of April 1-7 –while the Katyn massacre takes place in Poland– to prepare, among other things, with Georges Hugnet and Christian Zervos No 3-4 of the Cahiers d'Art magazine. We have also verified, thanks to an unpublished letter to Georges Hugnet of 25.03.1940, that he visits etching magician Roger Lacourière to prepare the beautiful print –which reminds us of the Constellations– to be used in the luxury copies of No. 3 of the review L’usage de la parole directed by Hugnet and that will be distributed together with Cahiers d'Art. Confronted with the imminent invasion by the Wermacht, Miró had three options before him. The first was to stay in France, as did Picasso, Matisse, Sartre, Michel Leiris, Paul Éluard, and many other intellectuals and artists. The painter had nothing to fear from the Germans, as he had not even been designated by the Nazis as a degenerate artist. The curator of the Jeu de Paume museum Rosa Antonia Valland (Cate Blanchett in the movie The Monuments Men) said that some of Miró's work was burned as degenerate art on May 27, 1943 by the Nazi organization dedicated to the confiscation of artistic property Einsatzstab Reichsleiters Rosenberg (ERR) 144. There is no witness to this alleged burning, and in any case the material that Valland kept in the museum was not degenerate art, but the works plundered, in large part from Jewish owners, with the aim of swelling German collections or to be sold to obtain funds. In any case, in the great exhibition of degenerate art of Munich of 1937 (Die Ausstellung "Entartete Kunst") there was no work of Miró, and his name does not appear in the long list of artists included in the inventory of 'vicious' art (Beschlagnahmeinventar Entartete Kunst) 145. 144 McCloskey 2005 p. 26 "Degenerate Art" Research Center, Department for Art History, Freie Universität Berlin Available on-line at http://emuseum.campus.fu-berlin.de/eMuseumPlus (consulted on 09.29.2014) 145 58 The possibility of staying in occupied France came up with a variant in 1941, when the armistice took place: moving to the south of the country to the so-called free zone or Vichy, where many artists went in order not to have to endure the presence of the Germans. The difficulty posed by the French option was that the painter no longer had an outlet for his work in Europe. His dealer Pierre Loeb had been mobilized and the other gallerists did not live during the war but on trading with the plundering of the assets of incautious Jews, whether collectors or dealers. In short, the war blocked the remittances of Pierre Matisse, Miró did not have any source of income in France, and the state of autarchy and poverty in Spain made it impossible to receive remittances from his mother. The second option open to Miró was to temporarily emigrate to the United States, as many artists and writers did: Breton, Matta, Zadkine, Tanguy, Ernst, Chagall, Léger, Mondrian or Masson. On the other side of the Atlantic Miró did have a dealer, but relations with him, which had been fruitful from the artistic point of view, had deteriorated due to the inability of Pierre Matisse to provide the painter with sufficient income in ten years of relations. For the rest, Matisse had suggested to Miró in a letter of 11.10.1939 that he cross the Atlantic, but not to go to New York, but to settle in Mexico, where he said that they helped the Spanish refugees a lot 146. Miró imagined his family therefore barely surviving in a foreign and rough country and with the meager income provided by Pierre Matisse, or rather, that his dealer promised to pay, since he had not received since many months before the 320 dollars a month of the contract. In the United States, Miró, who was not famous and popular as Dalí, would have been totally dependent on Matisse to pay rent and food, and probably could not return to Europe in many years. Dalí's case was different: the painter and Gala, Paul Éluard’s ex-wife, opted since the arrival of the Germans to go to the United States, where he had almost inexhaustible sources of income. To cross the Atlantic, Dalí did as Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg: he obtained in June 1940 visas for Portugal from the Consul in Bordeaux and Portuguese national hero, Aristides Sousa Mendes, days before he was dismissed by dictator Salazar's government. The visa was probably issued on the same day (16) when Miró crossed the border at Port Bou, at the other end of the Pyrenees. That day, Mendes issued payment visas for those who had money, the Rothschild family bankers among others. The next day he issued hundreds of safe-conducts for those who had no money. Once in Lisbon, Dalí had no problem obtaining another visa for the United States and embarked on the Excambion ship, arriving in New York in August. Most Surrealists opted for exile in the United States. But those who, like Miró, did not have a good amount of money in their pockets could not do what Dalí did. The trip of these to the other side of the Atlantic was quite hectic. First they took longer to move. André Breton did not go to the French Riviera until August 1940. There he met a young American journalist, Varian Fry, who with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt – and within the framework of the International Rescue Committee conceived by Albert Einstein in 1933– had created the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose main objective was to remove from Europe the maximum number of anti-fascist and Jewish 146 Letter from Pierre Matisse to Miró del 11.10.1939 PMGA 18.23. 59 intellectuals and artists. Before arriving in Marseille, where he established his headquarters at Villa Air-Bel, Fry asked his ex-Harvard classmate Alfred H. Barr., then director of MoMA, a list of artists in danger. To prepare the list of intellectuals Barr .counted on the help of Thomas Mann. In Marseille was also Jewish millionaire and collector Peggy Guggenheim –who had come there called by fellow millionaire Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy's wife– who funded Fry's risky operation and ended up marrying one of the artists that Fry took to the United States: Max Ernst. It was not until the spring of 1941 that the first refugee ships sailed for New York, Mexico or the islands of the Caribbean, where some had to wait a long time for the coveted American visa –Benjamin Péret was forced to remain for the entire war in Mexico. André Breton himself asked for help from his contacts in the United States, such as wealthy surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann, without receiving an answer. He then went to Bordeaux to head for Spain and Lisbon. Then he changed direction, heading to Marseille to meet Varian Fry. Finally he was able to leave France in a boat together with anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on March 24, 1941. But the ship went to Martinique, in the French Antilles, where after Breton was detained for a few days the family had to wait until June. Thanks to an affidavit of support for him, his wife Jacqueline Lamba and his daughter Aube, issued by Pierre Matisse, he was able to travel to New York, where they lived a precarious existence that produced a estrangement between the writer and his wife and an immediate divorce . The prospect was not what Miró expected for him, his wife and their ten-year-old daughter, and he preferred not to join his fate with that of the surrealists of Marseille, who also did not constitute an ideal company for him in those years. Miró said –when already an old man– that his first intention was to go to the United States. When Georges Raillard asks: “After the Spanish Civil War, in 1940, you left France and returned to your country. Did not you think about exile at that moment?”, Miró responds: “I tried to go to America with my friend, architect J.L. Sert, but there were no seats on the boats. My daughter Dolores was small. For me it was a great responsibility. And since we could not go to America, Pilar and I decided to return to Spain” 147. The Miró establishment has maintained since the restoration of democracy in Spain this assertion that his intention was to go to the United States and that if he did not do so, it was because of the impossibility of obtaining tickets. It was possibly done because it was aesthetically unacceptable that an anti-Franco painter directly opted for the alternative he finally chose. But the examination of his correspondence shows that the idea never crossed his mind. In several letters he talks about the intention of one of his friends to make the leap, but in none does he show the slightest interest in doing the same, while he clearly expressed his intention to return to Spain 148. Besides, in the extensive correspondence between Miró and Sert 149 there is not one single reference to Miró’s alleged plan to go into exile in the United States. There is no 147 Raillard, Georges. “El surrealismo arraigado de Miró”. In Bonet Correa, Antonio (ed.). El surrealismo. Cátedra. Madrid. 1983 pp.135-142. Cited in Reus 2004 p. 239. 148 A Domenec Escorsa, Epistolario 2009, pp.591-603 149 Juncosa 2008 60 doubt that the painter had decided from the beginning to return to Franco's Spain, as his friend Joaquim Gomis had done when Franco won the war. Sebastià Gasch, who meets Miró at the painting materials warehouse of Catalan Antonio Castelucho in Paris when the painter flees from Varengeville, remembers that he was absolutely overwhelmed by the events: “Pale, disheveled, the features disfigured by fear, he only repeated like a litany: 'They have bombed Varengeville, they have bombed Varengeville'”150. Gasch had followed the opposite path to that of Miró and Gomis, staying in Barcelona during the war and fleeing to Paris before Franco's troops entered Barcelona in 1939. But he returned home in 1942 and joined the editorial staff of Falangist magazine Destino . A clear indication of Miró's determination to return to Spain can be found in information from Asturian painter Luis Fernández, Miró's partner in the Llotja school in Barcelona. A short article by the English collector Peter Watson published in his magazine Horizon: a Review of Literature and Art ends with the following words: “The last (about Miró) received directly from a friend of his, Louis Fernandez, a Spanish painter still in Paris, was that he was leaving France last April for the home of his wife’s parents in the Balearic Islands”151. It is also worth noticing that Miró claims in his statement to Raillard that his intention was to go to America with J. S. Sert, but that he could not do it because “there were no seats on the ships”. But as everyone who tried the adventure knew then, in Varengeville in May 1940 it was not possible to know whether there would be places on the ships for the United States. The only way to find out if the trip could be made was to go to an Atlantic port, and wait there for both a visa for the United States and the availability of a ticket. All those who in the spring of 1940 fled the German advance and wanted to go to America took the train in Paris to Bordeaux and Hendaye, as did Dalí and many thousands of refugees trying to reach Lisbon as a port of departure. The same direction took the surrealists, who once arrived in Bordeaux went to Marseille when they learned that it would be possible to take a boat from there. But Miró headed towards Port-Bou. He can not pretend he planned anything but to return to Spain through Catalonia. Moreover, the attraction of the United States and of joining Sert was very low in June 1940. The architect, who ceased to receive his salary as an official of the Republic in Paris in the first months of 1939, immediately went to Cuba, where he arrived in March. From there he mobilized his contacts until he arrived in New York at the end of June, entering the United States with an invitation from James Johnson Sweeney, then Director of the Department of Painting of MoMA, to give lectures in the country. His early days there were difficult, living in a hotel room and not getting practically any work. It took several years until Paul Lester Wiener, who had built the American pavilion at the 1937 exhibition, offered him to collaborate on urban projects in Latin America. Thus was born in 1942 Town Planning Associates. The life standard of Sert was not in the spring of 1940 a model for the gentrified Miró. 150 151 Gasch, Sebastià. Joan Miró. Alcides, Barcelona, 1963.p.60. Cited in Reus 2004 pp. 242 Watson 1941 p. 133. 61 What Miró had decided long ago is that once the circumstances that had forced him into exile –the revolution in Catalonia– disappeared, he would return to Spain. As soon as he received his family in Paris, he had written to Pierre Matisse on January 12, 1937, saying: “All my friends advise me to stay in France. If it were not for my wife and child, however, I would return to Spain.” And he asks him to make the necessary preparations to send him money there if at some point there was censorship in France or if he went to Spain. While it is true that Franco's Spain was far from the ideal that Miró had dreamed of, the truth is that it had restored normality in the country, the condition the painter had established in a letter to Pierre Matisse of 18.12.1936 to return when he fled militia violence (“We are going to remain in Paris until life returns to normal in Catalonia”). Even his grandson indicates that in 1939 “Miró knows that, although the civil war in Spain has ended, he will have to wait before returning home”152, that is, it was not a question of opting to go to the United States or Spain, but of what would be the right time to return to his country. Besides, if in France all his friends were aligned on the antifascist side, in Spain the situation was more complicated. Some of his friends, like Sert or Prats, were moderate Republicans, but many others had clearly gone over to the side of the new regime. And finally, Franco's troops had swept away precisely those revolutionary communist, anarchist, Trotskyist and Catalanist forces from whom Miró had fled in 1936. Thanks to the triumph of the nationals, the Miró family had recovered all the properties that the republic had confiscated. In fact, the painter's mother and sister remained in Montroig until the troops of General Yagüe entered Barcelona on January 26, 1939, returning to the capital to launch recovering procedures for their properties the following month. Four months later, Maria Dolors will marry builder Lluís G. Ylla. The painter could therefore count, if he returned to Spain, with a safe roof, sufficient means to live with a certain comfort and with the Montroig estate that provided him with many pleasures – in addition to food and a secure income. The problem that arose was how the regime would react to the return of someone who had carried out two propaganda works for the republic: the pochoir Aidez l'Espagne and the mural The Reaper. Miró had between April 1939 and June 1940 more than enough time to find out what awaited him if he returned. And he had someone to consult and to support him. If the only two sins he had committed –as we saw he had refrained from publicly speaking about the war– he had made them for the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat. And the Propaganda Commissariat of the Franco regime had been founded in Madrid by Dionisio Ridruejo, helped by his mentor since the beginning of the century, writer and art critic Eugenio D'Ors. And since 1938 D'Ors was National Head of Fine Arts of the new Francoist Ministry of National Education, position in 152 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p. 63 62 which he was responsible for negotiating the return to Spain of the treasures of the Prado Museum together with Josep María Sert, José Luis Sert’s uncle, who had taken them out of the country at the end of the war. As publisher and writer Esther Tusquets recalls, the arrival of Franco's army in Barcelona was received with enthusiasm by a large part of the population: "One of my first memories is seeing a crowd of soldiers advancing on a road or a avenue. There were many people acclaiming them from both sides of the road or from the sidewalks. My father, who had not set a foot on the street for almost two years, was holding me up to watch the troops march past. My mother shouted Franco's name with an enthusiasm that I would see her manifest on very few occasions throughout her life, and followed a good distance the soldiers without ceasing to cheer and applaud. It was the army of the military rebels... I was three years old and I only knew that something very good had happened, and that the street had been filled with people, and that everyone was happy and shouting a lot, and that my mother was shouting more than anyone, and that also the soldiers smiled and greeted us, and one of them gave me a little red and yellow flag in passing”. What united the thousands of people was the experience of three years of terror : “My people received Franco as their savior, and for them he was. My father, totally disinterested, like many other Spaniards, from politics until the beginning of the war, had defected from the Republican army. Undoubtedly because they were not his people, but also because, as he told me in one of his infrequent confidences, he could not bear the task that as a doctor he had been assigned –to go to the victims after the executions and, if he still detected them alive, give them the coup de grace– and he lived hidden, not even daring to lean out of a window or raise his voice, with the constant fear that someone would denounce him or that they would find him during a 63 casual search, as we had suffered several... Neither mom, of liberal family and with a freemason father, had been interested in politics before the war, but from there on, and unlike dad, remained Francoist to death. A mother extremely tolerant in many aspects and to top it an atheist, but a conservative one”153 . Writer Laura Freixas also recalls that her grandparents, both belonging to “the Catalan bourgeoisie –my grandfather was a textile entrepreneur– spoke Catalan, did not go to church, read Aldous Huxley and Stefan Zweig; they belonged to... the Catalanisht Lliga ... However, when the troops of the Generalissimo entered Barcelona in January 1939, my grandparents received them screaming and shouting, right arm in the air: 'Franco, Franco, Franco!’”154. For a large part of the three million inhabitants of Catalonia, the choice presented to them in the summer of 1936 was the one spelled out by to the humanist and diplomat Joan Estelrich i Artigues: Facing an independent Catalan state with dictatorship of an anarchic proletariat, the victory of the military appeared as the lesser evil. Estelrich himself recalled in 1940 that “One year ago, the day of liberation, all of Catalonia was unanimously for Franco and the National Movement”155. In addition, it can not be forgotten that the Miró's belonged in 1940 to the large family of victims of the Red Terror, praised and glorified by the new regime. To our knowledge, the painter has no doubt: he must return to Spain. And his family and friends tell him that he does not have much to fear. The only thing he is advised to do is to remain discreet for some time and to take some precautions so that the episode of his modest collaboration with the republic does not come to light. Miró will follow these instructions and soon will have solid support among the regime’s artistic establishment in Barcelona, such as Santos i Torroella, artistic director of the Layetanas Galleries; critic Sebastià Gasch; Juan Eduardo Cirlot and all the group of collaborators of the magazine Destino, founded in the Franco headquarters in Burgos, in May of 1937, by Xavier de Salas (friend and neighbor of Miró in Montroig) and José María Fontana Tarrats (Miró’s neighbor in Reus). Jorge Luis Marzo points out for 153 Tusquets, Esther La falangista Tusquets, El País November 18, 2007. See also her memoirs Habíamos ganado la guerra - Ediciones B/ Bruguera, S.A., Barcelona, 2007 154 Freixas, Laura Una generación de catalanes. El País January 21, 2014 155 Estelrich i Artigues, Joan Dietaris, Quaderns Crema, Barcelona 2014 (August 26 and September 1st, 1936). Cited in Freixas, 2014 64 example that “Sebastià Gasch was a 'recalcitrant pro-Franco', in the opinion of the apparatchik Rafael Santos Torroella” and “Juan Eduardo Cirlot professed complete admiration for the Nazi universe” 156. Despite of this background, Gasch, Santos Torroella and Cirlot will be included by the Miró establishment among a large group of freedom fighters during the Franco dictatorship, accompanying other resistant artists d intellectuals such as Alexandre Cirici, Antoni Tapies, Josep Llorens Artigas or Alberto del Castillo157, the latter being the person who, together with Llorens Artigas, showed Franco in 1951 the first Tapies painting the dictator saw. The painter, Pilar and their daughter Maria Dolors leave Paris, according to repeated statements by Miró and his wife, collected among others by Roland Penrose, eight days before the arrival of the German army 158 on 14 June –which means they left on the 6th of June. “We left Paris eight days before the entry of the Germans”, says the painter 159. The information is confirmed by Pilar Juncosa: "We were in Paris until eight days before the Germans entered”160. Undoubtedly, the date repeated incessantly in the Mironian historiography is incorrect. He could not have left Paris on June 6 and, after a trip that was undoubtedly difficult, be in Perpignan, installed in a hotel and sending letters, postcards and telegrams on the first of June. The most logical thing would have been for Miró to leave Varengevillesur-mer just after signing on the back gouache No. 10 of the Constellations series, Acrobatic Dancers, on May 14. The exact day could be the subject of conjecture, but we do not see how Miró could escape the panic caused in Varengeville by the German bombings from May 11 to 14. If he had left, for example, on Thursday, May 16, he would have done it three weeks before what has been said since the 70s. Although it would have been logical that the terrified Miró Gasch describes left the same day or the day after the end of the bombings, that is, on Tuesday 14 or Wednesday May 15, when his last gouache, which he had been painting since April 29, more than two weeks before, was dry. While bombs fall, one takes refuge at home or wherever one can, and when it clears up one tries to flee. What seems inconceivable to us is that since the bombings took place, the painter would have waited quietly in Varengeville for two or three weeks, while the rest of the population fled and Georges Braque went off with all his possessions to dealer Paul Rosenberg’s shelter in Bordeaux 161. Although Miró tells Raillard that they spent several days waiting at Rouen station, Dupin will later point out that it took him a whole day to travel the 200 km that separate Dieppe from Paris 162, where we think they should have arrived by Friday 17 or Saturday May 18, 1940. We also think that it is possible that Miró was able to reach 156 Marzo 2010. p. 120 Minguet, Joan M., Montaner, Teresa & Santanach, Joan, Joan Miró, escriptor català, in Epistolari 2009, p. 20 158 Penrose, Roland. Miró. Editorial Destino. Barcelona 1991 (1st edition 1970), p. 100-101: 159 Taillander 1972, p. 19. 160 Juncosa, Lluìs. “Apunts per a una petita biografia”. In Aubert 1994 p. 20 161 Dantchev 2005. pp.207-208 162 Dupin 2012, p. 248 157 65 Rouen by car, so as to avoid the Dieppe railway station and the railroad lines between the two cities, typical target of bombings. We have a clear confirmation of our interpretation to the effect that the always cited date of “eight days before the entry of the Germans into Paris” is wrong. This is a letter from Miró to Roland Penrose, in which the painter explains the genesis of the Constellations, while the Briton was preparing his book on Miró, published in 1970. It states that the eight days are before the arrival of the Germans to Normandy, not Paris. “We had to leave Varengeville in haste. In this region, which had remained calm, the Germans opened pitiless bombardments. With the Allied armies completely defeated and continuous bombardments we took the train for Paris. Pilar took Dolores, who was then a little girl, by the hand and I carried with me under my arm the portfolio containing those Constellations that were finished and the remainder of the sheets which were to serve for the completed series. We left Paris for Barcelona eight days before the Germans entered Normandy. We left there at once as a measure of prudence, and went to Palma where I could live peacefully, ignored by everyone and seeing nobody” 163. In fact, the Germans never bombarded Varengeville, a small holiday village of 1,000 inhabitants without any strategic interest, but the city and port of Dieppe. What happens is that the Clos des Sansonnets of Varengeville, where the painter lived, was about 4 or 5 km away from the port of Dieppe, so the feeling was that they were bombing next to your house . The dates coincide: the first German bombardments on Dieppe took place on Saturday, May 11, and the army corps formed by two panzer divisions of General Heinz Guderian (Heinz the Rapid) took the Normandy coast –through Abbeville to the north, not through Dieppe, which will not fall until June 11– breaking the Allied army in two on May 20. Miró also noted that they left Varengeville “amid the bombings”, which gives credibility to our hypothesis of an exit on May 14. But when the Roland Penrose book is reissued in 1985, in a publication that maintains exactly the same pages as the 1970 edition, the reference to Normandy disappears, leaving the text like this: “We left Paris for Barcelona eight days before the entry of the Germans” 164. Plain manipulation, as this modification endorsed the interpretation of the painter and his family that they had left three weeks later, which as we have seen can not be true. Jacques Dupin, the biographer and scholar of the painter who had most contact with Miró, ends up giving a date that has been endorsed by historiography, without confirming our hypothesis that Miró could have left Varengeville on May 14, 15 or 16, but in any case advancing in almost three weeks the official version of eight days before the entry of the Germans in Paris: "On May 20, 1940, the advance of the German armies and the mass exodus of the civilian population in a terrifying disorder finally forced him to stop work and leave”165. Our interpretation of a departure between the 14th and the 16th of May, seems to us more convincing than that of Dupin insofar as it gets closer to the initial statement of Miró, gives the painter two weeks to 163 Penrose 1970. pp.100-101 Penrose 1992 p. 101 165 Dupin 2012, p.248 164 66 get from Varengeville to Paris, make his arrangements in the capital and make the long trip that will take them to Perpignan, where they will probably arrive a few days before June 1. With Dupín they only have ten days to do it all. Be that as it may, Miró, Pilar and María Dolors must have been in Paris on the weekend of Saturday 18/Sunday 19 of May. In Paris, they probably spent a week making arrangements, both for their trip to Spain and to safely leave behind the paintings and goods they had in the capital. Actually the paintings should have been sent to the United States, but it seems that at that moment, when he was not receiving the stipend from his dealer, his main concern was not to fulfill his wishes. But saving the paintings should be a priority. The encounter with Sebastià Gasch in Castelucho would indicate that the painter also buys materials to work. In a letter to Matisse on June 6, Miró explains that “We have passed very quickly through Paris, and it has been impossible for me to take care of sending you the paintings. I will take care of it as soon as I arrive in Barcelona” 166. And as soon as they can they head by train to Perpignan, where Miró and family arrive before Saturday, June 1st, date of a postcard to Tristan Tzara, then in Marseille, kept at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, in Paris. In it the painter gives the impression of having been for a few days there and notes that “for the moment we are here without knowing exactly what we are going to do”167. It is very probable that, although at that moment Miró knows exactly what he is doing, that is, going back to Spain, he opts for not telling Tzara openly that he is one step from reintegrating Franco's Spain. The poet had been in the Republican zone during the civil war and had organized numerous acts in France in its support. Tzara, who was a Jew, chose like his son Christophe to join the French resistance instead of going into exile in the United States. Perpignan was the last days of the spring of 1940 a hotbed of refugees. For example, in the Villa Crépuscule in Canet, poet Robert Rius hosted painters Jacques Hérold, Oscar Domínguez, Víctor Brauner, Henri Goetz and also Benjamin Péret, accompanied by Miró ‘s friend Remedios Varo. But Miró does not seem to have made any effort to see them, nor they to see him. In the aforementioned letter of June 6 to his dealer, Miró also says that he had been for "several days" in Perpignan. Pierre Matisse is worried. This year of 1940 the war will prevent him from making his annual trip to France and pick up the production of Miró and other painters, and despite numerous requests, still has no news of the shipment of the paintings by the Spaniard. On June 4 and 5 he sent two telegrams, the first to Varengeville and the second to Paris, to architect Paul Nelson's address, announcing Miró that he already has at Royal Canada bank the money he was claiming and asking him to send him the canvases 168. But it's too late, because the painter and his family have been for more than a week in Perpignan, where the messages arrive. On June 6, Miró writes a long letter to the gallerist, but he advances by telegram: "We are going back to Barcelona. Pasaje de Crédito. Letter Follows” 169. The painter explains in his 166 PMGA 18.34 Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004 p. 726 Reus 2004 p.242. Archived in folder TZR C 2702-TZR C 2751 of the Jacques Doucet Library, Paris. 168 Reus 2004 pp. 724-725 169 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004 p. 725 167 67 missive that “I’ve decided to return home. I think this is the wisest thing to do at the moment to safeguard Pilar and the little one... I know that this entails very great sacrifices on my part, but I cannot allow my little family to remain in the midst of a tempest. We are thinking of leaving on the 8th... I do not know what will await me upon arrival.... but I hope that once this has passed, I will be able to concentrate once again and to set to work” 170. But it took a few more days to cross to Spain. The painter will tell Georges Raillard in the seventies that in Perpignan “they did not want to give us the visa; but fortunately the consul of Spain was a good person, who cared little about Franco. Thanks to him, after a certain time we were able to leave” 171. The explanation changes when Pilar Juncosa speaks: “There was a mayor in, what’s the name, Port-Bou should be, who was anti-Franco, how odd, because Franco was there, and Joan told him directly that we would like to return to our countrys”172. Obtaining the safe conduct to enter Spain was not difficult, although it did take a few days. Victoria Combalía considers that the ease with which they obtain the permit can be explained by “the help of a relative from within nationalist Spain, very frequent then, and the fact that, in 1940, Miró was no national glory as Picasso was, had not behaved in any scandalous or provocative way (as 'scandalous' and provocative the fascists found, for example, the populism and gay personality of García Lorca). Whether one or the other is the reason, the truth is that Miró was not held at the border, nor was subject of any interrogation” 173. According to Pilar Juncosa, “when we arrived at the border, there was a list of all those they did not want to let in... those days I was very afraid ... and I thought if now Joan can not pass, it will be my fault. And they looked at the list, brr, brr, Joan Miró... and nothing, as Joan had not done much, they let us through”174. But Miró told Raillard, however, that the list was not checked at the border, but within Spanish territory: “At the Figueras stop, they checked the list of suspects. I was scared, but my name was not there” 175. Once crossed the border and saved the obstacle of the list of those disaffected to the regime, they took a train to Gerona, where according to Miró, “my friend Prats was waiting for us” and were advised them not to go to Barcelona. From Gerona they went to the place where they thought they would be safer: to the residence of the victim of red terror that Miró's sister María Dolors was. According Pilar Juncosa, they went to Mas Riambau de Tona, near Vic 176. The same erroneous version is repeated by María Lluisa Borràs in 1995 in the catalog of an exhibition (Record de Joan Prats) held at 170 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 and Reus 2004 p. 726 Raillard 1998 p.36. 172 Juncosa, Lluìs 1994. p. 29. Cited in Reus 2004 p. 240 173 Combalía, Victoria. Picasso-Miró. Miradas cruzadas. Editorial Electa, Madrid 1998. p. 104. Cited in Reus 2004 pp. 244-245 174 Fageda & Lacasa, 1994. p. 21. 175 Raillard 1998, p. 36-38 176 Juncosa, Lluìs 1994. p.21 171 68 the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona 177. But Pilar's brother, Lluís Juncosa Iglesias, who lodged with the Mirós in the forties while studying medicine, corrects Pilar and gives a more plausible explanation of how the events developed: “On the advice of Joan Prats, they stopped at Quintanes of Voltregà, an estate owned by Juan's sister. They met Joan Prats and our father. They agreed that for political reasons it was not advisable to go to Barcelona, and my father offered them our house in Palma” 178. In short, everything was planned in advance by Joan Prats: Miró would go back to Spain, go to Gerona by train and then would drive by car to the Quintanes estate in Sant Hipòlit de Voltregà, about 80 km away, where himself and Lamberto Juncosa Massip –Pilar’s father–were awaiting them, and urged them to seek anonymity in Majorca. As we had seen, the imposing Quintanes estate should theoretically have been ceded to the Church and charities after the death of Jaume Galobart in 1936. However, the Miró family managed to maintain Dolors’ husband's landed property after her marriage with builder Lluís G. Ylla i Cassany in 1939. Mas Quintanes is currently an important Opus Dei agricultural professional training center. After crossing the border and spending some time in San Hipólito de Voltregà, Miró returns briefly to Barcelona, but soon leaves with his wife and daughter to Majorca, where he will continue to paint the Constellations series of. As Miró told Raillard, the decision to settle in Majorca obeyed above all to the fact that “as the people of Palma had suffered the oppression of Franco from the beginning, they were fed up” with the dictator179. Two decades later, Pilar will repeat the same comment: “Because my father was anti-fascist too, and he told Joan: if you would listen to me, I would not be around a lot (in Barcelona), because in Palma there was an atmosphere that was already antiFranco, because here they had spent the war with Franco and they were already fed up with him”180. Undoubtedly, the Miros’ comments were politically correct in the 'anti-Francoist' late 1970s –once the dictator was dead– but they are far from true, because the Balearic Islands were a bastion of Francoism. The elections of February 1936 had been comfortably won in the region by the conservatives, not the popular front. As for Pilar Juncosa's comment on paternal 'anti-Francoism', suffice it to say that although Pilar’s brother Lambert spent some time imprisoned during the civil war due to his Lerrouxist past, he was later recovered by the Franco regime as councilor and Deputy Major of Palma de Majorca. Industrialist Lamberto Juncosa Massip had strong ties to the wealthy classes of Majorca, who were his main clients. Special was the bond with Juan March, the main financier of the Francoist rebellion. Lamberto’s company had built and installed all the cabinetry of the palace the arms dealer and smuggler –and later banbker– had built. The palace is now the seat of the Juan March Foundation Museum, and the building was redesigned in 1990 by Lamberto’s grandson, Alberto Juncosa. 177 Borràs, Maria Lluïsa "Joan Prats, biografia col.lectiva" in Record de Joan Prats. [Exp.20.12/95-03.03/96] Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona 1995. p. 19. Cited in Reus 2004 p.244. 178 Fageda y Lacasa, 1994. p. 35. Cited in Reus 2004 p. 240-241 179 Raillard 1998, pp.37-37 180 Juncosa, Lluìs 1994. p. 29. Cited in Reus 2004 p. 240 69 In the spring of 1941, Miró quietly returns to Barcelona and spends the summer at the Montroig estate, which has become the main income source of the family and which he prepares as a residence and study for the years to come. In fact, in the summer of 1942 he moved his official residence and that of his wife and daughter to Montroig 181. But they spend winters in Barcelona, where they occupy at least two floors of the family building in Pasaje de Crédito. Although he did not want to be too visible so that the accusations of republicanism may not reappear, Miró attends the literary and artistic gatherings as well as the exhibitions of his friends in the Barcelona of the forties. He illustrates several copies of Ariel, Revista de les Arts and numerous articles are published praising his work, written by Joan Perucho, Vicente Molina Foix, Cirici and Tapies. In 1944, together with Jean Cocteau and Grau Sala, he illustrated the book Vía Áurea by César González-Ruano, who had just returned to Spain after being arrested in Paris, accused of having sold Spanish visas to Jews, while at the same time denouncing them to the Gestapo 182. It has also been claimed that the writer could have returned to Spain as an agent of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence 183. In 1947 Miró has no difficulty obtaining a passport to travel to the United States. From that moment, when he acquires a more stable economic position and can afford it, he will not stop traveling abroad. The grandson of the painter Joan Punyet Miró says that, back in the 40s, the artist would affirm his anti-Francoism by pointing out, in relation to the Barcelona series, made according to him in the early years of the decade and published in 1944, that “Miró expresses again his aversion to the Franco regime. Through these monstrous figures, he strongly denounces the horrors of dictatorship and the ugliness of its authors”. Although, as we saw, in the happy 70s Miró said that the monstrous persons of the series, which are the continuation of those of his savage paintings and The Reaper of 1937, represented Franco, if it had been so Miró would not have dared to draw or publish it in May of 1944, when he tried to go unnoticed and to get rid of the label of being a republican. Nor would Joan Prats print the engravings, since he had spent a few months in prison for his role in the exportation of works of sacred art in the framework of the Zervos exhibition in 1938. The painter will explain to Georges Raillard, however, that “censorship did not see that they were political prints” 184. It does not seem far-fetched, however, to think that apart from the fact that censorship of course never saw the series of prints, of which only five copies were printed, artist and publisher could have a prepared explanation in which the monsters drawn did not represent the dictator, but his enemies. In any case, we understand that what happened is that Miró had painted the series –which share the aesthetics of the savage paintings– much earlier (probably in 1937 and 1938, before painting the Varengeville series, 181 Cable of 07.23.1942 from the Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes to the Mayor of Montroig. Cited in Martí Rom 2014. p. 8 182 García-Planas, Plàcid y Sala Rose, Rosa, El marqués y la esvástica: César GonzálezRuano y los judíos en el París ocupado, Anagrama, Madrid 2014 183 Castillo, Fernando Noche y niebla en el París ocupado. traficantes, espías y mercado negro, Fórcola Ediciones, Madrid 2013 184 Cited in Punyet Miró y Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p.73 70 which in turn gave way to the Constellations). And in 1944 Prats printed the lithographs to avoid that the natural deterioration of the fine report papers would destroy the drawings. Report paper is meant to be passed to stone immediately, not to be stored. Another reason for Miró to have the lithographs printed was that he was preparing a shipment to MoMA with the Constellations. The Barcelona series does not bear any similarity with Miró's graphic or pictorial work since he returned to Spain in June 1940 (saving the Constellations, completed in November 1941), while many of the lithographs look very much like etchings made especially in 1938 (See Miró Engraver I pages 42 to 64), and as we have already pointed out, the peasant of The Reaper of 1937 is practically identical to the monster of lithography VII of the Barcelona series. What could have happened is that when it is decided that the series has to be printed urgently in 1944, to prevent the deterioration of the paper or to send them to the MoMA, some of the fifty sheets of the notebook remained unused. The artist then completed the empty notebook pages with signs and drawings that are characteristic of his 1944 work (see, for example, lithographs numbered as 34, 36 and 41 of the Barcelona series). Miró insisted in 1944 in sending the Barcelona series to the United States to be shown along with the Constellations, presenting it as a complement to it. It does not seem very smart to flaunt anti-Francoism in the MoMA of 1944, already led by an anticommunist establishment. Neither do we believe that he tried something similar three years later when he reissued the series in the United States in a circulation of 1,500 copies during his stay in the country 185. This second edition of the portfolio was accompanied by a text by Michel Leiris, entitled Around Joan Miró that underlined the marvelously childish character of the work reproduced, which was a good excuse in case someone asked about the monsters of the series. Not very far from what Antoni Tàpies commented in his text Miró's Innocence, included as a prologue to a book by Yves Bonnefoy XE "Bonnefoy, Yves" in 1964: “What it has of joy, innocent, childish, aesthetically funny and that many believe harmless, the purely formal magic attributed to it, quiet magic...” 186. Nor of what Miró’s friend of and philo-Nazi Juan Eduardo Cirlot said: “The spontaneity of Miró, his search for the poetry of the line and the stain, in proximity to children's art, some facets of popular creation and of the pictographs of the prehistoric style of the Spanish Levant, find a very suitable means of expression in the different forms of engraving”187. Cirlot himself was in charge of prefacing the 1959 Spanish edition of the book by American critic Sam Hunter Joan Miró: His graphic work, which also included reproductions of the Barcelona series 188. And the lithographs were also exhibited in the 1949 Miró tribute show in Barcelona. One of them is reproduced in the catalog of the exhibition 189, in which his friend Cirlot describes the series as a simple continuation of his schematism 190. 185 The Prints of Joan Miró, Curt Valentin , New York, Fall 1947. Tàpies, Antoni, La inocencia de Miró, in Bonnefoy, Yves Miró, Editorial Juventud, Barcelona 1970 187 Indice de Artes y Letras, nº 124-125, April-May 1959. Cited in Ureña 1982, pp.235-236 188 Hunter & Cirlot 1959 189 Cirlot 1949, Figure 31 190 Cirlot 1949, p. 33 186 71 Once the process of rewriting the painter's biography began, Miró and his clan must have thought that Leiris had exaggerated a little the trivialization of the Barcelona series. On the occasion of the reprinting of the series in the first volume of the catalogue raisonné of his lithographs in 1972, the poet was forced to rewrite the 1947 text. After apologizing to the painter for “the abuse that I made earlier of flowery words”, he corrects the shot saying that “You can talk about childhood about Miró, but provided that it is the childhood of the world and not of his own childhood” and he apologizes again for having compared him in 1947 to Walt Disney 191. The toughest critic in this regard with Miró is Nobel Literature Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, who in a chronicle in which he extolled the mastery of Matisse and above all Picasso, dispatched Miró with a blunt paragraph: "I was deeply disappointed. Miró was a good painter at the beginning, who doubts it, and introduced into modern painting a playful, naughty and frisky innocence that breathed poetry and good humor. But how soon he lost the creative impetus, the risky spirit, and began to repeat and imitate himself until he became a cacophonous, artificial and falsely naive industry. While, between boring and desolate, I went through the exhibition, I remembered an insolent phrase about Miró by Juan Benet that I read somewhere in the seventies –a suitable painter for dentists’ waiting rooms or something like that– and I found it very unfair then. Now, after this experience, I do not find it so unfair anymore”192. 191 Leiris, Michel, Enmiendas y adiciones 1970 En torno a Joan Miró 1947. In Joan Miró Litógrafo 1972, p. 13 192 Vargas Llosa, Mario Pintores en la Costa, El País, Madrid 09. 20.2009 p. 35 72 2nd PART: THE CONSTELLATIONS AND THE FIGHT FOR APPROPRIATE REMUNERATION 4. The Constellations or how to tame monsters (1940-41) The 23 Constellations gouaches do not in themselves bring any artistic novelty in Miró. Some of the horrendous characters of his previous period and of the Barcelona series make their appearance again in the gouaches, but miniaturized, hidden or schematized to the extreme in the form of a curved line for the mouth and a series of triangles for the teeth. Although Miró did not paint the first of the series until January 21, 1940, he actually began to change his perspective, to abandon his wild paintings, starting in early 1939. On March 14, for example, he painted the large canvas(130 x 195 cm) Young Girl with Half Brown, Half Red Hair Slipping on the Blood of Frozen Hyacinths of a Burning Football Field 193, that anticipates the aesthetics and characters of the gouache series. As they are also anticipated by the lithographs of the Barcelona series, 1937/38, that in fact constitute the base on which the are built the Constellations, which would only 'dissolve' the monsters of the Barcelona series. In this sense, it is worth remembering that Juan Eduardo Cirlot, in his 1949 book on Miró, in which he completely ignores the Constellations, does pay special attention to the series of lithographs, which he dates erroneously but describes as follows: “Later, in the lithographs of 1944, the schematism continues, this time without the most powerful help of colors. The lithographs are like a kind of game to which Miró surrenders without hesitation. He starts with 'visual melodies' and then, through the series, he confabulates a world, the old world of his primordial style, in which the astral and sexual signs open up, like brothers, in the middle of the ineffable action of the backgrounds, because emptiness is also, in Miró, protagonist” 194. We think this is a splendid description, not of the Barcelona series, but of the Constellations. Between the months of August and December 1939, Miró painted two series of small canvases, Varengeville I and Varengeville II, the first on a red background and the second on sackcloth. The dominant characteristic in both is the safety of the stroke and 4. The Constellations or how to tame monsters (1940-41) 193 194 Joan Miró Paintings No 608 Cirlot 1949 p. 33 73 the firm line drawn on the background. The characters still come from the savage paintings, but a tendency to move and establish a relationship that frees them from isolation becomes evident 195. The name Constellations, denomination that would not be applied to the series of gouaches until 1958, appears for the first time and the series also carry titles that seem small poems. These paintings, among which stand out Women and Kite Among the Constellations (81 x 60 cm) and Dew Drop Falling from a Bird's Wing Wakes Rosalie, who Has Been Asleep in the Shadow of a Spider's Web (65 x 92 cm), mark the appearance of the geometric figures and characters that would later populate the gouaches, and these are distributed with a great density in the canvas, they cross and relate to each other in the same way as in the 1940/41 series. Miró uses in these paintings the same pictorial elements as in the Constellations but, given their size, in the series of gouaches the density of drawings increases considerably, the elements are related to each other and integrated into the matrix. The figures are now diluted and the arrangement of the set and the incorporation of bright and cheerful colors make the aggressiveness of the subjects disappear. Most of the pictorial surface is occupied by other benign figures, such as stars, moons, suns, eyes, soft representations of the female sex, etc., all located in a matrix that occupies all the space by means of lines –in the way of Picasso in the Carnet deJuan-les-Pins of 1925 and La Cuisine of 1948– but in this case in an apotheosis of colors. In the Constellations, the main lines that dominate the composition are those of the main figures, persons and animals. These guide and direct the distribution, dimensions and color of the secondary components, each of which is tamed and controlled so that it maintains its place in the balance of the whole. Miró's most complete explanation of his Constellations series, and probably the most authentic and least contaminated by later historiography, was the one he made to James Johnson Sweeney during his trip to the United States in 1947, and which was published in the form of an interview in the New York magazine Partisan Review in February 1948 196. The painter explains then that he began in 1939 in Varengevillesur-Mer a new stage of his work that had its source in music and nature. He remembers that this happened more or less when the Second World War broke out, when he felt a deep desire for escape and deliberately locked himself in. He also points out in this interview that, perhaps because of his isolation from other painters, materials began to acquire a new importance in his painting. In watercolors, he would harden the surface of the paper by rubbing it, and when painting on this hardened surface it produced curious random shapes. He recalls that after the series of paintings on burlap, he began the series that in 1948 was not called yet the Constellations: “a group of gouaches... an entirely new conception of things. I did about six of them before I left Varengeville for Spain and Majorca at the fall of France. There were twently-two (Sic) in all in the series. They were based on reflections in water. Not naturalistically –or objectively– to be sure. But forms suggested bu such reflections. In them my main aim was to achieve a compositional balance. It was a very long and extremely arduous work. I would set out with no preconceived idea. A few forms suggested here would call for other forms elsewhere to balance them. These in turn 195 196 Malet 1983 p. 17 Sweeney 1948, Reproduced in Rowell 1992, pp. 206-211 74 demanded others. It seemed interminable. It took a month at least to produce each watercolor, as I would take it up day after day to paint in other tiny spots, stars, washes, infinitesimal dots of color in order finally to achieve a full and complex equilibrium. As I lived on the outskirts of Palma I used to spend hours looking at the sea. Poetry and music both were now all-important to me in my isolation. After lunch each day I would go to the cathedral to listen to the organ rehearsal. I would sit there in that empty gothic interior daydreaming, conjuring up forms. The light poured into the gloom through the stained-glass windows in an orange flame. The cathedral seemed always empty at those hours. The organ music and the light filtering through the stained-glass windows to the interior gloom suggested forms to me. I saw practically no one all those months. Bit I was enormously enriched during this period of solitude. I read all the time: St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and poetry –Mallarmé, Rimbaud. It was an ascetic existence: only work. After having finished this series of paintings in Palma, I moved to Barcelona. And these Palma paintings had been so exacting both technically and physically I now felt the need to work more freely, more gaily –to ‘proliferate’... Forms take reality for me as I work. In other words, rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work. Even a few casual wipes of my brush in cleaning it may suggest the beginning of a picture. The second stage, however, is carefully calculated. The first stage is free, unconcious; but after that the picture is controlled throughout, in keeping with that desire for disciplined work I have felt from the beginning.”197. Miró would give more details to Roland Penrose, in a 1969 letter –almost thirty years after painting them– on how he had made the first stage of pictorial suggestion in the Constellations: wetting the brushes he had used in a painting made the same day in turpentine and rubbing them against the white sheets of a notebook of sheets of high quality paper that he had bought in Castelucho. “The blotchy surface put me in a good mood and provoked the birth of forms, human figures, animals, stars, the sky, and the moon and the sun. I drew all this in charcoal with great vigour. Once I had managed to obtain a plastic equilibrium and bring order among all these elements, I began to paint in gouache, with the minute detail of a craftsman and a primitive; this demanded a great deal of time.” 198. When he ran out of leaves stained by dirty paintbrushes soaked in turpentine, Miro says he repeated the same operation, cleaning the brushes he had used to paint the first Constellations with the solvent and staining the necessary number of sheets of the notebook. 199. The method used by Miró in the Constellations is similar to that used by Marc Chagall years later to make his portentous lithographs. It has always been understood that the painter first drew the contours with a brush or lithographic pencil in black and then 197 Sweeney 1948, Rowell 1992 pp. 210-212 Penrose 1992 p. 100 199 Tone 1993. p. 4 198 75 filled the drawings with bright colors. In fact, after observing samples of the painter's work stages in the Chagall Museum in Nice, we can assure that very often the painter made one or several spots of color and then used the charcoal, marking the edges of the stain and filling it with drawings of characters or objects that the stain had suggested. It seems to us that in reality these three stages –preparation with paintbrushes and turpentine, drawing with charcoal and coloring– are not enough to explain the process. In fact, with the brushes impregnated with the colors of the previous Constellation, the painter could not have created the backgrounds of the following one without further deliberate action. The clearest example is the passage from gouache number 2, The Escape Ladder, to number 3, People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails. In the first one, made on an ocher and gray background, red and black predominate and there are only a few small final touches of blue. With turpentine in the brushes one could not obtain the overwhelmingly blue background of the second wash, applied in two layers, one light blue and the other a much darker shade. And the same can be said of the transit from number 3 to 4. As we have seen, People at Night ... has a totally blue background, on which Miró applied red, white and black. But the fourth gouache, Women on the Beach, has a light cream background on the right that is darkening to the left and that can not result from rubbing the brushes used in the previous gouache, which does not include this color. In short, Miró may have discovered that the paint dissolved in turpentine from his last oil before the series produced in the paper of Castelucho's notebook a wrinkle effect that marked the grain and suggestive spots. But what he did next was to prepare a colored background in each tempera. When we look at the gouaches in the series, the first thing that catches our attention are the figures, well-colored with gouache of pure colors and bright tones. These are elements or figures of drops, balls, stars, inverted triangles joined by the tip, eyes and bicoloured leaves –representing these the female sex. But if we look closer we discover that the fine lines drawn by the painter surround or define silhouettes, some of them more or less adapted to the color stains of the background and others located discretionarily over the entire surface of the paper. Those silhouettes are the characters that the painter alludes to in the titles. It has been pointed out that the images represented by Miró in the Constellations mean to represent the whole order of the cosmos. Astral bodies are represented by circles or planets and stars. The characters symbolize the earth and the birds would be the union of earth and heavenly world. For Rosa María Malet, “the artist feels an inner desire to escape from the reality that surrounds him and provokes in him a great repugnance. Miró evades inward: deepening in his interiority, in his thoughts. Retired life favors this process of introspection, in which the sky and the night play a fundamental role with their stars, to which Miró associates music” 200. As we had seen, Picasso also associated the astral constellations with music in 1925. For J.J. Sweeney, a multitude of microscopic forms swim in an infinite space; delicate lines, freely drawn, move between these tiny symbols, drawing larger forms of phantasmagorical character. The 200 Malet 1983, p. 17 76 tiny shapes are so numerous and so subtly arranged that the whole composition seems to be in constant movement 201. The characters are mostly the monsters of the savage paintings and the Barcelona series of his previous period, but the key to the issue, the release that Miró gets with this series is that the monsters lose their terrifying character here. As Dupin points out, “the figures are still those of the preceding years, except that the counterpoint of the lines and colors that constitute them is so tight and so precise that they no longer seem threatening and cruel in their isolation, but literally caught in the meshes of a network of great charm that nullifies its primitive aggressiveness. The aggressiveness remains, but as above the rhythmic joy that contradicts it 202. The monsters are no longer solid and powerful, but ethereal. To dilute their malefic power, Miró makes them transparent. Miró has escaped from the world of real monsters and has chosen to enter the world of the reflections of reality in moving water, or in the light filtered through the stained glass windows of the cathedral. When the lines that define each character intersect with those of another or with figures of balls, stars, etc. the crossing divides the figures into two parts, each with a different color. This produces the impression that the fearsome characters of yesteryear, although they retain their teeth or viperine tongues, are actually innocuous transparent jellyfish, which reveal both the hidden side of the figures and the background of the paper. Transparency implies a loss of matter that makes dangerousness disappear. Miró manages to make the monsters that terrified him in the Spain of 1934-39 become mere inhabitants of an ethereal existence, which move –like reflections in water– in multiple intersecting planes but do not affect the reality marked by the crumpled and painted background paper. Ended the war with the victory of Franco, the monsters no longer populate reality, but have lost their corporeality and float above it as parts of a visual composition orchestrated by Miró himself, who is no longer prey to chimeras, but their tamer. In Constellation No. 21, The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers, we see as the main figure, which occupies almost half of the gouache, a figure of a woman with only one eye and a nose in the shape of an elephant trunk. But in reality there are two women in her because her big breasts create an impression of a face of another woman in the belly of the first, the breasts being the eyes and a huge vulva being the nose. The counterpoint of the big woman is a small lover located to the left of the gouache, with a distracted air, a hairy wart on the nose and five hairs on the head. There are two other characters, the beautiful bird that is a parrot with its prominent tongue, located in the upper right, and a slug with a large stylized head and body, which advances to the left as all the characters except the ventral woman, who throws a deep look at the observer of the gouache. And it is this second woman who focuses attention. For Roland Penrose, it is as if Miró “had decided to condense all that he loves most, women, the night, stars, birds, dewdrops at dawn, into these small paintings, while emphasizing the precariuous, illusory nature of our existence. Nostalgic themes such 201 202 Sweeney 1945. p. 126 Dupin 2012 p.250 77 as The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain are troubled by the appearance of grotesque masks that reveal Miró’s underlying anxieties. He presents us with a world that is vast and richly furnished with good and evil” 203. The result is that the Constellations transform the characters of the savage paintings and integrate them into a dreamlike landscape, arranged like a melody by Bach or Mozart. Not in vain Miró had confessed J.J. Sweeney in 1947: “The night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings. Music had always appealed to me, and now music in this period began to take the role poetry had played in the early twenties –especially Bach and Mozart when I went back to Majorca upon the fall of France” 204. But, as Dupin recalls, we must not forget that “this musical creation is linked to the presence of anguished beings at the beginning of the work; transfigures them in their movement and drags them into the vertigo of the night where their poison dissolves” 205. Miró inscribes the poetic titles within a drawing on the back of each gouache. Some are simple and descriptive as Toward the Rainbow, Nocturne o Woman and Birds. But others constitute sketches of poems, like People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails o Women at the Border of a Lake Irradiated by the Passage of a Swan. The drawings within which he writes the titles are made in a space of about 25 by 20 cm and represent male or female persons with a tiny body and a large head, inside which Miró writes his name. Below is a horizontal line ending in small circles, followed by another line or lines with the title of the gouache between asterisks. Below is a drawing of a spiral; below is the place where he completed the gouache; below the date in the figure format of day/month in Roman numerals/year in standard format. And they all end with a typical Miró star formed by four lines that cross in the center and whose vertices are completed here with small circles. So in each of the 23 gouaches. As Penrose recalls, Miró alludes in a subtle way “to his desire to evade the horrors that menace him. The ladder of escape is the title of an early Constellation, just as on 14 October 1940 he wrote on the back of another The 13th, the Ladder Brushed against the Firmament. Another is named The migrating bird, and the last of the series, which began with Sunrise, is The Passage of the Divine Bird. Perhaps the most expressive title, in circumstances from which deliverance seemed so improbable, is People in the night guided by the phosphorescent tracks of snails ”206. Undoubtedly, Miró was deeply depressed in the period 1934-39 that precedes the Constellations. But the painter has a steel spirit with sufficient resources to get out of this situation. For Penrose, “It must be very rare that a series of paintings that contain such coherence and lyricism should be completed in the midst of such catastropic events affecting both the native country of the artist and the country he has adopted as 203 Penrose p. 105 Sweeney, 1948, Rowell 1992 p. 209 205 Dupin 2012 pp.254-255 206 Penrose pp.105-106 204 78 a refuge. It is a sign of the fortitude and equanimity of which Miró is capable that his work continued unchanged in its quality and its impact”207. The question of the relationship between depression and the work of Joan Miró has been the subject of several studies. One of them, Mind and mood in Modern art I: Miró and “melancolie” 208 guesses a relationship between the feelings of despair and the inner torment of Miró and the evolution of his artistic work, but does not dare to establish a direct link between his depressive state and concrete works of art. It notes however that through introspection and meditation, the spiritual beliefs of the artist sustained him in his sufferings, and made his isolation, loneliness, dissatisfaction and the desire to ascend to the celestial heights subject of his art. The author, Harvard Medical School professor Joseph J. Schildkraut, is an expert in the interrelation between depression, spirituality and artistic creativity and was called in 1993 by the Joan Miró Foundation to organize and preside in Barcelona a symposium on the centenary of the birth of the painter. The result of this event was the book Depression and the Spiritual in Modern Art: Homage to Miro 209. One of the most famous phrases by Miró is the one that was included in the December 1933 issue of Minotaure magazine: “I find it difficult to talk about my painting, because it is always born in a state of hallucination, caused by any blow, objective or subjective, and of which I am totally irresponsible”210. The statement is the written response to the question posed by publisher Stratis Eleftheriadis Tériade, who, fed up with the delirious interpretations of intellectuals about artists' paintings, decided to give the latter the floor in an article 211. Picasso's friend Beaudin and Miró sent him brief texts, while Bores devoted himself to theorizing ("A painting is a confession made in a secret language") and Dalí gives free rein to his delusions ("As for spontaneity, I would say that it is also a pig’s foot, but a pig’s foot upside down, that is to say, a lobster"). Both Miró's statement and the text that Tériade chooses from Georges Braque refer to hallucination as the basis of the creative process. For the French painter, “Impregnation is all that enters us unconsciously, which develops and is preserved by obsession and is revealed one day through creative hallucination. Hallucination is the definitive realization of a long impregnation, whose beginning goes back to the (first) youth”212. In 1947, Miró also told Sweeney that in the thirties, and as a result of reading the surrealist poets “I began gradually to work away from the realism I had practiced up to The Farm, until, in 1925, I was drawing almost entirely from hallucinations.... Hunger was a great source of these hallucinations”213. 207 Penrose p. 102 Schildkraut 1995, p.p. 139-156. See also Schildkraut 1982 209 Schildkraut 1996. Among the essays included, one is ‘Rain of Lyres Circuses of Melancholy:’ Homage to Miró by Schildkraut wth Alissa J. Hirshfeld. 210 Minotaure, nº 3-4, Editions Albert Skira, December 1933. p.18 211 Tériade, E. Émancipation de la peinture, Minotaure, nº 3-4, Paris 1933 pp.9-20. 212 Minotaure, nº 3-4, p.12 213 Sweeney 1948 p. 208 208 79 It can be imagined that the process that Miró underwent in the preparation and during the time in which he made the Constellations resembles the one many years later Carlos Castaneda, another son of a watchmaker goldsmith, and a traveler like him, will describe. According to the anthropologist of Peruvian origin, compassion for oneself is caused by personal importance, a powerful force that prevents us from perceiving the hidden realities of our own existence. To undo personal importance, the individual must move his assemblage point, the place where the person's consciousness, his soul, lies. By moving that point you can reach different perspectives that discover planes of consciousness different from the daily reality of everyone. It is much more than a change of perception, because it opens consciousness to unusual worlds. We will recall also that already in February 1937, Miró had anticipated his intention to escape from the difficult reality that surrounded him and paint something that would later take him to the Constellations. In his long letter of January 12 of that year to his North American dealer he indicates that, since all his unfinished works have remained in Barcelona, he will try to do something new: “I have decided to do something absolutely different; I am going to begin doing very realistic still lifes. I was already thinking of doing that, but later, and alternating with other things in which I would have attempted to escape reality entirely –and create a new reality, with new figures and fantasmagoric beings, but ones filled with life and reality. I am now going to attempt to draw out the deep and poetic reality of things, but I can’t say whether I will succeed to the degree I wish” 214. As early as 1940, on February 4, Miró wrote to Pierre Matisse from Varengeville: “I am now working on a series of 15 to 20 paintings in tempera and oil, dimensions 38 x 46, which has become very important. I feel that it is one of the most important things I have done, and even though the formats are small, they give the impression of large frescoes.” 215 Miró seems determined to move his assemblage point and have access to these new planes of consciousness, for which Castaneda points out that what is essentially needed is will: “To face the attempt, we need abandonment and coldness and, above all, boldness”216. According to Castaneda’s Don Juan, “a high fever can move the assemblage point. Hunger or fear or love or hate can also do it. The same mysticism and inflexible intent, the preferred method of sorcerers”. The favorite reading of Miró in those years were the poems of San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Jesús 217. And the painter does not lack the audacity necessary to start the process. As early as 1936, upon his arrival in Paris, he had declared to Georges Duthuit,: “Courage consists in staying at home, close to nature, which does not care about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something wonderful. But to understand it we have to recover the magical and religious sense of the things that belong to primitive peoples ... In fact, people are always the same, and everywhere –spontaneously– they create wonderful things”.218 214 PMGA 18.22. Rowell 1992 p. 146, Umland 333 & Reus 2004, p. 711. PMGA 18.22. Rowell 1992, p. 168, Umland 1993 p. 335 & en Reus 2004, pp. 720-721 216 Castaneda, Carlos El conocimiento silencioso, Gaia Ediciones, Móstoles 2002 p. 105 217 Santos Torroella, Rafael: Miró aconseja a nuestros jóvenes pintores, Correo Literario nº 20, Madrid 03.15.1951. Rowell 1992 p. 227 218 Duthuit, 1936 215 80 In 1917, in a moment that for Miró was as difficult as the time of the drôle de guerre in Varengeville, to the extent that as we said before, he was doing his military service and his battalion was destined precisely in Barcelona where it had taken place an insurrection, Miró has a reaction similar to that of 1940. The painter then writes to his friend Enric C. Ricart: "I have worked a lot. Now I'm in Montroig with my people, and here I plan to finish the summer painting. This summer I have written very little, against what I proposed, and also with great synthetism. The lonely life of Ciurana, the primitivism of those admirable people, my intense work, and above all my spiritual retreat, the opportunity to live in a world created by my spirit and my soul, set apart, like Dante, from reality (do you understand all this?) have imprisoned me inside myself, and as I became skeptical in everything that surrounded me I have been getting closer to God, to the trees and mountains and to friendship. A primitive like those people of Ciurana and a lover like Dante” 219. Miró's introspection exercise is recognized by his grandson, for whom “When he realizes that war is approaching, Miró retreats into himself and establishes an invisible barrier with the world. Like a monk, solidly rooted in the soil, allowing himself to feed on purity by nature. His imagination, forced to limit itself to sheets of paper, develops even more to interpret his feelings and transcribe them with drawings. The ladder is more present than ever in the Constellations, as if to transcend his material destiny” 220 . The Constellations have also been interpreted using other keys. One author suggests, for example, that the series constitutes Miró's artistic testament, made in Hebrew ciphers. For Murilo José Farias Dalla Costa, the set of washes is structured as a funeral song or meditation on death and the meaning of life. A work in which Miró “reveals in an allusive way his most prolific and secret beliefs –among which his religious beliefs of Jewish origin” 221. Saturnino Pesquero also sees influence of the Jewish cabal in the figures of Miró. This author develops his philosophical-metaphysical vision’ 222 of the painter citing Miró himself, who in a 1957 statement for XXe Siécle, responds to Pierre Volboudt that his true reality “is a deeper, more ironical reality, indifferent to the one before our eyes; and yet, it is the same reality. It need only be illuminated from below, by the light of a star. Then everything becomes strange, shifting, clear and confused at the same time. Forms give birth to other forms, constantly changing into something else.” It would be, according to Miró, “a secret language made up of magic phrases, a language that comes before words themselves, from a time when the things men imagined and intuited were more real and true than what they saw, when this was the only reality.” 223 219 Epistolari 2009, pp.65-66 Punyet Miró.& Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p.65 221 Dalla Costa 2012, p.p.15,125 222 Pesquero 1999 223 Rowell, 1986 p. 240 220 81 5. Skipping his dealer: the failed exhibition at MoMA (1941-1945) In the frustration of his personal, artistic and economic situation in the oppressive Spain of the early forties of the twentieth century, Miró, advised by Joan Prats and other Spanish friends, tried various strategies to overcome the trance. He could not sell in Spain because of the disastrous economic situation that the civil war had left and that provoked by autarchy, and because he was practically ignored in his country. Lost the source of French relations and income due to the war and to the flight to Cuba of Pierre Loeb, the only contact and source of money that he has left is his United States dealer Pierre Matisse. He is the first to whom he addresses in search of artistic outputs and cash icome. He will even decide to send him the only important work that he treasures and that somehow thinks that will constitute his lifeline: the Constellations. And this despite the fact that he knows that the dealer will consider that more than half of the gouaches of the series belong to him. But the Constellations are not sent to New York and Matisse does not respond to the call, for long periods not giving any news. The little cash that his dealer sends him barely serves to cover his most elementary expenses, without being able to lead the life he thought he deserved, and forced him to depend economically on his elderly mother. These circumstances add frustration to the already discouraged painter, who then tries –in 1944– two parallel strategies: on the one hand to try to bypass Pierre Matisse and sell through other channels in the United States, the only real market given the economic boom that the war had generated, and on the other hand, to organize on his own two magnificent exhibitions of his work, first in New York and then in Paris. As we will see, the two strategies fail miserably due to a combination of lack of good contacts and poor preparation: he will not manage to sell anything, Matisse will wrest the Constellations from his hands, and the museums in New York and Paris will reject the idea of doing a great exhibition of his war work. Until the great 1993 exhibition in MoMA, historians had shown no interest in ascertaining the vicissitudes of the series of gouaches since its creation until its rise to fame in the second half of the 40s and its resurgence in the late 50s. But when preparing the Centennial exhibition, MoMA commissioned Lilian Tone –whom she identifies as former research assistant of the Department of Painting and Sculpture– to make the catalog of the exhibition. Tone not only makes the catalog, but is interested 82 in the genesis and avatars that surround the series, which she guesses will constitute the center of gravity of the display. The result is the essay "The Journey of Miró's Constellations” 224, that the MoMA relegated to the 1993 Autumn Museum Review instead of publishing it in the magnificent catalog of the exhibition225. The author –now curator of the museum– has indicated to the author of these lines that the reason for not being included in the book was that she finished the text, fruit of her 'fascination' for the Constellations, when the book was practically ready. Tone’s text will constitute the oracle of truth for all those who since 1993 have written about Miró and the Constellations. The problem is that the text was supervised by one of the parties involved and does not shed any light on the many uncertainties surrounding the role of MoMA, the way in which Pierre Matisse takes control of the series and the maneuvers of Miró himself and his team of advisers in Barcelona. As for the way in which the Constellations actually arrived in New York, historiography has established that it was through Brazilian Paulo Duarte. But in fact the details have not been published in any opf the thick essays dedicated to the artist. For the rest, Miró himself and his family have contradicted themselves several times in this regard. For example, the painter told Lluis Permanyer in an interview with Gaceta Ilustrada in 1978: “In Paris I met the cultural attaché of the Brazilian embassy. He sent the 23 Constellations to my dealer from New York, Pierre Matisse, in the diplomatic bag”226. But he does not specify who it is. Permanyer states in his 2003 book of conversations with Miró that the “deputy to the head of the department of culture at the Brazil Embassy in Paris” to whom he delivered the gouaches for shipment to New York was undoubtedly Joao Cabral de Melo Neto 227, disregarding the fact that since the opening of the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery it had been conclusively proven that the person responsible for the shipment was Paulo Duarte. Miró’s brotherin-law Lluís Juncosa indicates for his part in his Notes for a small biography of Miró: “And he will meet Adriano de Guzmao, a Portuguese diplomat, and a Brazilian who was called something like Melo Neto, who will be the person who sent the Constellations, by diplomatic bag, to the Matisse Gallery in New York” 228. As we will see, the person responsible for the shipment was not Melo Neto, who in 1944 had not yet joined the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor Gusmão, who was not a diplomat. The books on Miró, which did not address the issue during the five decades that followed the completion of the Constellations, have later settled the matter thanks to Lilian Tone. Dupin, Penrose, Malet, etc. limit themselves to making a brief reference to the essence of Tone's article, that is, that MoMA could not get hold of the gouaches for economic reasons. We are going to try to shed some more light on the matter using 224 Tone 1993, p.p. 1-6 Lanchner 1993 226 Permanyer 1978 Rowell 1992 p. 295 227 Permanyer 2003, pp. 141-142 228 Juncosa, Lluìs 1994, p.38. Cited in Boix Pons 2011 225 83 the documentation that has been published or made available since then, contrasting it with other data that had not been taken into account, in order to see to what extent Tone’s story needs updating. John Russell, in his documented 1999 work Matisse: Father and Son, does not cite Tone's article, but indicates that the 23 Constellations would have been brought to MoMA “under diplomatic immunity, by a Peruvian diplomat who was stationed in Madrid. They were consigned to the Museum of Modern Art, to which the diplomat in question had been of service on other occasions” 229. Undoubtedly, Russell refers to Paulo Duarte, but he is wrong in almost everything: Neither Duarte –who is not Peruvian– nor any of those involved in the shipment are diplomats; the expedition is commercial and is made by ship and not personally carried by the Brazilian. Nor 23 gouaches are sent, but 22, although Russell correctly points out that the addressee is not Pierre Matisse, as Miró says, but MoMA. In order to try to reflect what really happened, there is no other way than following the chronological approach. Tone’s description is repeated word by word in one of the two only relatively long essays dedicated to the Constellations of which we have had knowledge, the Master thesis of Murilo José Farias Dalla Costa Mortuary meanings of the series The Constellations of Joan Miró: “According to the initial idea of Miró, the series of paintings ... should have been acquired all by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which would have guaranteed its permanent exhibition in this prestigious institution in New York” 230. The same goes for Antonio Boix in his exceptionally well-documented blog Mirador: “Miró initially planned to send his paintings to MOMA in March 1944, so that they would be exhibited towards the spring” 231. This same version is repeated in the 2004 doctoral thesis of Jaume Reus Morro Escape and internal exile in Joan Miró's work: 1939-1945, the most elaborated work up to the moment that addresses the Constellations theme: “Miró is convinced of the significance of the series, and that is why he plans their exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York” 232. But if Miró had wished to market the Constellations by any means other than Matisse, he would not have written to the gallerist from Varengeville on Wednesday, January 12, 1940: “Work runs smoothly. I am now doing very elaborate paintings and I feel I have reached a high degree of poetry –a product of the concentration made possible by the life we are living here” 233. And he says this nine days before completing the first gouache of the series, Sunrise, which he finished on Friday, January 21. As we saw, Miró gives again details of the series to Matisse three weeks later, on Friday, February 4, four days after completing his second gouache, The Escape Ladder, when, after telling him that he was working on the series, he added that “With this series and the one before it 234, you could do a very, very fine exhibition. I am planning to work on these paintings, using a very elaborate technique, for about 3 months –making 229 Russell 1999 p. 252 Dalla Costa 2012, p.15 231 Boix Pons .2011 232 Reus 2004 p.293. 233 PMGA 18.34. Rowell 1992 p.168, Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, p.720 234 Varengeville series I & II, precursors of the Constellations 230 84 allowance for the fact that, fortunately, they will lead me to conceive of other works which I will prepare at the same time...”. The fact that he points out later in this letter that he will not send them until they are all finished does not indicate in any way that he was trying to avoid the commercialization by the gallerist: “With the series of 38 x 46 canvases I m working on now, I can’t even send you the finished ones, since I must have them all in front of me the whole time –to maintain the momentum and mental state I need in order to do the entire group”235. In short, Miró thought from even before finishing his first gouache that they were destined to be exhibited and sold by Pierre Matisse. Miró was convinced that Pierre Matisse was the right dealer and propagandist. He was happy with the way he carried out his exhibitions and with the promotion he made for his work to be displayed in museums, either in exhibitions or in permanent collections. What he could not understand is how he did not get a better slice of the cake, how the exclusive rights he has given to Matisse to market his work does not allow him to live materially as he deserves, that is like a good bourgeois. In January of 1939, when the end of the Spanish civil war approaches (“the rebel troops are getting closer and closer to Montroig”), Miró is calm. In a friendly letter to Pierre Matisse 236 written from Paris on January 2, he sends him a photo of the – frightful– decorative panel he had made for the bedroom of the gallerist's children and tells him about Pierre Loeb, without showing any sign of concern for the future of his French dealer –who was Jewish. But he continues to point out that “In view of the very disturbing state of Europe, I would prefer that you deposit my emoluments in my bank account in New York. That will be more prudent, and I will let you know when to make a transfer to my bank in Paris as I may need funds. According to my accounts, you owe me $ 660 for the year 1938 plus 220 for the year 1939 (which makes a sum of 880)”. Matisse answers him on January 16 and confirms that in a next letter he will send him the receipt of depositing the money in his New York account. And he adds, apologizing in advance, that Miró needs to send him paintings, because he plans an exhibition for the spring 237. The following letter of which we have proof from Miró to Matisse dates from August 25, just a week before Hitler invaded Poland, and is sent from the Clos des Sansonnets in Varengeville-sur-mer. The tone has changed and the concern becomes more present: “I was working very well in this beautiful country and here we are immersed in this nightmare” 238. The next letter from Miró to Matisse is also written from Varengeville on September 15, 1939, two days before Stalin invaded Poland from the East, despite which Miró, installed in the tranquility provided by the drôle de guerre, tells him that “I have resumed my ordinary life and I am satisfied with my work”. Again the economic concern is paramount, and for the first time we see that he suspects that his source of income in Europe will disappear. After asking the gallerist to put the New York 235 PMGA 18.34. Rowell 1992 p.168, Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, p.p. 720-721 PMGA 18.24. Umland 1993 p. 334 & Reus pp. 713-714 237 PMGA 18.24. Reus pp. 714-715 238 PMGA 18.24. Umland 1993 p. 334 236 85 account in the joint name of his and Pilar Juncosa's, and do what is necessary so that both can draw cash from the Parisian branch of the bank when they need it, he adds that “Since all that will take a while, I ask you to send me a check for $ 220 (monthly payment for July)”239. The same disregard for the military situation is clear from the content of his next letter to Matisse, dated October 24, when Hitler has just ordered his armies to invade France, an assault that will not occur because his generals convince him to wait until spring. Five and a half years after having signed his first contract with Miró, and after having made a good amount of money from the works of the painter, which he obtained for very few dollars –some $ 11,400 at 2016 purchasing power for the entire production of one year– Matisse decided to take a step forward and offer a stable and better remunerated contract. He does so because in those years he had organized numerous solo exhibitions by Miró (New York and Chicago in 1934, New York in 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938 and 1939) and placed his work among the great North American collectors and museums, making handsome profits. Another reason that prompts the gallerist to offer more money to Miró is that the painter had done a lot of work in those years: the famous savage paintings that so please Pierre and his clients, especially the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which will acquire in this time, among others, Rope and People of 1935, Still-life with old shoe of 1937 and Self-portrait 1 of 1938. Each painting that MoMA acquires and exhibits implies a multiplying effect on American demand, which means cash for the dealer. And MoMA exhibits Miró's work in two exhibitions in 1936, one in 1937 and one in 1939. Less important museums, such as those in Philadelphia, Chicago or Minneapolis, also acquire paintings by Miró, and they are followed by big collectors, always passing through Pierre Matisse's. In addition, the paintings Miró does those years are the size that collectors and museums prefer –an average of 75 by 110 cm. Pierre Matisse evaluates the situation and decides to offer Miró a contract that, without being opulent, is much better than the previous one. This also prevents the painter from being tempted to accept offers from other American dealers. On November 3, 1939 and after having met Matisse in Paris, Miró has already made his decision. In a letter to the gallerist, and in view of the difficulties he guessed to haunt Jew Pierre Loeb –meanwhile mobilized in the army– he accepts Matisse's offer: “I have reflected on our conversation and I have decided, to put you in a position to deal thoroughly with my work, of giving it to you in its entirety. I do it to encourage your efforts and those of Teeny by giving you facilities, and so that, once the market is restored, you will not hesitate a moment and be in a position to place my painting in where it will have the right to demand.” The remuneration is set at 320 dollars per month (about $ 5,480 of 2014 taking into account inflation) for the entirety of his work. The letter ends with rudimentary accounts, in which Miró indicates that Matisse owed him as of July 31, 220 dollars, but that a check from the gallerist on September 19 of $ 250 resulted in Miró owing him $ 30. It also indicates that the “Contract with Pierre (Loeb) is paid until August 31” 240. For Miró, the fact of having a contract in 239 240 PMGA 18.24. Reus pp. 715-716 PMGA 18.24. Reus pp. 717-718 86 dollars and not in French francs is a considerable improvement, because the Gallic currency had suffered devastating devaluations in previous years. In 1936 two depreciations, the first of 35% and the second of another 25%, which in a few months meant the value of the currency was reduced to less than half. In addition, charging in dollars allows him to have the money deposited in New York or Geneva and play fully in the forex market, a game he had learnt from friends and diplomats, who at that time –and today also in many parts of the world– obtained by this method a good part of their real income. But once the deal is concluded, the tug of war on payments on one side and delivery of canvases on the other, begins immediately. On Monday, November 20, 1939, Pierre Matisse sent Miró a telegram from Paris, stating that he can not make the deposit in the bank and that he leaves for New York on Saturday, but another undated cable sent from the United States confirms that he has “Telegraphed the monthly installments, November included”, adding immediately that he impatiently awaits the paintings he has seen in the Miró’s studio and he needs for the exhibition and beggs the painter to communicate by telegram the date of delivery to Arthur Lénars in Paris, the company he used to send works of art to the United States 241. Miró feels at any rate calm in Varengeville. He considers that he has won some points from Matisse and that he is in a position of strength, so he does not hesitate to show reluctance to send work, even if it belongs to the gallerist. The painter responds therefore on February 4, 1940 from Varengeville giving the gallerist the dimensions of the paintings he has seen and the information that Christian Zervos will reproduce them in in Cahiers d'Art. After telling him for the first time about the Constellations (he has already painted two), he suggests something that will obviously displease Pierre Matisse: “The Zervos came the other day and said that all those paintings should be shown in Paris before leaving for America and that Yvonne would like to exhibit them in her gallery, which is very beautiful. The idea seems interesting to me, because what matters most is that the works be consecrated in Paris, where our paintings have a resonance, which would undoubtedly have an impact in New York and the success of your exhibition would be more considerable and effective.”242 Matisse does not want delays nor does it please to thim that meddlesome Yvonne Zervos exposes the works, and he replies to Miró in a telegram dated February 19: “SHIPMENT IN PREPARATION AT LENARS. PRAY INCORPORATE WITHOUT DELAY THE CANVASES, WHICH I NEED URGENTLY” 243. And he does not cease from then on to ask Miró for paintings, which he considers appropriate due to the monthly payments he makes. Matisse also fears they might be blocked in Europe, given that the drôle de guerre has ended in the meantime: on April 9 Germany has invaded Denmark and Norway, and On May 10, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Fall Gelb, the Western offensive against the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. On Tuesday, June 4, 1940 Matisse comes back to Miró asking for canvases in a telegram: "MONEY WENT TO ROYAL CANADA STOP 241 PMGA 18.24. Reus pp.718-719 PMGA 18.34. Reus pp. 720-721 243 PMGA 18.34. Reus p.722 242 87 DELIVER THE PAINTINGS IMMEDIATELY TO LENARS STOP ADVISE CHANGE OF ADDRESS WE THINK OF YOU. FOLLOWS LETTER” 244. Although he has no news from indolent Miró, he is worried because in those days the evacuation of 350,000 British, French and Belgian soldiers from Dunkirk to England is taking place, an operation completed on June 4. Ten days later German troops enter Paris. Miró receives the Tuesday 4 cable on Thursday 6 in Perpignan, next to the Spanish border, from where he sends a telegram to Matisse giving him the address of his parents' home: "BACK TO BARCELONA PASSAGE CRÉDITO” 245. In the letter that he wrote to Matisse that night from the Hotel de France, he informed the dealer that since “we passed very quickly through Paris, it has been impossible for me to send you the paintings. I'll take care of it when I'm in Barcelona” where he will head in two days. Miró asks Matisse to behave in these difficult days as a friend and not as a dealer, and after assuring him that he will undoubtedly find a way to send him his paintings, he asks him not to speak in the correspondence that he sends to Spain – addressed to his wife– about money or monthly payments and that when he needs money he will ask for it, using the catalogs code (1 catalog ordered equal to 100 $ requested) 246. The next letter we are aware of is one sent by Pilar Juncosa from Palma de Majorca on August 22, 1940, in which Miró says he has received news from the gallerist and talks about family issues, without mentioning at any time the question of sending the paintings that Matisse awaited –nor the Constellations, of which he has already completed ten– nor the money 247. And nothing more until the 7th of January of 1941, when Pierre Matisse shows in a telegram to Pilar Juncosa his restlessness due the lack of news: "WORRIED WITHOUT NEWS WE SEND BEST WISHES NEW YEAR AWAITING NEWS” 248. In another letter from Pilar Juncosa to Pierre Matisse dated March 23, 1941, we find a hidden reference to the subject of the canvas shipments: “The field was marvelous here at the time of almond tree bloom, it is a beautiful country, full of poetry, unfortunately I do not see at the moment how I could send you the images” 249. He is referring to the impossibility of sending the paintings that Matisse is still waiting nor the Constellations gouaches, of which he has already finished 16. One month later, on April 28, Pilar writes again from Palma, referring cryptically to the Constellations: “Juan always studies a lot; now he works in an extremely thorough and intense way and we are very happy, not only for the results obtained, but also for the documentary value of those studies, which can represent new starting points for new and important achievements that he prepares”. And then he informs Matisse that he will still not send him paintings: “It is for this reason that this work is very valuable for him and so for some time he will need to have it at sight to use it as control material, for comparison and study. As soon as he doesn’t need them, he will inform you”. She e immediately 244 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.724 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.725 246 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, pp.725-727 247 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, pp.727-728 248 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004 p. 729 249 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, pp.729-730 245 88 goes on to talk about the reverse side of the coin, that is, about remuneration: “Let us also hope that the material difficulties we face today are going to decrease” 250. We understand that despite Matisse’s insistence and the promises of the painter, he has not taken any streps to send the paintings he had in Paris, occupied by the German troops for already ten months. It is not until six and a half months after that Miró tells Matisse, through a letter from Pilar Juncosa, that he has done something to take care of the matter. In a letter of November 15, 1941, he informs him that “During the days we spent in Barcelona (Miró) has made some efforts to send images and hopes to succeed.” We have here confirmation that the images of the previous letter were the paintings that Matisse has been waiting for three years. But the main reason for the letter is not the sending of canvases, but to ask for money: The letter begins in its first line with a reproach to the gallerist: “For some time now we have not received news from you”, and Pilar soon tackles the gist of the matter: “We need to receive catalogs, naturally at an advantageous price for us. Could you tell me as soon as possible if you can send them to us? Talk to Moncha and her husband, they could give you some advice” 251. In short, Pilar criticizes the gallerist on Miró’s behalf for not giving any signs of life (or sending money), he insinuates that Miró may be able to send him work, but immediately urges him to send a good amount of money. To prevent Matisse from claiuming he would get into trouble by sending cash, he reminds him that the person who is already his informal agent, José Luis Sert, is in New York. Sert could find a way to get the money to him, and precisely through the black market, so as to be able to get pesetas “at an advantageous price”. The method of sending money through Paco Sert, the architect’s brother, undoubtedly in charge of finding Barcelona businessmen, black marketeers or wealthy people who need foreign currency on a regular basis, paying him in pesetas, will not fail to raise problems, as shows a letter from Miró to his architect friend of October 14, 1948, after his 1946 contract and when in addition to catalogs at $ 100 there is also talk of prints at $ 1,000: “He also asked me to tell you that at the moment he has problems finding the money to pay for the lithos and begs you to suspend remittances for the moment... As soon as Pierre sends you the announced consignment of 1 engraving and 5 catalogs, tell me, so as not to disturb to your brother, and I'll tell you what to do with it” 252. Miró had completed the last gouache of the series, The Passage of the Divine Bird, on September 12, 1941. And the lack of money makes him think of sending them to the United States to earn cash. The advantage of the gouaches with respect to canvases was that they would be much easier to transport. On November 12, three days before Pilar wrote to Matisse, Miró had asked Joan Prats to send money to Palma and explaining a detailed plan for sending the series through architect José María Gudiol Ricart 253. He was an old acquaintance of the family, since he was very attached to Vic and knew the two successive husbands of Dolors, Miró's sister. Nephew of Josep Gudiol i Cunill –who carried out excavations in the Mas Riambau of Jaume Galobart 250 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, p.730 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp.731-732 252 1 etching = 1.000 $ Letter reproduced on Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p. 121 253 Epistolari 2009, p.609 251 89 and intimate of Lluis G. Ylla– he had also tried to stop the exactions of the republican militiamen in Vic and region in order to safeguard its artistic heritage, which included that of the old Rectory of Tona and the private collection of Galobart, owner of the Tona Iberian Stele. In this first letter, Miró does not indicate who will be the recipient of the shipment, not mentioned either in his following letter to Prats on the matter, dated December 1, which also reminds him of the money issue 254. It is not until December 8, 1941 that in a third letter to Prats Miró asks his friend to inform him of the date of departure of the gouaches, so he can “write to Matisse so that the gallerist is ready and makes his preparations” 255. In fact, in the third letter to Prats, and after thanking him for having taken care of sending him funds, he asks him to tell Joaquim Gomis that he is waiting for a reply from Matisse about the money, which proves that Gomis was now in charge of the black market currency operations. We can therefore assume that Miró has decided to send the Constellations to his dealer, perhaps as an element of pressure to force him send the monthly emoluments he has not seen since September 1939, that is more than two years before. The gallerist certainly does not see things with the same eyes as the painter: if he has not sent Miró funds for two years, much longer time has passed without receiving work for which he had already paid. Miró has a plan, since on Wednesday, November 12, he writes –in Catalan– to his friend Joan Prats, from Palma de Majorca, a letter exclusively dedicated to sending the series and in which we see that the project has been discussed since some time. After pointing out to Prats that he thinks the architect José María Gudiol Ricart must have already returned from Madrid, he informs him: “He told me that he will embark in a month's time. I would greatly appreciate you interviewing him to talk about how to send my works. I insinuated that he take them with him in his suitcase. You could ask again if it would be inconvenient to do so, I do not think this would be abusing him because it is only a small porfolio with 22 works on paper of 38 x 46 cm. In case that caused him some inconvenience, you could ask him what we could do to do the shipment by other means”. The problem that arises to Miró is that he is in Palma, while the paintings are in Montroig, and he asks Prats whether “If it is not a problem for you, you could go and get them on a weekend”. Miró gives his friend all kinds of details on how to find the Constellations and how to protect them: “The porfolio is on the last shelf of a kitchen table that you will see to the right of the studio. As the covers of the porfolio are not very solid, to avoid receiving blows during the trip, it would be convenient to take a corrugated cardboard, the one used to send packages by mail, so they would be protected. Once you have them, pack them yourself leaving them flat, and before sending them we would agree to show them to a small group of friends and I would tell you which one you have to leave apart to keep it for Pilar”. In that same letter of November 12, 1941 , Miró reminds Prats of his need for money 256. 254 Epistolari 2009, p. 611 Epistolari 2009, p. 612-613 256 Epistolari 2009, p.609 255 90 But it seems that Prats does not rush to follow Miró’s instructions and travel the 130 kilometers that separate Barcelona from Montroig, so the painter writes again on Monday, December 1, 1941, reminding him of his previous letter: “Some weeks ago I wrote you a few words talking about the issue of sending my last series of paintings. Since our friend Gudiol told me that he should embark on the 16th of this month and that this date is approaching without you having talked about it again, I would be grateful if you could write to me a few lines to know what to expect. If Gudiol would take them, you could show them before they leave to a small group of friends, we'll agree on that. I would also indicate the painting that would have to be separated to stay here, and that I would keep for Pilar”257. Miró's interest and concern with this issue of the Constellations is evident in the fact that one week later, on Monday, December 8, he wrote again to Prats: “Thank you very much for all your efforts regarding what I asked you. And many thanks also to friends Gudiol and Figueras, to whom I beg you to transmit them.... In case you still have not been to Montroig, I will tell you that my mother has already returned to Barcelona, but the tenant Peret and his family are very kind people and they will attend you very well. The paintings porfolio is on a shelf of the white wooden table in my studio.” In this third letter to Prats on the 'Gudiol affair', Miró again suggests to his friend the possibility of making a small show of the series. The painter includes in this letter to Prats some instructions on the way in which the works should be displayed, instructions that he will later develop when he sends the series to the Museum of Modern Art in New York: “I also recommend that you show them in strictly chronological order, in order to see exactly the trajectory of my thought during this stage that I consider one of the most important of my œuvre, and that opens me unsuspected horizons. I also have the greatest interest in showing the back of the painting in which, in the form of graphics, I have indicated the date and the title of the painting, the latter written in the form of a sketch poem, this being important, as these gouaches exceed painting, so petty as purpose, to fully reach music and poetry”. The last instructions to Joan Prats are to let him know the reactions of the attendees to the small show, to indicate exactly the date of departure, so as to foretell Matisse of their arrival and to separate the gouache that will be offered to his wife. “I would also be grateful if you could also tell me exactly what day Gudiol is embarking, so that I can write to Matisse so that he will be prepared and do his preparations. Of these paintings, you can remove from the porfolio, after having made the exhibition, the one I keep for Pilar, which is dated in Varengeville-sur-Mer on 16/III/1.940, and is entitled L'étoile matinale. This painting, keep it yourself, placing it in a flat surface”. And finally, he thanks his friend for sending him the money he needed in Palma. Miró still hoped that his dealer was going to send him money, and so he tells Prats: “I am also very grateful for having taken care of the matter of money. Tell Joaquim that I am waiting for an answer from Matisse, and that once I receive it, I will come to Barcelona to sort things out with him”. It seems reasonable to think that, since his return to Spain, Miró has started, through his friend Gomis, a method to bring money 257 Epistolari 2009, p.611 91 to Barcelona without going through banbks, thus benefiting from the black market exchange rate. The money could come from Pierre Matisse's remittances or from what the painter managed to park in Switzerland when he fled with his family from Republican Catalonia. It is Gomis, in any case, who provides him with pesetas in Palma de Majorca or Barcelona, and it was he, too, who, through his brothers in Zurich, facilitated the opening of an account in Switzerland. Note that in those years, everyone who had access to foreign currency in Spain used the black market to obtain pesetas. Even American film distributors honored their exhibition contracts in Spain with money multiplied in this way 258. Architect José María Gudiol Ricart did not take the gouaches to the United States. Catalan historiography talks about his intention to go into exile in that country 259, but in reality Gudiol, who had been enlisted by force in the republican army, went to France in February 1939, to immediately move to Paris. Once there, Gudiol himself explains in a letter the first thing he did: “From there, I wrote immediately to the Marquis of Lozoya 260, giving account of my situation, offering to collaborate in the reconstruction and recovery of the Artistic Heritage of Spain and notifying him some concentrations of art improvised in the last moments and that I considered in danger” 261 . Thanks to his contacts with ancient art dealers and art historians in the United States, Gudiol moved from France to that country, where between 1939 and 1941 he taught at the University of Toledo, Ohio and at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York 262. But he returned to Spain in 1941, where he was appointed director of the Amatller Hispanic Art Institute in Barcelona, where he would develop a wide career until his death in 1985. In any case, in the following letters from Miró to Joan Prats, dated December 24, 1941 and April 27, 1942, the issue of sending gouaches to the United States is not mentioned at all, and when through other letters and sources, the issue of the shipment resurfaced two years later, the Miró clan has had another idea: given that his dealer does not provide money, instead of sending them to Pierre Matisse, they will sell them to MoMA itself to make an exhibition. 258 Aguinaga, Pablo León PhD Thesis El cine norteamericano y la España franquista, 19391960: relaciones internacionales, comercio y propaganda. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Facultad de Geografía e Historia Departamento de Historia Contemporánea. Madrid 2008 259 Epistolari 2009, p.610 260 Since 1939 Director General of Fine Arts. 261 “En su defensa: la intervención de Josep Gudiol en el Salvamento del Patrimonio Artístico durante la Guerra Civil”, reproduced in Ramón, Artur & Barbié, Manuel Tres escritos de Josep Maria Gudiol i Ricart., Opera Minora, Barcelona 1987. Cited in Cañameras 2013 pp. 178-211 262 Peiró Martín, Ingnacio & Pasamar Alzuria, Gonzalo Diccionario Akal de Historiadores españoles contemporáneo. Ediciones Akal, Madrid 2002 pp. 317-318 92 In the absence of the gallerist's reaction to his wife's messages, Miró personally writes a letter to him on February 26, 1942, and in it he reminds him again, with undisguised insistence, that he owes him money: “I have to know if the catalogs that I left are available and how many do you have, because I need them. Please be kind enough to inform me by telegram” 263. Matisse reacts, but not by telegram, but by means of a letter to Pilar Juncosa dated March 11, in which for the first time in years he talks about money, although in reality he does not explain why he has not sent it before, but why he can not send more thereafter: “The government allows me to send only $ 100 per month pus $ 25 for each member of the family, so I have sent $ 150” 264. We have not found any reference to the issue of sending paintings against money orders in the known fragments of the following letter from Miró to Matisse, dated May 12, 1942, although in fact there must be, since in another one dated July 11th indicates: “As I said in this letter, it is difficult for me at this time to send you new paintings. In view of this difficulty, I believe that it is necessary not to let the interest of the people who follow my work wane and that it is necessary to send them from time to time illustrated catalogs of my exhibition” 265. On the economic difficulties of Miró in that period we have a proof in his letter to his sister Dolors Miró Ferrà and his brother-in-law Lluís G. Ylla of March 2, 1943 266, in which he refers to the impossibility of launching the construction of the new Montroig studio. “I received a letter from Mossèn Josep, very pessimistic about the prices of fruits, that are falling in an alarming way. I also had the same information here. Given this, and that the end of the war is not foreseen any time soon, I panicked and I think it would be imprudent to undertake the works of the studio, which are expensive .. the most prudent thing is to postpone until the situation is clarified”. The situation would not improve until May 27, 1944 when his mother dies and he inherits half of her assets, so in July he writes again to his sister and brother-in-law, who would be in charge of carrying out the construction works, to launch the project 267. Second World War had already entered its final phase with the landing in Normandy (June 6) and the liberation of Paris would occur in August, so that in addition to his new patrimonial situation, Miró had reasons to be optimistic. Again a communication gap between dealer and painter, and Miró does not cease to proclaim his discomfort with the absence of letters from the gallerist. In a letter from Miró to José Luis and Moncha Sert on March 11, 1943, in which he urges them to write him, since their last letter dates from June 6 of the previous year, the painter asks them for news “because I barely have”, and insists: “And Pierre Matisse, how is he ? I'll appreciate if when you see him you tell him that I have not received any letter since one year ago.” The letter to Sert had an effect, since on March 22 Matisse writes to Miró asking him once again to send him paintings. Miró's response of June 1, 1943, while keeping a friendly attitude, is also openly frank: he doest not hesitate to reproach him for the lack of news: “Finally, with your letter of March 22, I have been able to 263 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.734 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp.734-735 265 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 336 & Reus 2004, p.736 266 Epistolari 2009, p. 627 267 Epistolari 2009, p. 644 264 93 receive news, which I had not had since you wrote to me on March 25, 1942”. The painter has also accepted as a fact of life that Matisse can not or does not want to send him money, and he keeps his temper and is not discouraged. He puts a brave face on it: “Fortunately, we are also very well, excellent health. Every once in a while I have hard times from the economic point of view, but nevertheless I manage to get ahead as best I can”. The next thing Miró does in the letter is to to make envious a dealer who does not stop asking him to send paintings: “The work is going well, this life of almost absolute isolation that I have here is doing great to immerse me thoroughly in meditation and in the realization of my work. My painting can thus become more and more concentrated and vigorous... I dare to say that the whole of my production in recent years will be very impressive; let's hope it can be seen one day”. And once exhibited his charms to the dealer, he clearly informs him that he will not be able to enjoy them: “What you ask –that I should send you some more paintings– raises many difficulties at this moment. We would have to be certain that they would reach you safely. We should also have to hope for an immediate and substantial financial return. As things now are, we cannot count on either of those conditions. I think it would be wiser if I simply concentrate on my work and make my way as best I can. If you wish, we can talk about our arrangements when we next see one another” 268. To underline his bitter economic situation, he reminds Matisse that “From Pierre Loeb I have no news”. Miró means to tell in these letters to his dealer to take care of keeping alive interest in his work, but in regard to his new work and that of the last five years, he is not willing to send anything despite the contract with Matisse, who covered two years of the period. To see his paintings again, Matisse will have to accept a much improved agreement and put a lot of money on the table before the painter agrees to send anything. This is Miró's mood in the summer of 1943, and this is the strategy that his friends Prats, Gomis and probably Sert have advised him to follow. We have no more indications of the two having discussed the issue of work against compensation in a long time. No reference appears in the fragments that we have another letter from Miró to Matisse on November 24. In short, Miró considers that he has a treasure in his hands with the Constellations series, and he does not want to send it to his gallerist as he had tried two years before, desperately seeking at that moment how to sell it. It is probably then, in the fall of 1943, when Paulo Duarte appears in his life, introducing himself as an envoy of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Paulo Alfeu Junqueira de Monteiro Duarte (1899-1984), called the Brazilian Quixote, was a lawyer and journalist who was forced into exile after the failure of the 1932 revolution of the Sao Paulo oligarchy against the dictatorship of General Getulio Vargas, whose coup d'etat he had supported two years before. Very involved in the intellectual milieu of his country, he met 268 PMGA 18.34. Russell 1999 p.250, Umland 1993 p. 336 & Reus pp. 740-741 94 Benjamin Péret in 1928, and when he went into exile abroad he chose France as his first destination. He met in Paris Breton, Picasso, Miró, Dalí, etc. and also Henri Laugier and Jean Cassou, who had just been appointed inspector of historic monuments and then director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Until 1945, when he returns to Brazil once the war is over, and is named Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, Duarte remains initially in the French capital, where he works with ethnologist specialist in pre-Columbian America Paul Rivet, the friend of Cassou who founded in 1937 and directs the Musée de l'Homme. Duarte also forms part until the Germans arrive of the intellectual vanguard groups of the Parisian capital and together with Rivet and Laugier, forms the core of the network of FrancoBrazilian scientific contacts 269. After the 1940 armistice, the Brazilian intellectual travels to the United States, where he manages to get hired –possibly with the help of Laugier– in the programs that, at the initiative of Nelson Rockefeller, the Inter-American Affairs Office of the State Department establishes to strengthen relations with the countries of Latin America, and especially the Brazilian giant. His relations with the Department of State will create the hoax that Duarte is actually a paid agent of it. During his American exile, and with the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, Duarte taught at the University of Montreal, where Laugier was a fellow too. In New York he writes chronicles for public radio NBC and does small jobs for the Department of Architecture of MoMA. When after the Rio Conference in January 1942, Brazil breaks relations with the axis powers and declares war on them, MoMA, following the indications of Rockefeller, sends Chairman of the MoMA Architecture Committee Philip Lippincott Goodwin to the country to prepare an exhibition on Brazilian architecture. To plan the trip, Goodwin has the help of Paulo Duarte, whose status as an external collaborator in the museum climbs a step thanks to this circumstance. In the catalog of the exhibition, which Goodwin signs, the architect thanks “Dr. Paulo Duarte for translations into Portuguese and many good suggestions” 270 . When the war in Europe ends and MoMA wishes to establish contacts with cultural institutions of the continent, Duarte offers to act as its itinerant representative in Portugal, Spain and also in France, where he has many contacts among the intellectuals and in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS. In 1944 he returned to liberated Paris and resumed contact with his friends Jean Cassou (again appointed director of the Museum of Modern Art) and Paul Rivet, returned from his exile in Colombia, and with whom Duarte founded in 1945 the Institut français des hautes études brésiliennes, in which Henri Laugier was also integrated. It is in one of these trips that he visits Barcelona and enters, or resumes contact with Miró. The contact is established this time through Joan Prats i Vallès, the childhood friend of Miró and promoter of art in Barcelona since the 1930s. Prats, founder 269 Petitjean, Patrick Miguel, Paul, Henri et les autres: Les réseaux scientifiques francobrésiliens dans les années 1930, Université Paris VII, Paris 2001 270 Goodwin, Philip Lippincott Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942 Museum of Modern Art New York, 1943, p.7 95 together with José Luis Sert and Joaquín Gomis of ADLAN (Friends of the New Art) had played a role in safeguarding Catalan architectural heritage during the civil war, had many contacts with the French surrealists and it was normal for Duarte to get in touch with him. Paulo Duarte presents himself in his travels around Europe as a MoMA representative, and uses in his correspondence the institution’s letterhead with name and address (11 West 53rd street), as shown by a letter sent on April 22. of 1944 from Lisbon to Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, who had also resided in the United States at the invitation of the State Department. This letter also gives us an idea of the level of his contacts, since he talks about his interviews in Madrid with the Marquis of Lozoya, whom he describes as “the only support in Spain of leftist intellectuals or exiles.” 271. It has been said that Duarte was Director of the Latin Department of MoMA, but this statement is based solely on the statements of a presumed con man, Candido Costa Pinto, who in a letter of May 18, 1945, to a New York gallery trying to sell a group of gouaches that Miró will declare false, makes reference to his supposed friendship with Duarte 272. The two persons that according to the forgetful Miró facilitated the exit of the Constellations from Spain would have been “some Melo Neto and Gusmão ”. The confidence is picked up by journalist Lluis Permanyer 273. Miró's brother-in-law, Lluis Juncosa, also refers to the two people: “Adriano de Guzmao, Portuguese diplomat”, and the Brazilian “Melo Neto” 274. Boix Pons, for his part, identifies Gusmão as “Portuguese consul in Barcelona” at the time, and states that his participation consisted in “helping Miró to pass correspondence to Duarte, then living in Lisbon”275. But memory must have failed Miró once again, and he confuses names, jobs and roles. Melo Neto is none other than Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. But the problem is that he was not appointed Vice Consul in Barcelona until 1947, and in 1944 he resided beyond doubt in Brazil, where he joined only in 1946 the Itamaraty, the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Cabral de Melo will in Barcelona befriend Miró and publish a book about the painter in 1950, which contained woodcuts in the style of Parler Seul lithographs276, but he could not play any role in the matter before us, much earlier in time. As for the second person, he is Adriano de Gusmão, and he was not a diplomat, but a Portuguese art critic and founder of the Portuguese Museology Association, but most likely he played a real role in the journey of the Constellations. In October 1943, the prestigious Lisbon cultural magazine Seara Nova published an 271 Letter to Sérgio Buarque de Holanda dated 04. 22.1944, published by Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brasil 2002 on the centennary of his birth. Available on-line in http://www.siarq.unicamp.br/sbh/biografia_14.html 272 Letter from Costa Pinto to Downtown Gallery of 05. 18.1945. PMGA 18.35 Reus 2004, p.p. 770-771 273 Permanyer 2003 pp. 130, 141-142 274 Juncosa, Lluis 1994. p.38 275 Boix Pons 2011 276 Joan Miró “Private edition” for the author, printed by Enric Tormo and formally published by Edicions de l'Oc de Barcelona. Print run 125 copies, all signed by Miró and Melo 96 interview with Paulo Duarte, identified as “delegate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York”, by Adriano de Gusmão 277. In short, Duarte is the one who comes in contact with Prats and Miró and suggests the possibility of sending the Constellations to the MoMA, which he claims to represent. We can assume that the date on which Miró opts for the Duarte solution is December 1943 or January 1944, because on February 2 of that year the painter dedicates a drawing with watercolor and ink made on a page of the catalog of Miró's exhibition at the MOMA in 1941, which was undoubtedly brought by the Brazilian: “for Paolo Duarte, with all my heart. Miró. Barcelona. 2-2-1944” 278. We have a letter from Miró to Paulo Duarte, who by then has already become a close friend of the family, judging from the farewell: “Pilar and the girl send you two good greetings. My regards to Juanita and for you a big hug”. Reus dates the letter towards the month of January or February of 1944 279. If we take into account that Duarte has returned to Lisbon at the end of February or the first days of March –on March 5 he writes to MoMA–; that he has spent almost three months in Spain; and that when he passes through Madrid, essential point of his trip to Spain, he already has the Constellations with him, we must conclude that the letter must have been written by Miró probably in the second half of February, when Duarte has left Barcelona for some time and the painter thinks that he will already be in Lisbon. At the time of writing this letter to Duarte, the painter thinks that the shipment is imminent, because Miró will expand on this missive about his ceramic work, at this moment discarding the possibility of having it finished to be part of the expedition: “With Artigas we are working hard on ceramics, I believe that our effort will be a very serious thing. The realization of these pieces is a very slow process; because I suggest new techniques and also because fire intervenes with all the improvisations and unexpected things, we will still have work for quite some time. I do not think we can finish until the end of April”. Miró also made in this letter the first reference to the sculpture that will finally also be sent for the exhibition: “I will keep you abreast about this work, to see if you suggest any idea to see if there is any possibility of exposing these things too”. Miró thinks that the exhibition in New York will be made only with the Constellations, and will only add ceramics depending on the possible favorable response of Duarte and given the delay in the shipment. Basically that satisfies him, because in those moments he is absolutely accelerated with the technique: “This mode of work has allowed me to get more and more away from the idea of painting, with all the narrowness and limitation of spirit that it represents, and all get out of this idiocy that represents making a painting in a rectangle of cloth enclosed in a frame. All my efforts are to reach pure magic, naked and miraculous. The collaboration with Artigas is perfect, it is full of this spirit of the Far East, which Rimbaud already felt. Chance 277 Gusmão, Adriano, Uma oportuna entrevista sobre arte. Seara Nova, n.º 842, October 2, 1943, p.p. 94-95. Cited in Rodrigues Fitas, Manuel Joaquim Seara Nova – Tempos de mudança… e de perseverança (1940-1958), Master Thesis, Universidade Do Porto, Faculdade De Letras, 2010 278 No 1070 in Volume II of Joan Miró - Drawings : Catalogue raisonné des dessins de Jacques Dupin y Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Galerie Lelong, París 2007 279 Reus 2004, p.293 97 and superstitions continually come into play; the fact that a mouse, the Chinese god of ceramics walks through the garden when preparing the oven is a good omen” 280. The shipment of the temperas, ceramics and lithographs did not arrive in Philadelphia in a diplomatic pouch, which could only be addressed to the State Department, but as a simple package addressed to MoMA. Another proof that there was no diplomatic shipment is the fact that tariffs had to be paid to release the package from customs and that this took time. It is likely that Duarte told Gusmão about Miró's concern and that he would then volunteer to helping bring the Constellations to Portugal. We will point out in this sense that Gusmão published in 1946 a book entitled Inquérito museológico em Espanha (Museological Inquiry in Spain) and another one in 1948 titled Espanha artística. Notas de viagem (Artistic Spain. Travel Notes), which indicates that he had made trips through Spain in previous years. Miró talks about Gusmão in his letter to Duarte on May 15, 1944, in which he informs him in the first paragraph that he has had “direct news about you through our friend Gusmão, who is a man full of sensitivity and intelligence. He has arrived just in time because we had just finished the last piece of ceramics. We will give you 5 jugs together with a sculpture and an object, in total 7 ceramic pieces.... I told to you some time ago that we were printing lithographs. I have activated the test run and now they are finished; I will also give them to our friend Gusmão”. In Cirlot’s book, Gusmão appears photographed next to the painter and Joan Prats in the Miralles lithographic workshop, while plate XXXVI of the series is printed. He is identified as “Portuguese critic A. de Gusmão”. In any case, the activation of the Barcelona series would confirm our impression that it was printed precisely to be sent to MoMA and constitute in the exhibition the counterpoint to the Constellations, that is, the wild world before being domesticated by Miró’sspirituality. On March 5, 1944, Paulo Duarte wrote to his “dear friend” Philip L. Goodwin, then president of MoMA’s Architecture Committee. The letter is not written in English, a language in which they normally communicate, but in French, for which Duarte apologizes in the first line of the letter. If Duarte writes in French it is because he is following directives from the meticulous Miró/Prats/Gomis clan, which wants the painter's instructions to be transmitted to MoMA in the exact terms in which they were written by him. Duarte does not address the subject of the exhibition proposal until the fourth paragraph of the letter, in which after having indicated that the painter lives “completely ignored in Spain”, he tells Goodwin: “As for Miró, I think I have something interesting for the Museum: Miró has worked hard, but does not exhibit or sell anything. Even so, he has consented to send twenty-two paintings to be exhibited in the Museum and that I am going to send you possibly through diplomatic channels. They are completely unknown works, and only a handful of people in Spain have seen them... The twenty-two paintings measure 38 by 46 cm each, and are dated between January 21, 1940 and September 12, 1941”. Duarte adds a political note to confirm that the series has never been exposed and create a certain war drama, thinking that anti-fascism is still selling in the United 280 Reus 2004 p.p. 744-745 98 States: “The Spanish authorities, upon learning that these works were in my possession, asked if I did not want to expose them for a week in Madrid. In my opinion, it was a question of attenuating the very clear impression of political oppression, of which artists do not escape either. I told them that I could not do it without Miró's authorization. Once I consulted him, he refused, and the mentioned works came with me without having been seen”. According to Duarte, “the whole series constitutes a new phase of Miró. As he has told me literally, he is progressively abandoning all objective painting to devote himself exclusively to pure painting and magic”. Duarte's letter to Goodwin 281, written in connivance with, or directly by Miró, includes commercial instructions established by Joan Prats. In fact, just after informing MoMA that he has in his posession the series, and before manifesting how the Constellations are to be displayed, the first thing that Duarte does in the same fourth paragraph of the letter is to detail the commercial conditions of the operation, which are as flexible as Prats’ hats. On the one hand it affirms that MoMA will not have any obligation to buy the Constellations. But if it did not do so, he encourages the museum to sell them if by chance buyers appear, setting a sale price: $ 500 each tempera (about $ 6,700 in 2016, adjusted for inflation). Regarding the role of Matisse, the Miró clan states that once the exhibition is over, the unsold gouaches “should be handed over to Pierre Matisse, who is Miró's commercial agent in New York”. And if MoMA “does not want to take care of the commercial part, it can, after the exhibition, deliver everything to Matisse”. They do not say that if the objective of selling is not met, the gouaches must be given to Matisse, but that they can. Miró's reticence is justified by the fact that 13 of the 23 gouaches in the series have been painted while his last contract with Matisse (1939-1940) was still in force. In fact, the one that the painter gives to his wife, Morning Star, painted on March 16, 1940, also belongs to the dealer. To cover this fringe, the painter indicates to Goodwin in Duarte's letter that “if in the course of the exhibition buyers for all the paintings show up” –Miró gives a new opportunity to MoMA to decide to buy– “at least 7 must be reserved for Pierre Matisse to sell them in his gallery”. Miró does not want Matisse, his only potential source of income, to think he has been revoked from the commercial point of view, hence the minimum of 7 that he reserves for his dealer. This stipulation in favor of the gallerist constitutes an acknowledgment by the painter of the claim that Matisse has on a part of the series, and is also an insurance not to break with him and be able to market it in case the museum is not in conditions to buy or sell the gouaches. Duarte and Miró had to get the idea that the MoMA itself might sell the Constellations from the fact that the museum actually sold exhibited items from time to time. But in these cases they were pieces of much lower value than the gouaches, as was the case of the following exhibitions: Useful Household Objects under $5.00 (MoMA Exhibition No 80, 1938), Useful Objects of American Design under $10.00 (No. 93, 1940), Useful Objects of American Design under $10 (No 117, 1940), American Color Prints under $10 (No 118, 1940), Useful Objects Under $10 (No 160, 1941-1942), Silk Screen Prints Under $10 (No 161, 1941-1942), American Photographs at $10 (No 281 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.p. 745-750 99 162, 1941-1942), Useful Objects in Wartime under $10 (No 208, 1942-1943) or Christmas Sale of Pictures Under $75 (No 248, 1943-1944). Miró has also transmitted to Duarte written instructions about the planned exhibition at MoMA, instructions that the Brazilian literally copies in his letter: "Miró has given me some written instructions for the exhibition: 1. These paintings should be exposed together; under no circumstances should they be separated from each other; 2. I believe that they must be exposed following a strict chronological order, which will explain my evolution and my state of mind; 3. They should be framed with double glazing, so that one can see the title; 4. They should be framed in a very simple way, hanging on a simple white background and well separated from each other. 5. Before framing, check carefully if there is any mold in some places, especially on black, due to the humidity of the trip. In that case remove it carefully with a brush of marten hair. 6. In the event that the ceramic arrives in time for the exhibition, expose the pieces in a showcase that allows to see them from all sides ". Following the painter's instructions, Duarte also tries to promote in MoMA his recent production of ceramics and the personality of Artigas, whom he says has worked with Picasso: “The case of instruction no. 6 is also very interesting. For the first time, Miró makes ceramics. With this objective he has teamed up with a famous Catalan artist, who has lived many years in Paris, where he stayed until the German occupation. His name is Llorens Artigas, he has already made ceramics with Picasso and with many famous artists... They have agreed to send me 5 medium-sized vases, the first ones they made, for the aforementioned exhibition, which would provide a guarantee of high interest, since it will be the first time that ceramics will be seen along with Miró's paintings”. The claim that Artigas had worked with Picasso was false, since the Spaniard did not start making pottery until 1948, although he did know Llorens Artigas, whom he had denounced for theft. It is the so-called Picasso affair in which Artigas helped in 1930 a friend –Miguel Calvet– obtain the painter’s authentication of four hundred drawings by Picasso obtained from the painter's mother. They were exposed in a gallery, where they were seen by the artist, who immediately filed a complaint for theft. The lawsuit lasted for eight years and in the end Picasso recovered the drawings 282. Another interesting aspect of Duarte's letter is the confidence he has in having powerful allies with whom to carry out its objectives: “I am here taking the necessary measures so that the American Embassy in Madrid or Lisbon agrees to transport the ceramic pieces with urgency. But it would be very useful if the Museum tries to obtain 282 Richardson, John A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Alfred A. Knopf (Random House), New York 2007, pp. 403-412 100 an order in this regard from the State Department. In that case, the order must be given immediately, and include the paintings that I have with me.” Duarte had made some operations for MoMA commissioned by Goodwin, and of whose nature he gives an approximation in his letter of March 5, which states that “your written instructions have been followed to the letter”. He points out that the interest aroused by MoMa in Spain, and mainly in Barcelona, has been great. He informs his interlocutor that the Higher Council for Scientific Research in Madrid is very interested in establishing an exchange of publications with MoMA and that they have given him a good number of books in exchange for the ones he brought from the museum, including one about Picasso, which they have literally taken out of his hands. The letter also includes a reference to another parallel Duarte activity. He thanks Goodwin in his letter the –negative– answer that he has given him about some tapestries he had proposed that the museum buy. He justifies his action in an elegant way, stating that “it is not possible for me to avoid being offered things by people who come to see me as a representative of the museum. When it comes to works of art of exceptional value I send the data and the offers that they make because they can interest MoMA. The decision you take matters little, both because I can get rid of the people who offer them and because some might interest the museum.” Paulo Duarte’s letter to Goodwin is a formal and quite detailed proposal. It is undoubtedly based on written instructions written by Miró. Duarte however includes the proposal in a letter related to other matters that actually occupy more than half of the text, which appears to us as a blunder. Miró's proposal had enough importance to be dealt with in a separate letter, and since Duarte had to know that the letter would have to be circulated to several people in MoMA, the fact of dealing with several matters made it very difficult for the offer to be taken into consideration. Being drafted in French, rather than in English, will undoubtedly make it even more difficult for museum officials to take it into account. Two days after the letter from Duarte to Goodwin, on Tuesday, March 7, 1944, and without having said anything to Pierre Matisse, Miró, no doubt within the strategy designed by Prats, communicates his plans to make an exhibition at the MoMA to gallerist Valentine Dudensing. We have news of this letter only thanks to Anne Umland, who in the catalog of the 1993 MoMA exhibition reproduces a paragraph of it: “I’ve entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art several paintings which I consider very important –from the 1940-41 period. I think they will hold an exhibition this spring”. The quote has been taken from a letter from Dudensing to Monroe Wheeler, dated October 30, 1944 to which Umland has had access and in which the gallerist reproduces Miró's text and provides the date of Miró's letter 283. Wheeler was since 1940 head of the MoMA’s Department of Exhibitions and Publications. This letter from Miró to Dudensing could be interpreted as an act of Machiavellianism. On the one hand, we know that Dudensing was the one who had provided the painter the first opportunity to hold an individual exhibition in the United States. This could make us think that he was looking for an alternative to his dealer. But on the other 283 Lanchner 1993, p.336 and Note No. 663 in p.359 101 hand, Valentine was the first friend that Pierre Matisse made in New York. Writing to Valentine could be a way to send an indirect message to Matisse. Miró's perception of who Duarte was is clear from a letter he wrote two months later. The painter, and therefore Joan Prats, are convinced that they are dealing with a MoMA official with decision-making ability, or at least great influence. Miró gives him three signed proofs of the Barcelona series and treats him with great deference: “I think both the museum and you will be happy that I give you all this material, which together with everything you already have will allow you to make a great exhibition. Along with these 250 prints you will find, separated by a paper, 3 unnumbered proofs, one for Juanita, one for you and one for Gusmáo, which I want to offer you... I know that the museum will organize all this very well, but let me still say that in my opinion these lithographs, in black and white, very intense, should be exposed together with the ceramics, which have a great color potentiality” 284. When he wrote that letter on May 15, 1944, and despite not having any information that would hint a favorable reaction from MoMA, Miró and Prats still think that the exhibition will take place and prepare documentary material for it: “We have done also many photos of Artigas study, both of us working, of the printing press pulling the lithographs, and of my study. All this I will also give to Gusmáo and I think it will be interesting for organizing the exhibition, as documentary elements.... I have hastened to write to you all this so that you can communicate it to the museum, which for organization purposes will need to know it urgently”. Until today, no documentary evidence of how Pierre Matisse learns of Miró's initiative has been published. The painter refrains from communicating it to him, hoping to place him in front of a fait accompli, and the gallerist does not show signs of having found out. But it seems far-fetched to think that Matisse had not been immediately informed by his friend Dudensing or directly by the museum, given the very intense relationships between MoMA and the gallerist. Between 41 East 57th Street where the Pierre Matisse Gallery is located and MoMA’s 11 West 53rd Street, there are only 500 meters. For the rest, given that the museum was, at least in its first 30 years of existence, a matter of a handful of collectors, we are talking about extremely close commercial and personal relationships between Matisse and the great patrons of the museum. We can recall in this sense that Philip L. Goodwin himself was a client of the gallery. But there is still more: Anson Conger Goodyear, the founder and President of MoMA since its opening in 1929 until 1939, was in fact the first client of the Pierre Matisse Gallery, when he bought the drawing by Henri Matisse Jeune Marocaine in 1932 285. And he had also bought him paintings by Joan Miró in 1935. In 1944, despite having ceded the presidency of the museum, the millionaire was a member of the Procurement Committee and was also a member of MoMA’s Board of Trustees, of which he formed part until his death in 1964. Goodyear’s successor in 1939 as chairman of the MoMA Board of Trustees, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, retired from the presidency in 1941 to focus on his war work as 284 285 Reus 2004, p.p. 751-753 Russell 1999, p.82 102 coordinator of anti-Nazi activities in Latin America and as Deputy Secretary of State, but continued being a member of the organization and regained the position of President of MoMA on his return to civilian life in 1946. In 1938, Rockefeller had commissioned, through Pierre, a Henri Matisse decoration for his new apartment, and continued buying the dealer paintings, even by Miró. Stephen C. Clark, one of the founders of the museum that had acceded to the position of Chairman (coordinator or nº 2 of the Board of Trustees) when Rockefeller arrived at the Presidency and the person who exerted the maximum authority of MoMA in 1944, was a client of Matisse in the Valentine Gallery since 1931, although he declined to buy in 1937 Miró’s Harlequin's Carnival, which was also rejected byJoseph Pulitzer. As for James Thrall Soby, who had been appointed Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture in October 1943 and was therefore the person most directly involved in both the possible acquisition and the eventual exhibition, the critic was one of the main clients of Pierre Matisse, and had bought him in the 30s paintings by Miró, Balthus, De Chirico and Matta. Finally, although Alfred H. Barr .had been removed from the direction of the Museum –which he had been leading for 14 years– a few months before Duarte's letter, he was then acting as Advisory Director, so he had to be informed of the proposal. And the relations between him and the gallerist were also very close since the founding of the museum in 1929. In short, all those who know Miró's proposal to sell and expose the Constellations in MoMA are people very close to Matisse and some of them had to tell the gallerist, if only to make sure that the proposed works were not subject to contractual easements. In any case, we have proof that the gallerist was informed immediately. In a letter from Matisse to Miró on April 6, 1944, he informs him that he has known that he works in ceramics: “According to Sweeney, you do ceramics. I hope it is not due to lack of material. In one of my last letters, repeated afterwards, I told you of the great hopes I had of receiving some gouaches to use them in a publication that I would like to make of your paintings, at least of those I have” 286. Sweeney was the Director of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA from 1935 until he was replaced by Soby, but he returned to his position in January 1945 and remained curator of the museum until becoming Director of the Guggenheim Museum in 1952. This reference to ceramics and The Constellations confirm our hypothesis that the gallerist is already aware of Duarte's letter to Goodwin on March 5 and his letter can therefore be interpreted as a warning to the painter, giving him the opportunity to explain himself. He also informs Miró that he is moving the gallery from the 17th floor to the 6th, always in the Fuller Building, and that he will inaugurate the new premises with an exhibition of his paintings. From the following letter from the gallerist to the painter, dated April 22, we only have the reference that he informs him that Miró’s “exhibition will be made with works from 1934 to 1939, oils and gouaches on celotex and trôle”287. Matisse had found out and, in the absence of the painter's reaction to his warning, he sent a letter to Miró, of which we have no other references than those that appear in 286 287 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.751 Reus 2004, p.751 103 Miró's reply. Matisse tells the painter that he knows everything and demands explanations in a now open way. The answer is the first letter from Miró since Duarte submitted his proposal to MoMA. It is dated June 17, 1944, that is, more than a month after writing to the Brazilian the letter of May 15 we mentioned earlier and in which the painter tells him of the intense preparations he is making for the MoMA exhibition, how he has finished firing the ceramics and printing the lithographs, and in which he conveys above all his absolute conviction that the exhibition will take place. As for the date of Matisse's letter, we would place it in April, since it is very likely that, like Matisse will do later, Miró took his time before responding, after consulting his friends Prats and Gomis. In fact, Matisse's letter asking for explanations to Miró could be that of April 22. The gallerist would have left the painter more than two weeks to respond to his letter of April 6 and Miró let almost two months pass before answering him, both to reflect on how to react to the fact that Matisse was aware, and to find out before writing what had been the result of Duarte's efforts and what MoMA had answered. The two letters that we will comment below, that is, Miró's response to Matisse's announcement that he is aware of the plan and the gallerist's answer, constitute an example of the tug-of-war that constitutes the basis of any relationship between artist and dealer. Miró lies shamelessly, is affectionate and haughty at the same time, challenging and conciliatory, firm and flexible. He affirms his rights and the high vision he has of his art and his future and demands from the gallerist that he show himself up to the circumstances. And Matisse responds in kind: he lies openly, he is almost sarcastic about the absence of news from the painter, but he also shows himself affectionate, conciliatory and ready to forgive Miró's affront. And he warns him not to get carried away by the siren calls that promise him glory and wealth that will eventually reveal themselves as transient. Miró begins his June 17 letter 288 with irony: “My dear friend, I am very happy to finally receive your recent news, especially considering that until now I did not receive even answers to the letters I sent you”. Indeed, Miró was at the beginning of the decade complaining of not having news of Matisse, and especially of not receiving any remuneration, as attested letters to other friends. But it is also true that he had neither sent him a single painting nor had he written to him while planning and developing his MoMA strategy. The gallerist has asked for explanations, but Miró refuses to give them and only evokes his initiative to bypass him in a line and a half, placed precisely after a paragraph in which he communicates the death of his mother three weeks before. He deals with family matters at the end of the letter, but the information of the death goes up to the beginning, no doubt to soften Matisse so that he would not to react too harshly. And he does not admit to having worked behind the dealer's back, since he claims that he had kept him informed, and that only chance has caused the letter to be lost: “According to what you tell me, the letter I had entrusted to Duarte, of the Museum of Modern Art, has not reached your hands”. He implies shamelessly that the Post Office is to blame. In any case, Miró is not willing to waste more time and energy 288 PMGA 18.34. Russell 1999 p.251, Umland 1993 p. 336 & Reus 2004, p.753-755 104 in the discussion, and then ditches the question: “Duarte tells me nevertheless that an agreement has been reached with you regarding the paintings that I have sent to the museum, but if there is still any difficulty, I am absolutely convinced that everything will be easily fixed when I come to see you in New York, which I will do as soon as possible”. We do not believe that Duarte has given him such information about an agreement, to which the gallerist does not make any reference in his answer. It is simply a way for the painter to end the discussion pretending that it is dialectically closed. Then, after assuring Matisse that if he makes ceramics and lithography it is not to abandon painting, but to “resume it with a new impetus”, Miró returns to his defiant attitude and refuses not only to send him paintings, but also photographs of them: “If I do not send pictures of the paintings I have here is because I think it would be a mistake, since the reproductions do not give more than a very weak idea of the original. Also, I want to save the bulk of my production here; it would be equally a considerable error to send things separately, it is all that will have to be seen one day, and not fragments, then I prefer to wait”. And in case the dealer did not understand, he says it more clearly then: “Quite apart from all that, you will understand that, as I now have no money, I prefer to maintain a considerable stock of paintings that will help me to get back on my feet again after the war. Once my debts are paid off, I can reclaim the position in life that is due to me”. And he concludes by noting that he is “fully aware of the capital role that my painting should play in the future, and at 51 years old, it is time to play hard, to be or not to be. It is therefore legitimate for me to contemplate things from an exclusively objective point of view, these last years have been quite hard for me, and they are even more so now, as to act differently”. The painter in any case still does not know anything in those moments of the whereabouts of the Constellations or of Duarte. The only reference to the departure of the shipment that we have is a letter from Duarte to Goodwin dated July 10, 1944 289 in which he warns him that he has managed to ship the Constellations, the seven ceramic pieces and the 250 lithographs aboard the ship S.S. Pero de Alenquer, that departing from Lisbon was expected to arrive at Philadelphia between the 23 and the 30 of July. But Duarte does not communicate it to the restless Miró, given that the painter asks in a letter to Joan Prats of July 23, 1944: “Have you had more news from America or Lisbon? Take note that if you have something urgent to communicate you can call me to phone No. 10 of Montroig, La Tira farm, owner Xavier de Salas 290”. Before receiving the answer from Matisse, Miró remains convinced that the exhibition will be held, whether Pierre likes it or not. In a letter to Joan Prats on September 10, 1944, Miró says: “You should have already received the signed documents related to the exhibition long ago. It seems that everything will work very well, mainly in these moments” 291. Pierre Matisse takes three months to respond to Miró's letter, probably to try to see the gouaches, get hold of them as soon as possible and design a future strategy for his 289 Umland 1993 p.336. Epistolari 2009, p.642 291 Epistolari 2009, p.648 290 105 relations with the painter, who is no longer subject to any contract with him. And his letter of September 20, 1944 292 is as full of contrasts as Miró's: cold and warm, irony and sincerity, firmness and temporization, offers and warnings. And it also contains some blatant lies. As Miró did, Matisse initiates his letter with a heartfelt message of condolence for the death of the painter's mother. But he immediately responds to Miró's tirade about the absence of letters with his: “Your letter is the first one I receive since November 24, 1943”. And then he returns to the topic of the Constellations: “Unfortunately I have not received the one that you sent to Duarte for me, and that is why I had not told you about the museum. I only found out in July because of the clarifications I asked from the museum about the rumors that had reached me”. He pretends to have learnt in July about a matter that he openly reproaches Miró in a letter from April and which the painter answers in June. The gallerist denies that he has agreed anything with Duarte, but concurs with Miró in that they can reach an accommodation: “There is no definitive arrangement because the customs formalities have not been completed yet. I am sure that we will always agree between us and I want to point out that I have been very moved by the fact that you have thought of me spontaneously in your arrangement with the museum”. But immediately he launches into a sermon that has all the elements of a rap on the knuckles to the painter: “In fact, I have not worked to make your œuvre known for the last ten years, dear friend, without having developed for you not only a great admiration for your work, but also a great affection for you. It may have crossed your mind that I used you to elevate my position. But I am convinced that if youI had been able to realize the efforts I have made to make you known, you would not have paid any attention to the people who were trying to harm me before you. Since my first exhibition of yours, in which I did not sell anything, I have restarted with perseverance and I have never ceased to give you the first place in the gallery and to present your works with the care and dignity that you seemed to appreciate. The numerous testimonies that have come to us from all parts prove it. Many artists have come to me since then, despite being solicited by others, and their choice shows that they have realized that their interests were defended both morally and materially. I understand your concern for the future and the trials you have had to face in recent years, which have also hurt me especially because I was not in a position to remedy them. One day you will be able to realize what the situation was. We will soon recover a little peace and we can then resume the occupations that we like. Then I hope you will not forget everything that I have done for you and that you will reserve me in the presentation of your works the place that I hope corresponds to me for the battles I have fought for them for so long. Otherwise, you will have all the compensation you could wish for and the prestige that corresponds naturally to a work that is one of the firsts of our time. I believe that I am in a better position than any other to provide it, especially because you also occupy the first place in my publishing projects. Loquacious people are often dangerous and do much less than what they say, even if they manage to dazzle doing great projects that most of the time are never carried out. Remember the 292 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp.755-757 106 example of Masson, who for a year or two in Paris could congratulate himself of a brilliant situation that unfortunately did not last.” Matisse ends his letter by telling Miró that he is “convinced that you and Pilar know where the true values are, as well as the best defenses of your interests and I look forward with confidence to the renewal of our relations”. And he says goodbye reminding him of his publishing projects: “I wanted to publish in a series of albums most of your paintings made during the war”. Miró continues without news of the Constellations and the administrative procedure is delayed. The first information he receives about their clearance through customs is not from Duarte or MoMA, but a telegram from Matisse dated November 21, 1944: "WONDERFUL PAINTINGS. I REQUEST TELEGRAPH AUTHORIZATION REPRODUCE WITH LITHOGRAPHS IN BOOK ON YOU. GREETINGS TO ALL". This is the second time that Matisse cites his plan to do what he will eventually accomplish in 1958/59 with the Miró pochoirs and the André Breton poems. The painter responds with another telegram dated on the 27th: "I AUTHORIZE REPRODUCTION WORKS IF MUSEUM ACCEPTS. GREETINGS. JUAN MIRÓ” 293 . As we can see, Miró still thinks that the plans to hold the exhibition go on. In fact, Miró's desire to have the gouaches exhibited by MoMA was perfectly compatible with their commercialization by Pierre Matisse. It is true that there is a dispute between Miró and Matisse regarding 13 of the 23 gouaches, which the gallerist claims as his property in compliance with his contract, but this could well have been arranged between the two. The fact of being exhibited by MoMA would have only increased the value of the paintings, thus facilitating the gallerist's ability to sell them at an interesting price for painter and dealer. A proof of the fact that Matisse did not object to the museum exhibiting the Constellations is the fact that the dealer did not formally assert his rights over the paintings until November 24. He knew that out of the two Miró demands to MoMA, that is to organize an exhibition with them and to try to sell them itself, the first one the museum has to take is to exhibit or not, which is independent of any challenge on ownership. The museum had Miró's permission to exhibit, and this suited Matisse. Then MoMA should decide whether to choose selling or declining the offer, either for lack of interest or for the veto of the gallerist. But Matisse already knows then that the museum does not intend to exhibit the gouaches. When in November 1944 Pierre Matisse finds out that the Museum of Modern Art has no plan to exhibit the Constellations or the material that accompanied them, he formally addresses himself to it by sending on the 24th a letter to Goodwin claiming possession of the pieces. The very fact of directing the letter to the architect, who does not hold any function in the artistic framework of the institution, proves that MoMA did not want to have anything to do about the matter. The museum is deaf and the issue of the gouaches is at the level it was six months ago: that of an external occasional collaborator who has made a proposal to the head of the department of architecture, a proposal that, formally, has not even been considered. “As I told you, I had a contract with Miró, under which all the work he created from November 1939 to 293 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp. 757-758 107 November 1940 were my property in consideration of monthly payments to him during that period”. He adds that “Mr. Miró was unable to send these pictures on account of war conditions and for that reason held them until some time when he could safely ship them to me”. Matisse concludes that in case “these works do not fit into your regular schedule of exhibitions, and you... decide not to exhibit them”, the paintings should be returned to him “in order to further the interest in Miró’s work in America” 294. Immediately afterwards, the gallerist contacts Paulo Duarte, who is in New York, to formalize the terms of the agreement through which Miró accepts Pierre Matisse's getting hold of the pieces. Miró’s approval of the conditions will come in two letters by Duarte, also signed by Notary New York’s Public Morton Planitz and dated both December 20, 1944, in which the artist submits to all the conditions of the gallerist, and even affirms that the Constellations were from the beginning destined to Matisse. In the first one, Duarte points out that “In relation to the sale of the Miró material (ceramics, lithographs and gouaches) that you have received from the Museum of Modern Art and in relation to the deposits that you will be making in the frozen account of Joan Miró, keep in mind that all the accruals of the first sales must be used to reimburse you for all the sums that you have had to pay to the Museum of Modern Art and that represent the costs of bringing the material from Spain (shipping, packaging, insurance, tariffs, etc.); all of which according to the instructions of Messrs. Miró and Prats” 295. Miró's concession is that the reimbursement covers not only the small deposit costs in the port of Philadelphia and the tariffs, but also the shipping, packaging and insurance costs, which had been borne by Duarte. Matisse himself has demanded this recognition of debt, so that it does not interfere in the economic agreement that appears in the second document. Duarte has preferred to charge his expenses in New York, and be paid directly by Pierre Matisse, rather than waiting for the Miró clan to pay him in Spain. His remuneration will therefore be in dollars, before the gouaches are sold, and long before the Miró clan sees the slightest income. In the second letter, also signed by Duarte and the notary Morton Planitz, are fixed the terms that the gallerist has imposed to commercialize the work and that Miró accepts. The letter begins with a statement by Duarte in which he claims that the shipment was originally for Matisse, and not for MoMA: “While I was in Barcelona before bringing the gouaches, lithographs and ceramics from Miró that you now have in deposit in the name of the artist, I had a conversation with him, Mr. Artigas and Mr. Prats during which I was granted the power to decide with you and change the prices, if necessary, of the different material that I was bringing”. The most important element of this letter or Miró’s armistice is treated last, and Duarte, on behalf of the painter, states: “I acknowledge that you informed me that twelve of the gouaches were made by Miró during the period in which he was under contract with you and that accordingly all this production is your property”. Once taken for granted that more than half of the twenty-two gouaches belong to him 294 295 PMGA 114.46 Fragment reproduced in Griswold & Tonkovich 2002. p.38 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp. 759-760 108 without any servitude, and since he has no current contract with Miró, Matisse agrees to appear as a commission agent for the rest of the material. Prats and Miró had tried that Matisse’s commission for the sale of the gouaches be of only 30%, the customary percentage for works in deposit. But Matisse demands more, and to achieve this he accepts to lower to 30% the commission for ceramics and lithographs, which he has no intention of selling (in fact he will not sell even a single one of the 255 pieces). “Consequently, in view of the current commercial situation in the United States, I agree with the following figures that we have jointly established for the sale in this country of the material that you have in your possession: Sale price Commission P. Matisse 3 large ceramics (each) 1.500 $ 30 % 2 small ceramics (each) 1.200 $ 30 % gouaches A (each) 500 $ 50 % gouaches B (each) 400 $ 50 % 30 $ lithographs according to size 40 $ 30 % 50 $ The usual commission practiced in the United States to work with work in deposit is 30%, which applies to both ceramics and lithographs. In relation to gouaches the commission will be 50% in view of all expenses (framing, presentation, insurance, catalogs, etc.) that will be covered entirely by you.” 296. In short, Matisse has obtained the recognition that more than half of the gouaches are his, and as for the rest, he will not have to pay Miró until enough sales to cover the expenses are produced. And he will only pay for these gouaches, which have taken the painter an average of one month to make each, between 200 and 250 dollars per piece, less the expenses. In short, Pierre Matisse has in his hands twelve gouaches that belong to him entirely and ten more in deposit, for which once sold all he would have to pay Miró is about 2,200 dollars, minus shipping, insurance, customs, duty, etc. which, according to what has been said insistently, were very high. It seems clear that the obligation to pay transport and management expenses imposed on the painter is a punishment for having worked behind the gallerist's back. If the initiative had been Pierre Matisse’s, he would have assumed the full cost of the operation. But in 1944 Miró, beset by economic necessity and once his attempt inspired by Prats to bypass Matisse has failed, has no choice but to accept the conditions of the gallerist. At least with this arrangement Miró will not have to pay Duarte for all the work developed in the failed maneuver. The amount was negotiated by Duarte with Pierre Matisse, and was added to the expenses paid by the gallerist to MoMA. 296 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp. 759-760 109 These simple arithmetic calculations can only confirm the veracity of at least the spirit of Rosa Maria Malet's assertion that Miró received as the only payment for all Constellations, an electric refrigerator 297. The episode of the refrigerator –or rather the refrigerators, because they were two– is true, and is documented in the correspondence of the Mirós with their friends the Serts. Apparently, the Miró couple marveled during their stay in 1947 with the electric refrigerator that their friends had in their apartment, where they lived for some time. And before leaving, they asked for the purchase of one for the Barcelona apartment and one for the Montroig estate. But one thing is to order and another to pay the hundreds of dollars that they cost to buy and to dispatch them –thousands of dollars of 2016– which from Miró's point of view corresponded to Pierre Matisse, from whom he expected the first important payment of his 1946 contract ($ 17,500) at the end of that year. The matter was complicated and was the subject of several letters from the painter and his wife to the Serts, who acted as his representatives in the United States, between November 1947 and August 1948 298 . And it required the intervention of the Serts, Teeny Matisse and others, and in the end was only solved by Marc Chagall’s accountant in the United States, the controversial Bernard Reis, who worked for Miró in order to formalize the role of Sert as his representative in the U.S. Once the battle of the Constellations won, Pierre Matisse is prepared for what he knows will be a tough negotiation of a new contract with Miró. But he needs to hurry up. Paris had been liberated for four months in December 1944 and Berlin would fall into allied hands four months later. The gallerist knows that the big Jewish dealers are returning to the Gallic capital, and that once their business is restored, Miró will have an outlet for his production, which at the moment can only be sold to him. Matisse therefore tries to reconcile with the painter and spoils him with frequent mails and telegrams, so that he knows that he is always there, taking care of his affairs and trying to promote his art. A few days after sealing the agreement on the Constellations, Matisse sent a telegram to Miró on December 27, 1944: “MY BEST WISHES NEW YEAR STOP EXHIBITION JANUARY MY GALLERY STOP WONDERFUL SET WILL SEND CATALOG AND PRESS CUTTINGS GREETINGS” 299. On January 17, 1945, a week after inaugurating the Constellations exhibition in his gallery, Matisse wrote again to Miró, praising him: “It was a great joy for all to see your work again after these long years of silence. The opinion has been unanimous and the public has found your exhibition very emotional. You have achieved an unprecedented degree of poetic intensity, and a dazzling mastery in both color and line”. But he also includes some information that Miró will not like: “Advised by a certain number of people, Sert, Sweeney, Breton and Duarte, I decided to expose only sixteen of the twenty-two gouaches” 300. Two weeks later, on February 2, he wrote again: “The exhibition is over this week and I will continue it with a new exhibition of the lithographs, of which I will send the 297 Amiguet, Lluís Intervierw Joan Miró cambió veintitrés cuadros por una nevera, La Vanguardia, Barcelona 12.24.2011 298 Juncosa, Patricia 2008, pp. 93 a 119 299 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004 pp. 760-761 300 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 p. 762 110 advertisement. We have naturally had great success and there is a lot of talk about the gouaches. Do you know that these are the first works that have come from Europe since the beginning of the war? The ceramics have been highly appreciated by experts. Unfortunately there are not many and we have not found buyers. I have asked Duarte if it would not be advisable to lower the price a little” 301. Pierre Matisse writes again to Miró on February 20, and this time he avoids giving bad news. Only two days before closing the exhibition of the Barcelona series lithographs Matisse has not sold a single one of the 250 prints offered, but he does not tell Miró: “After the exhibition of the gouaches that has reaped a lot of success and has been much talked about, I now make an exhibition of lithographs that also arouse much interest. I am very satisfied in all aspects, and above all for the moral effect. I think you will also be very happy” 302. But in those days Miró has a problem with mail, and these letters do not reach him, nor does another one from Paulo Duarte. In any case, on March 26, the painter writes to Duarte, upset by the absence of letters and also because he has not seen in the detail of the agreement with Matisse that Joan Prats has sent him a reference to all the works he sent: “Prats has shown me the letter of 22/12 that you sent him –I waited a few days to see if I received the one you were announcing to me, but it has not arrived. No letter from Matisse either about my exhibition, only a telegram announcing its opening. Let's hope, however, that everything worked very well”. Miró wants in this letter to thank Duarte for all his failed efforts: “Thank you, my friend, for all you have done to organize my exhibition, especially for the annoying efforts with the museum and Matisse. You have acted very intelligently and I thank you with all my heart. I hope that soon we can resume personal contact and we will discuss all the details with Matisse. Your letter does not mention the small sculpture and the ceramic object at all, and I hope that the two works have been exhibited”. In the letter he also makes reference for the first time to the new chimera in which he is going to embark: the plan to organize an exhibition in Paris. “It is quite possible that next winter will make a great exhibition in Paris” 303. As promised, Pierre Matisse sends Miró, with a letter of April 23, 1945, a good range of the reactions that the exhibition has aroused among American critics, asking him to lower the price of ceramics, for which he apparently has a client, and showing interest in negotiating a stable contract. And the painter replies on May 13, reproaching him from the outset for the absence of news of his exhibition: "I received your letter of April 23, the first that comes to me since the exhibition. According to the press clippings you sent me, I see that you organized it very well, so I want to congratulate you”. After some family messages, Miró, who knows that now time plays in his favor, tells his gallerist not to worry, that he is in no hurry to sign a contract: “Do not worry, dear friend. I carefully keep all your correspondence in a file and it will therefore be very easy for us to put our things in order when we see each other”. And in order that Matisse sees that now he will not accept price reductions, he immediately discards the offer that Matisse had transmitted to him, on the part of a client, of exchanging ceramics for the cost of making brochures: "The exchange of ceramics against 301 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp.762-763 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 p.763 303 Reus 2004 pp. 764-765 302 111 brochures that your client proposes to us does not interest either Artigas nor me. We prefer to keep the pieces. We are only at the beginning of this work, and ceramics will be revalued over time”. As we can see, the main motive of the letter from Miró, who is already in possession of the family inheritance, is not to negotiate anything. He does not want Matisse to have the impression that he is in a situation of economic need that would prompt him to accept any agreement. What he wants is to convey to his dealer the impression that he is now an important personality, with many contacts in Europe and therefore with magnificent prospects to find a dealer that brings his work to the market and provides him with good income. With that purpose, Miró focuses in the letter on announcing his plan to organize a major exhibition in Paris, a substitute in some way of the one he did not get at MoMA in New York and he asks him to send the Constellations gouaches that have not been sold 304. Miró exhibits in this letter of May 13 the power of his contacts in the new French political establishment, which will allow him this time to avoid the odyssey suffered when sending the Constellations to New York, traveling this time in a real diplomatic pouch. To recover the gouaches he must claim that they are for a very important exhibition and that they will be under the protection of the French State. Miró will remind his dealer one month later of his plans for the Paris exhibition and the need he has for gouaches, ceramics and unsold lithographs305. The attempt to recover the Constellations gouaches still unsold after the January exhibition has for Miró an interest not only artistic, linked to the planned exhibition in Paris, but also chrematistic. Those of the first period, which he has recognized that they belong to Pierre Matisse, will have to return to the gallerist, but those of the second, which are at that time five, he does not have to return. The dealer has publisized them with his exhibition in New York and has assumed the cost of organizing and promoting them, but since they were consigned and had not been sold, once in Europe and out of reach, they belonged again to the painter, who could sell them at will, keeping with 100% of their value. Matisse knows this well, and despite Miró's insistence he will systematically refuse to send them to Europe until 1958, when once sold he will handle their transfer to Paris so that they can be reproduced in pochoir by Daniel Jacomet in yet another commercial operation of the dealer. While keeping Pierre Matisse at bay, Miró is also trying to re-establish contact with his pre-war dealer Pierre Loeb to put him in competition with Matisse and to have a secure source of income in Europe. As we had seen, he had already asked about Loeb in his letters to the Serts of March 11, 1943 and to Matisse in January 6, 1943, but in the spring of 1945 he still had no news. And on May 13, that is, five days after writing to Matisse, he writes to Christian and Yvonne Zervos in Paris, also inquiring about the gallerist: “And Pierre and Silvia, what has become of them? For a long time I have not had any news of them, except the very vague information that his brother Edouard has transmitted to me. Tell me what happened to them” 306. 304 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp.766-767 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp.771-774 306 Rowell 1992 pp. 90-91 y Reus 2004 pp.768-770 305 112 But the aim of the May 13, 1945 letter to the Zervos is obviously not to ask about Loeb, but to begin to re-establish contacts and ties with the Parisian intellectual world, interrupted five years ago, and to ask him for help to carry out his idea of making the great Parisian exhibition of his war work. Miró was answering a message from Christian Zervos in which the publisher told him about the reappearance of his magazine Cahiers d'Art, which had played in the 1930s an important role in the dissemination of his work. Miró closes his letter asking some favors from Zervos, which once again denote his economic difficulties and his urgent need to be aware of what is happening in the resurgent Parisian art world: “Now I ask you a favor. I have written to "Argus de la Presse" to come and see you and I have taken the liberty of telling them that you will pay an invoice of 116 francs. I would also like you to send me the Cahiers d'Art issues as soon as they they appear, the latest Éluard book and the album with reproductions of Picasso's latest works. Open an account with all that, because at the moment I have no way to send money from here and I do not know how my bank account in Paris is.” The press cuttings invoice that he asks the Zervos to pay is equivalent to only $ 24 in 2016. Miró had learned the usefulness of a press magazine service from Picasso himself, who had a subscription to a press review. Called LitTout (Read-All), this service summarized for the painter everything that was said about him. When he was absent from Paris, his secretary Jaime Sabartés was in charge of reviewing the press clippings and summarizing them in long missives that he sent him every day. Picasso had learned the usefulness of press reviews from Kahnweiler, who kept everything published about Cubism in the early years of the century, as well as reactions abroad to all his exhibitions307. Miró also asks his new French friends to help him bring the Constellations to Europe. In a letter dated June 19, 1945, the painter wrote to Philippe Rebeyrol, who he understood to be in charge of the so-called exhibition in Paris, emphasizing the importance of bringing gouaches from New York 308. In any case, the painful operation of the commercialization of the Constellations will leave its mark on the isolated Miró in Barcelona, and will even lead to reneging on them, at least for a few years. For example, when in 1949 a group of friends from Barcelona organized a tribute exhibition, accompanied by a book written by Cirlot , the gouaches were completely ignored. The critic does not cite them even once in his text, whose list of exhibitions even omitted to mention the presentation of the series in 1945309. 307 Orozco 2015 p. 68. See details of Picasso’s press cuttings in the Direction des Archives de France at: http://www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/chan/chan/fonds/picassohtml/d0e25936.html 308 Rowell 1992 p. 92 & Reus 2004 pp.775-779 309 Cirlot 1949 113 6. ‘Little paintings’ for women: The contempt of dealers, collectors and MoMA The main reason that drives Miró and his advisers to design the strategy of bypassing Matisse and offering the Constellations directly to MoMA is the retrospective exhibition that the museum had dedicated to him between November 19, 1941 and January 11, 1942. As we saw, before the exhibition was inaugurated, in the same month of November 1941 Miró was trying to send the gouaches to Pierre Matisse, as he tells Joan Prats in his letter of the 12th. Experts have underlined the importance of the MoMA exhibition of 1941, which undoubtedly makes Miró think that he can obtain an exhibition for the Constellations two and a half years later. Dupin points out for example that due to this exhibition, “critics, historians and amateurs from around the world will place him from that moment on the first row of his generation and among the greatest creators of contemporary art” 310. But it is not until Paulo Duarte shows up in Barcelona in 1944 with a museum business card, and after three years without receiving any stipend from the gallerist, that Miró and his advisers radically change their strategy. But Joan Miró's 1941 exhibition is by no means the most important exhibition held by MoMA that year, in which exhibitions number 110 to 164 of the Museum take place, that is, a total of 55 showcases 311, among which are the famous Frank Lloyd Wright, American Architect; The Ballet Today; We Like Modern Art; Understanding Modern Art; Britain at War; Paul Klee; Masterpieces of Picasso; New Acquisitions: Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism and Salvador Dalí. In fact, the 1941 success for Miró, but above all for Pierre Matisse, who inspires and obtains economic benefits from the show, is to get James Johnson Sweeney organize that retrospective with 73 works borrowed by collectors or taken from the unsold warehouse of Pierre Matisse himself, and especially that Sweeney writes a small monograph of 66 pages that MoMA will publish with a wide circulation for those years (8,000 copies) 312. This booklet constitutes the best sales catalog for the dealer. As for providing income to the overwhelmed painter, the show had no impact whatsoever. For the rest, of the two parallel exhibitions that MoMA celebrates at the same time and with the same duration, the one that constitutes a resounding success is that of Salvador Dalí, organized by James Thrall Soby and that monopolizes –perhaps unfairly– all the attention. If Miró's desire for the Constellations to be exhibited by MoMA in 1944 did not materialize, it is simply because MoMA decided not to approve the exhibition. The 6. ‘Little paintings’ for women: The contempt of dealers, collectors and MoMA 310 Dupin 2012, p.258 See MoMA Exhibition History List, http://www.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/archives_exhibition_history_list 312 Sweeney 1941 311 114 reasons that prompted the museum to make such a decision are complex and have much to do with the amateurism management of the Miró/Prats/Gomis/Duarte team, with factors internal to the museum and with the intrinsic nature of the gouaches, or at least their perception on the part of the MoMA establishment people that examined them. One of the reasons that militated against the Constellations was that they did not match their exhibition schedule. On the other hand, MoMA may have considered that the 22 small paintings, seven ceramics and 50 lithographs did not have enough entity to merit an exhibition. Besides, the museum was subject in those days of internal tensions that made decision-making difficult. In any case, the decision was MoMA’s. The initial excuse for the refusal was that Pierre Matisse has claimed the Constellations as his own. But later they will elaborate another: that the cost of taking the paintings and ceramics to New York was too high to be assumed by the museum. All the authors have followed since Lilian Tone's 1993 explanation that the reason for the refusal of MoMA must be found in the high cost that this would have entailed for the museum. Tone had pointed out that “Owing to significantly larger costs than had been originally anticipated, the Museum weas unprepared to pay for the shipment of the works to New York”. And she adds that in those sircumstances, “Pierre Matisse, in his capacity of Miró’s representative in America, took financial responsibility for the whole shipment” and kept the works 313. However, the notarized letter from Paulo Duarte to Pierre Matisse dated December 20, 1944, that is when Matisse already has the Constellations in his hands, authorizes him on behalf of Miró and Prats to deduct from the payment that corresponded to the painter “all the sums (that Matisse had) to pay to the Museum of Modern Art and that represent the costs of bringing the material from Spain (shipping, packaging, etc)”314. This indicates without any doubt that MoMA did pay the expenses, took charge of the entire shipment and examined the Constellations before deciding not to exhibit them. An additional proof is the aforementioned letter from Matisse to Goodwin on November 24 in which the gallerist claims ownership of the pieces –already customs cleared– and offers to participate in the expenses incurred when bringing them from Spain. Goodwin will inform the gallerist on November 27 that he has transmitted his request to James Thrall Soby, Director of the Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture 315 . This letter from Goodwin proves that MoMA has received the packages, has opened them and has examined the paintings and ceramics, since the architect indicates to Matisse that he is interested in acquiring one of the ceramic vases (the black one) of the five included in the shipment, and asks the gallerist to reserve it for him. Note that Goodwin is not interested in a gouache, but in a piece of pottery, which shows that the Constellations have not impressed him, although later, since the pottery is very expensive ($ 1,500), and perhaps feeling obliged about not having met Miró's wishes to have the MoMA exhibition done, he will acquire the gouache Acrobatic Dancers at a third or less of that amount. The same can be said of Stephen Carlton Clark, all-powerful MoMA patron at the time, who undoubtedly saw the gouaches in the museum before they were handed over to Pierre Matisse and decided that they 313 Tone 1993, p.5 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.p. 758-759 315 PMGA 114.46 314 115 were nice enough to give one to his mistress, but not to integrate his important art collection. After conducting some research, we can assure that the vast majority of gouaches in the series were acquired by or for women, some of considerable personal relevance, a fact that was not known until now. Lilian Tone naturally used in her catalog entries the data she obtained in the archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery, without taking the trouble of finding out more about the real buyers. The problem is that the data was not very precise and it basically sought to identify to which client the amount had to be debited. And married women did not then have the right to open current accounts, a possibility they only achieved by extension of the civil rights obtained by African Americans in the sixties and seventies of last century. Besides, women are always identified as Mrs. followed by the full name and surname of their husband, following a tradition that is still in force in much of the world. We will give a detailed account of the results of our investigation in another chapter of this book, dedicated to the journey of the Constellations after being sold. But we can reveal now that of the 23 gouaches, twelve were acquired directly by as many women: Helen Scherer; Irene Hudson, Natasha Zahalkaha, Claire Block, Hildegard Von Steinwehr Ault, Willavene Sober, Lallie Barnes, Elisa Bindhoff, Helen B. Lansdowne, Bobsy Fuller, Elizabeth Mason Paine and Pussy Nitze. Four others were bought for or given to as many women: Pilar Juncosa, Alexina Sattler, Mrs. Cable Senior and Patricia Kane. Another one was acquired with funds from the bequest of a woman, Lillie Bliss. Two others were acquired by a gay couple, consisting of Dwight Ripley and Rupert Barneby. Two couples bought three more temperas, the one formed by Georgia Talmey and Ralph Colin (two), and the one composed of Charlotte Bevans and William Lee McKim (one). And finally, a single man, Philip Goodwin, bought a tempera. As for subsequent buyers, women also lead: the aforementioned Natasha Zahalkaha bought another one in 1968. Vera Roberta McEntire bought another, Ellin Hobbins another, Patricia Helps bought it from Hobbins, and a gay couple formed by Stanley Seeger and Christopher Cone acquired another. Everything indicates that Miró's gouaches were met with skepticism, both in MoMA and from Pierre Matisse himself. Miró will also recognize to Lluis Permanyer at the end of his life that “when Matisse saw them, he felt disappointed” 316. In fact, Miró's instructions that the gouaches should be exposed all together were ignored by the dealer when he finally exhibited them. Although the 22 works appeared in the catalogs, the gallerist exposed them in batches, explaining in a letter to Miró that he had decided to exhibit them in groups “to avoid certain apparent repetitions that could have been misinterpreted by the public”. To reassure the painter, he assured him that from time to time he would alternate the works, so that the twenty-two had been exhibited when the exhibition ended 317. One of the reasons that might have prompted Pierre Matisse and MoMA to underestimate the Constellations is the rupture they represented with respect to Miró's previous work, and especially his savage paintings and the masonite paintings made 316 317 Permanyer 2003, p. 142 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004, p.762 116 just before the gouaches. As we have explained in a previous chapter, there is obviously a mutation. But to our knowledge, the main cause of the failure of the MoMA operation is the precipitation and lack of professionalism of the Miró team’s management. The most evident manifestation of the amateurism with which it was carried out was the lack of suitability of Duarte to carry out the running of the initiative, which is manifested in the reference he made to Alfred H. Barr. in his letter to MoMA. Neither Miró –who probably asked the critic to be mentioned– nor the ill-informed Brazilian seem to have been aware of Barr's. dismissal from the museum's top management position in October 1943. As proven by the fact that Duarte includes in his letter of March 5, 1944 to Philip L. Goodwin the following paragraph: “I know that issues relating to paintings should be dealt with by Mr. Barr.. However, I do it through you because you are the only person to whom I can send a letter such as this one. I beg you to explain it to Barr .so he does not think it's a lack of attention on my part”. The person to whom the initiative should have been addressed was undoubtedly James Thrall Soby, who at the time of Barr'.s defenestration had been appointed Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture. Soby was also at that time Chairman of the Committee on the Museum Collections, and therefore the person who could propose or veto acquisitions. In short, Miró and Prats accepted that the operation, which they hoped was the basis of a new life and artistic career for the painter, be carried out by Duarte, whose credentials for an initiative of this caliber were more than dubious. The Brazilian, for his part, proposed the operation to Philip L. Goodwin, who, despite having been – thanks to the influence of his family– one of the two architects who designed the MoMA building in 1939, against Alfred H. Barr’s. opinion318, had no influence in the museum outside of architectural questions. Philip L. Goodwin (1885-1958), born in Hartford, Connecticut, from a family of descendants of seventeenth-century settlers, was the son of J.P. Morgan Co. banker James Junius Goodwin, first cousin of the bank's founder, John Pierpont Morgan Jr. –founder of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library that houses the archives of Pierre Matisse. His mother was Josephine Sarah Lippincott, daughter of the owner of the J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia. Philip graduated from Yale in 1907 and studied architecture at Columbia University, without neglecting trips through Europe and Asia (19071908) and an extension of studies in Paris between 1911 and 1914. During the First World War he returned to New York, to work in the studio of Delano & Aldrich until 1916. The previous year his father had died, leaving a fortune of more than thirty million dollars (735 million of 2015) and Philip was 318 Kramer, Hilton The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972-1984, Free Press, New York 1985 p. 403 117 able to set up a new studio: Goodwin, Bullard & Woolsey. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the architect joined the Allied expeditionary corps as a lieutenant and participated in the 1919 diplomatic peace negotiations in Budapest. In 1921 he set up his own architecture studio, entered MoMA’s board and was named Chairman of its Archiecture Department. Besides being known for his conservative and nationalist positions 319, Goodwin had already been one of the strongest enemies of the influence of foreign architecture in the United States since the 1920s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had emerged in 1928 from an idea of three important women collectors: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller, who repudiated the idea, but provided the funds to finance it), Lillie P. Bliss (with whose bequest the museum acquired its sole Constellation) and pioneer modern art collector Mary Quinn Sullivan, a trio then known as the Daring Ladies. Together with collector Anson Conger Goodyear, they commissioned Harvard professor Paul Joseph Sachs to find a director for the planned museum. As it was an embryonic idea and there was not a large salary, Sachs proposed his pupil Alfred Hamilton Barr .Jr., a young 27-year-old PhD student who had studied with him. The mission that the founders entrusted to the new institution, and Barr. in particular, was none other than to validate their personal tastes by creating a museum for the art they collected 320. The museum did not buy anything, but it exhibited the paintings that the director was tracking down for his patrons to acquire, either following their inclination for some contemporary European painters or orienting it towards others that Barr .proposed. This model has been followed later by many other modern art museums, which often serve the interests of individual collectors, exhibiting their pieces and thus increasing their value. At the time of its founding, the museum was confined to five modest rooms on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. After its opening in November 1929 with the exhibition Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, Barr .achieved a stunning success for the museum, to the point that Rockefeller withdrew his opposition, offered a piece of land in Manhattan, facilitated the construction of a permanent headquarters and extended his control of MoMA, 319 Shanken, Andrew M. Between brotherhood and bureaucracy: Joseph Hudnut, Louis I. Kahn and the American Society of Planners and Architects, en Planning Perspectives, nº 20 International Planning History Society, London, April 2005, pp. 147–175 320 Alfred H. Barr in Sorensen, Lee. Dictionary of Art Historians. http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/barra.htm 118 which would last for decades. But in 1944 problems had accumulated for Barr. and led to the the dismissal of the museum’s director because of his promotion of surrealism in the 30s. A few weeks before the inauguration of the New York World's Fair of 1939, Paul Sachs, the Harvard Art professor who had placed Barr .at the head of MoMA ten years earlier, delivered a speech before the Board of Trustees of the museum at the ceremony of inauguration of the new headquarters built by Philip Goodwin. In his dissertation, Sachs urged the institution “to resist pressure to vulgarize and cheapen our work through the mistaken idea that in such fashion a broad public may be reached effectively”. And he emphasized that “in serving an elite, (MoMA) will reach, better than in any other way, the great general public by means of work done to meet the most exacting standards of an elite”. In Sachs’ view, in the unstable, troubled and disturbed times they were living, the only way to preserve high culture was scholarly activity that catered to an elite who could help guide the public in cultivating discriminating taste 321. Also in 1939, while the New York Fair was still open, took place the publication of the essay Avant-garde and Kitsch by critic Clement Greenberg322, that launches a call of attention before the threat that, according to him, a new form of pseudoart supposes for the artistic vanguard of the world. For the young critic, the new merchandise is “ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide” 323. Greenberg did not include Miró in the mediocre art he denounced in 1939, but instead put him in the category of avant-garde artists along with Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brâncusi, Klee, Matisse and Cézanne 324. Not in vain the Miró that Matisse had been showing in the last five years was the complex and hard of the savage paintings. In a footnote to the article, which followed the list of great masters –who he claimed derived their main inspiration from the medium in which they worked– the critic pointed with his finger to whom he was referring, who represented that spurious art, concluding that they were a typical example of a formulation by Professor Hans Hofmann: “From the point of view of this formulation surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to 321 Sachs, Paul Address to the Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, read on 05.08.1939.MoMA Bulletin Volume 6 No 5 (July 1939) p. 11 Cited in Zalman 2008 p. 80 322 Greenberg 1939 pp. 34-49. 323 Greenberg 1939, p. 39 324 Greenberg 1939, p. 37 119 restore ‘outside’ subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dalí is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium” 325. But as much as it displeased Sachs and Greenberg, the great star of the New York fair –which lasted from April 1939 to October 31, 1940– was precisely Dalí, who had a pavilion of his own and paid for it (Dream of Venus). Salvador Dalí had already overshadowed Miró in the historic MoMA exhibition Fantastic art, dada, surrealism (December 7, 1936 to January 17, 1937) that exhibited works of old and modern painters like them, Chagall, De Chirico, Duchamp, Arp, Picasso, Ernst, Magritte, Man Ray or Tanguy. The flaccid clocks of one of Dalí's most well-known works, The Persistence of Memory, monopolized all the attention of the visitors of that exhibition and, more importantly, of the press and the advertising industry, which saw in it an unparalleled source of inspiration. This tiny 24 x 33 cm canvas of 1931, which had been acquired two years earlier by MoMA for $ 340 ($ 6,000 in 2014), became the most famous of the exhibition. The painter's impact turned evident on December 14, 1936, when Time magazine devoted its cover to Dalí, reproducing a ghostly black and white photograph of the painter by Man Ray. And Newsweek named him the top media personality of the year. When he decided to go into exile in the United States in 1940, he was received there as a star and could live for eight years the opulent American dream Miró longed for, being entertained everywhere, making sets for movies and even writing scripts himself. Greenberg pointed out in a timely fashion in his 1939 article that “Kitsch’s enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted this temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely. And then those puzzling border-line cases appear”326. It does not seem unreasonable to think that, although Greenberg excluded Miró again from the kitsch black list by proclaiming him an abstract painter in his 1948 monograph 327, upon seeing the Constellations, MoMA leaders would think, confirming the radical turn that these festive and easy to enjoy paintings implied with respect to the complex and deep realizations of Miró’s previous work, that the painter was crossing the red line. Greenberg had used as an example of the appeal of mediocre art a Russian peasant who had to choose between a cubist painting by Picasso or a realistic work by Russian Ilya Repin. For the critic, “Superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no ‘natural’ urgency within himself that will drive him towards Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort” 328. The same argument would be developed in 1946 by Paul Éluard in defense of the creative freedom of Picasso, who was then accused of the sin of formalism by the leaders of the French Communist Party, who urged him to bend to socialist realism. In that year, the party magazine Les Lettres Françaises opened a survey on the theme Art and the public, to which Paul Éluard responds in No 100 of March 22: “From the 325 Greenberg 1939, p. 49 Greenberg 1939, p. 41 327 Greenberg 1948 328 Greenberg 1939, p. 46 326 120 nineteenth century painters express the reality of art more than reality. Since Cézanne, the painter strives to make paintings, and not figurative painting... For the general public, the only thing that counts is the subject. But artists are concerned only with art, while the public only cares about the content. There has therefore been a divorce, which was aggravated by the Impressionists... And yet the artist, from the moment he freed himself of all realistic restrictions, from the moment he uses forms to his free will, should have given the public the desire to free itself too. But the public does not want to free itself. As in politics, the public wants everything already digested. Divorce is not the fault of the artist but of the crowd and its bad education.... Critics and teachers should devote themselves to educate the masses". The text did not have much impact, and Picasso continued to withstand the party's attacks for years 329. If for Greenberg and the leaders of the New York museum the enemy of cultured art, of the artistic avant-garde, had to be found precisely in the ranks of the Surrealists, we can not forget that the introducer of Surrealism in the United States was none other than Alfred H. Barr. 330. And that he was removed from the direction of the MoMA in October 1943 to a large extent for having lent the museum to exhibitions of surrealist and magical art that many considered kitsch or mediocre. Although it is certain that the excuse adduced to separate to Barr .was the exhibition of the naïf painter Morris Hirshfield of the summer of 1943 331, the truth is that the root of his problems with the patrons of the museum was his promotion of the art denounced by Greenberg. The members of the governing body had already been irritated by the 1937 Surrealism exhibition 332. Then president of the group Anson Conger Goodyear wrote to Abby Rockefeller after the show, noting that “The unfortunate part of the exhibition is that it includes a number of things that are ridiculous and could hardly be included in any definition of art” 333. Barr .managed to avoid dismissal both in 1937 and the following year, when a reorganization of the museum was carried out. But in 1940, the board appointed a Director of Exhibitions and Publications (Monroe Lathrop Wheeler), formally to free Barr .of administrative obligations, but in reality to try to limit his freedom of choice. In 1939 Goodyear ceded his supreme position to Stephen Carlton Clark, relieving pressure on Barr., who had re-offended exhibiting in 1938 works that many considered dubious in the Masters of Popular Painting exhibition. In 1943, Barr. organized a more extensive one, with a large circulation catalog, on Realists and Magic-Realists 334 . Barr defined magic realism in the catalog as “the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions” 335. Clark was of the same opinion as Goodyear, but 329 See long explanation on the period in Orozco 2015 Zalman 2007 pp. 44-67 331 The Paintings of Morris Hirshfield. MoMA Exhibition No 234, June/August 1943 332 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism MoMA Exhibition No 55, December 1936/January 1937 333 Kantor 2002, p.357 334 Americans 1943: Realists and Magic-Realists MoMA Exhibition No 217, February/March 1943 335 Miller, Dorothy y Barr, Alfred H., AmericanRealists and Magic-Realists, Exhibition Cataslog, MoMA, New York, 1943 p. 5 330 121 could not dismiss Barr. for artistic reasons. He then told the board that the museum needed a Director to lead, who enjoyed the trust of the members of the board and could raise money and convince people to donate their collections. The governing body did not have the moral authority to question the artistic criteria of the Director, but it could reduce his artistic attributions and impose minimum management conditions. Barr served his dismissal to Clark on a silver tray: a few months before, he had written to the new president of the board explaining that he was behind in his writing plans; that he wanted to expand some of his monographs that could serve him as a doctoral thesis at Harvard; that he planned to write a history of modern art, etc. At the same time he recognized that since joining the museum he had stopped reading what he should have read and having an intellectual life. Clark did not miss the opportunity and acted: through a letter dated October 13, 1943 he informed Barr .that he was dismissed as Director because his lack of productivity as a writer made his salary of $ 12,000 per year –about $ 162,000 of 2015– unjustified 336. To avoid a possible rebellion by museum curatorial staff and Barr's. many friends, Clark abolished the position of Director, and his responsibilities were passed to a committee of department heads, coordinated by John Abbot as Chairman or non-executive president. Barr stayed in the museum, with the title of Advisory Director and Clark named Soby Director of Painting and Sculpture. In 1947 Barr .would be appointed Director of Collections of the museum, a position without executive functions he held until his retirement twenty years later. These are the circumstances under which the Constellations arrived at the museum, and the person that had to make the final decision to exhibit or not was therefore Soby. But the problem is that the gouaches came to him presented by Goodwin, who was unable to defend their suitability for an exhibition in the museum. And the paintings did not cause at that moment the busy Director of Painting an indelible impact. Not even in his study on the painter made fifteen years after seeing the temperas for the first time did Soby hide the impression of superficiality that they provoked in him: “The pictures in the series seem so spontaneous that it comes as a surprise to learn 336 Reproduced in Fox Weber, Nicholas The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007, p. 334 122 from Miro himself that they were ‘exacting both technically and physically’, and that each took at least a month to produce”337. Soby had been precisely commissioned by Stephen Clark, just after naming him, to eliminate the superficial, spontaneous and easy from MoMA’s exhibition calendar. Just before the Constellations arrived at the port of Philadelphia, Soby had submitted to the board of the museum a report on how it should exit from the period of exception of the war and contemplate the future of a standardized artistic landscape. The report was registered by MoMA on June 28, 1944, a few weeks before the Constellations arrived in New York, and in it Soby summarized the task he had assumed: “In very recent years, due to the pressure of war, we have probably relaxed our exhibition standards more than we realize. Most of our exhibitions relating to the war have been timely and of genuine propaganda, morale or instructional value. But with the war now nearing an end, it would seem a good time to pull up short and face the basic problem of standards to follow in the peace to come” 338. Soby was also at that time occupied with another controversy within MoMA not relative to exhibitions, but to acquisitions339. If he had stated in that same year of 1944 in an article in the Museum News magazine that it was not the primary mission of the museum to acquire the work of novel painters, another October 44 report by MoMA’s Policy Committee affirmed that the didactic purpose of the museum imposed the need to acquire 'minor works' and not only masterpieces. Soby felt unauthorized and was forced to resign from his position as Director of Painting and Sculpture in 1945, but not before pointing out, in alliance with Barr .and James Johnson Sweeney, that the main factor for a work to acquire a didactic value is its quality, and that the museum should continue to devote the bulk of available funds to acquire important works, and in a much smaller proportion to buy lower quality pieces 340. And probably, both Soby and Barr, Sweeney and Clark himself considered that the 'little paintings' that Miró sent did not reach the necessary level. But let's go back to Matisse's takeover of the gouaches. In the fixing of prices of the Miró/Matisse contract of December 20, 1944, it is clear that two actors have intervened: on the one hand, the Miró/Artigas/Prats trio for ceramics, pricing high because many people must get paid –painter, ceramist, agent, expenses, gallerist–and on the other Pierre Matisse, who not believing that ceramics can be sold does not oppose setting a high price, but in return pushes the prices of gouaches down. The Catalan team had proposed them at a sale price of 500 dollars each when they were sent to the MoMA, counting on the museum to pay the shipping and exhibition expenses, which meant Barcelona would receive 50% of the total sale price, that is, $ 5,000 net for the ten of them not covered by Matisse’s contract. When Pierre Matisse seizes the Constellations and imposes his interpretation that the first twelve belong to him without any limitation, he also demands that Miró be the one to pay the shipping 337 Soby p. 100 Report on Exhibitions for the Policy Committee, June 28, 1944. Submitted by James T. Soby. James Johnson Sweeney Papers in The Museum of Modern Art Archives, folder No 8, Museum Policy Committee 1944-1945. MoMA, New York. 339 De Santiago Restoy 2003. pp. 231-246 340 De Santiago Restoy 2003. p. 243 338 123 costs, it seems reasonable to think that Prats insisted that the price of the gouaches be raised, so that Miró still received a considerable amount, that is, several thousand dollars. But the gallerist refused and even lowered the sale price of part of the paintings down to 400 dollars a piece, keeping the others at 500 dollars as Miró had offered them to MoMA if there was no intervention by Matisse. The dealer estimated that $ 400-500 was the appropriate price to reach the new middle-class collectors that James Thrall Soby would describe in a famous article of 1946. Those collectors, belonging to the new upper middle class made up of senior business executives and successful professionals were buying the work of young American painters, but Matisse also wanted to attract them to his gallery selling essentially works by painters of the School of Paris. To achieve this he needed to obtain minor works, small oil paintings, drawings and sketches of the great European artists. This he achieved in his long trips to Europe during the spring and summer of each year. There he bought at very reasonable prices, directly from painters or his colleagues Louis Carré, Pierre Loeb, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, etc. The procedure for the sale of drawings and minor works suited the painters, who skipped their contracts with gallerists, obtained an additional source of safe income, not controlled by the tax authorities, and knew that they would only come to the market after a few or many years. They were thus willing to sell cheaply. Lithographic printer Fernand Mourlot recalls in his memoirs how on one occasion Matisse wanted to double the price he had agreed for some drawings with Louis Carré. Faced with the protest of the dealer, Matisse agreed to return to the initial price on exchange for Carré's promise that he would sell them as expensive as if he had paid the double to the painter 341. Pierre Matisse had been buying this type of work for many years, which allowed him, in spite of the fact that the Second World War interrupted his trips to France, in 1943, to organize the showcase Summer Exhibition: Modern Pictures Under Five Hundred. (June 15-July 31, extended to August) with works by Miró, Bonnard, Bores, Calder, Carrington, Chagall, Chirico, Derain, Dufy, Fautrier, Ferren, Lam, Laurencin, Laurens, Léger, Lurçat, MacIver, Masson, Matisse, Matta, Modigliani, Pascin, Picasso, Rouault, Tamayo and Tanguy. In view of the success of the show, the gallerist repeated the following year, celebrating another exhibition also with works offered at less than five hundred dollars a piece: Summer Exhibition: Pictures Under Five Hundred and Examples of African and Pre-Columbian Art. (June 27 – July 31 1944), with works by Miró, Bonnard, Bores, Brignoni, Chabaud, Chagall, Dalí, Chirico, Degas, Derain, Despiau, Dufy, Ferren, Gromaire, Hélion, Lam, Laurencin, Laurens, Léger, Lurçat, MacIver, Marquet, Masson, Matisse, Matta, Pajot, Picasso, Redon, Siqueiros, Tamayo, Tanguy and Toulouse-Lautrec. Unfortunately for Miró and his Catalan clan, when Pierre Matisse finally received the Constellations he understood that these gouaches fell perfectly into this category of minor works, both because of their small size and because they were made on paper, always undervalued in the art market, among other things due to the fragility of the 341 Mourlot 1979, pp.106-107 124 support. After the relative success of the Constellations exhibition–40% of the gouaches sold at 400 or 500 $ piece– the gallerist repeated the experience twice in that same year of 1945. One of the two was the exhibition Pictures Under Five Hundred. (11-31 December 1945), with works by Miró, Bores, Brignoni, Chagall, Dalí, Chirico, Derain, Dufy, Ferren, Gromaire, Lam, Laurencin, Laurens, Léger, Lurçat, MacIver, Marquet, Masson, Matisse, Matta, Pajot, Picasso, Tamayo and Tanguy. It has been persistently asserted that the Constellations had, after their exhibition in the Pierre Matisse Gallery from January 9 to February 3, 1945 a great success among art critics. As we have seen, the gallerist indicated in a letter to Miró dated one day before the closing of the exhibition that “We have naturally had great success and there is a lot of talk about the gouaches... The opinion is unanimous. In this series of gouaches you have obtained the highest possible degree of expression, freedom and poetic invention, as well as a technique that had never been achieved before now” 342. For Jacques Dupin, after being exhibited, the Constellations “will be received very favorably” in the United States, the exhibition having "great resonance” 343. Lilian Tone says that the exhibit “excited a wide and overwhelmingly positive response in the press”344. James Thrall Soby himself maintains fourteen years after the exibition that “the remaining twenty-two were shown after the war at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, where they had an immense and well-deserved success.” 345. Let us examine in more detail what the American critics said about the exhibition of the Constellations. For this we will build on the compilation made in his blog by Antonio Boix Pons, for whom "the North American critics surrendered in this exhibition to the genius of Miró” 346. The first two reviews –in second-rate newspapers– were indeed very positive. An article published on page 9 of the New York World-Telegram of January 13, 1945, under the title “Joan Miro's First Pictures since the War on View”, affirmed that the exhibition was timely “not only because Miró is so talented and original a painter, but because these are the first pictures to come out of Europe since the war. They were executed in 1940 and 1941, and were brought to this county from Spain, where the artist is living, via Portugal. They have nothing at all do with the war. It is as if Miró turned his head away from the terror and destruction on earth to contemplate the eternal mad yet ever varying constellations... This is the best painting Miró has done to date” 347. That same day, the art critic of the conservative newspaper The Sun was ecstatic saying that “it is impossible to pick out the best picture in the display because all of the twenty-two pictures are the best”. But the main newspapers were more circumspect. The show does not convince the critic of the Herald Tribune Carlyle Burrows, who publishes his article on January 14, 342 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp. 762-763 Dupin 2012, p. 460 344 Tone 1993, p.5 345 Soby 1959, p.100 346 Boix Pons 2011 347 Unsigned, Joan Miro's First Pictures since the War on View, New York World-Telegram, New York 01.13.1945 p. 9 343 125 but he recognizes the artist's originality: “Joan Miró has never been able to persuade us of his great seriousness as an artist, save on the grounds of his skill in putting curious little shapes together in his pictures with a provocativeness sufficient to tickle the fancy perceptibly”. The only thing that Burrows is willing to grant Miró is that “all the little shapes which he combines to suggest biological life in many forms are designed with the Miró hallmark. So peculiar are they that many lesser artists have taken them up and included them with a vaguely Miró-like effect in the work of their own supposed creating”. Nor do the Constellations seem to have convinced the critic of the New York Times, who does not quite see in his review of January 14 what is creative about the gouaches, and for whom “These temperas, though perhaps not fully indicative of Miró’s aims in 1945, reveal a steady swing toward an all-over design made up of the tiny shapes of old with their envelope of wide-open space. The tiny shapes are threaded on weaving lines and, in the sum, resemble constellations. For me, something significant has been lost –lost in a maze that is mincingly instead of robusty decorative”. However, this critic liked the ceramics displayed. Critic Maude Kemper Riley of Art Digest was also more convinced by ceramics than temperas. As for the Constellations, she only described their curious consctuction, adding that “Part of the fascination of these fancies is the game he plays of changing color each time the mystic line crosses a solid. One may explore each painting unendingly at close range; then receive a separate emotion of wholeness by viewing it at six paces” 348. It has been commented, in a repetitive way, that the gouaches sold as donuts: “In 1945, Pierre Matisse exhibits the first ceramics and the twenty-three (Sic) Constellations. The success is brilliant. Matisse announces to Miró: 'I sell them like donuts'”349. “This exhibition gave him enormous success –he sold everything– and respect, among other reasons, for being the first that allowed the American public to know what the European avant-garde masters had been doing during the Second World War”350. Miró’s brother in law, Lluís Juncosa, also points out that “they were sold like donuts and this will be the moment Miró triumphs in America, with good economic repercusions” 351. Actual reality was something different. If we analyze carefully the history of each one of the gouaches, which MoMA researchers tried to unearth in the preparations for the centennial retrospective and whose results were published under the responsibility of Lilian Tone in a brief and factual way on pages 415 to 422 of the catalog of the exhibition 352 we will see that in fact not so many temperas were sold in the exhibition, that the great collectors completely ignored the series and that the buyers were women or were bought for women, that is, the kind of work that is bought as a 'gift' for a woman, or in a couple of cases, for the mistress. It has been said on numerous occasions that the sale price of the gouaches set by Pierre Matisse was $ 700. Professor 348 Riley, Maude New Temperas and Ceramics by Miró. “The Art Digest”, New York, Volume. 19, nº 7, January 1945 349 Punyet Miró y Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p.75 350 Pérez Segura, Javier, Scandal & success: Picasso, Dalí y Miró en Estados Unidos, Editorial Eutelequia, Madrid 2012, p.254 351 Juncosa, Lluís 1994, p.38 352 Lanchner 1993. 126 Antonio Boix points out, for example, that “the price was unusually high for new works of that format, 700 dollars a piece, in total $ 15,400 for the 22” 353. The source of this information seems to be the 1999 book by John Russell, in which he points out, without giving any reference, that “they sold very well indeed at $ 700 each” 354. But in fact the only reliable data available make us think that the retail price was not 700, but 400 and 500 dollars, depending on the gouache in question. That is, a price per painting of between $ 5,200 and $ 6,500 of 2014 adjusting inflation355. That is, the price of a ring with a not very large diamond. It does not seem likely that the sale prices were modified in the few days that elapsed between the letter/contract and the opening of the exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery on January 9. To get an idea of what the sum of $ 400 or $ 500 represented in the art world of that time, it is enough to remember that two years later the first Picasso paintings made during the war are exhibited in New York and the cheaper oil paintings (35 x 45 cm), smaller than Miró's gouaches, sold for $ 5,000 each, that is, between 10 and 12.5 times more expensive. The exhibition is Picasso’s revenge against his dealers Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Louis Carré and Paul Rosenberg, who refused to pay the prices the painter demanded, arguing that his affiliation to the Communist Party had lowered his price level in the United States. After refusing to sell at the prices they offered, Picasso invited at the end of 1946 for lunch American dealer Samuel Kootz and sold him “without subjecting him to the usual tortures imposed on Kahnweiler” nine paintings painted between 1941 and 1946. With them takes place in Kootz’s 15 East 57th Street gallery, very close to that of Pierre Matisse, the first Picasso exhibition of the postwar period in the United States. The show was an unprecedented success, with endless lines and with the nine canvases sold on the first day at prices of between 5,000 and 20,000 dollars (between 65,000 and 260,000 today) 356. The fact that Miró’s gouaches immediately attracted women and were classified by a disappointed Pierre Matisse as little paintings to offer one’s wife or mistress does not post a negative note on the temperas or the intelligent sensitivity of the women who remained fascinated of these works that MoMA, Pierre Matisse and their collector husbands had undervalued. During the exhibition Joan Miró: Ceramics 1944, Tempera Paintings 1940 to 1941, Lithographs 1944, held from January 9 to February 3, 1945, of the 277 works offered for sale, 22 temperas, 5 ceramic jugs and 250 lithographs –the five copies of the Barcelona series– only eight pieces were actually sold, all of them gouaches. It may seem a small number, but it was quite rare that in the course of an exhibition in the Pierre Matisse gallery eight pieces were sold directly without haggling, without a loan to see if it looked fine in the living-room, delays, etc. In view of the moderate success of reviews but good sales of the Constellations and the resounding failure of the 353 Boix Pons 2011 Russell 1999, p.253 355 Calculated using the CPI Inflation Calculator from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm. 356 Exhibition catalog available at the Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Kootz Gallery scrapbook no. 1, 1947-1948: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/kootzgallery-scrapbook-no-1-13281/35938 354 127 lithographs, Matisse organizes with these another exhibition two days after closing the previous one (Joan Miró: 1944 Lithographs 5-25 February 1945), in which not a single print is sold. As for the ceramics, Duarte and Matisse agreed in December 1944 to sell them in the exhibition at $ 1,500 each (the bigger 3) and $ 1,200 (the smaller two) 357. But eight days after opening the show, and despite the success among critics, Matisse points out in a letter to Miró that the price has dropped to $ 1,300 for the large ones and $ 900 for small ones 358. The reason for the price drop is probably that some potential buyer has indicated that he found the price too high. But the climb down does not produce effects, and on February 2, 1945, penultimate day of the exhibition, the gallerist comes back to the painter: “The ceramics have been very appreciated by the connaisseurs. Unfortunately there are not many and we have not been able to find buyers. I have asked Duarte if we can lower the price a little” 359. But the ceramics remain unsold in Pierre Matisse’s warehouse, which incites him to write again to Miró resuscitating the subject in letters of June 4 and 13, 1947, proposing to reduce prices to $ 750 for the large ones and 600 $ for the small ones. Irritated, Miró hesitates to answer, but in a letter of January 2, 1948, says in his name and in that of Artigas that Matisse may sell the ceramics at the price he wants, although he defends them with all vigor: “although ceramics may not generally fall within the province of a picture dealer, they are a very beautiful form of art, and one with which it is possible to do very good business. We have every confidence in you, and we are sure that with your range of acquaiuntances and your enterpreneurial character, you will succeed with them” 360. Matisse replies that without going into a discussion about the place of ceramics in the hierarchy of art, the fact is that ceramics are still unsold and that even if prices were lowered a lot, it would still be very difficult to sell them. In June 1948, an irritated Matisse communicated ruthlessly to Miró, that “before we go deeper into this kind of work, I would advise you to think twice. In any case, I shall not be able to include ceramics in our contract, which applies only to paintings, gouaches, etcetera” 361. The 1946 contract between the two clearly states that the payment is for a “production uninterrupted by travel or by the execution of commissions", stating that he is remunerated “for each month spent in his studio" painting. The painter must understand that if he persists in devoting his time to producing ceramics, his income can be considerably reduced. It should be noted, however, that a decade later, and given the fact that Maeght does too, Pierre Matisse will eventually accept and show Miró ceramics. The first of these exhibitions will take place in December 1956. The eight pieces sold in the exhibition of 1945 were gouaches, of which four were purchased directly by women, three of them registered by the gallery in their name (On the 13th, the Ladder Brushed the Firmament, Women at the Border of a Lake 357 Letter from Paulo Duarte to Pierre Matisse dated 12.20.1944. Reus 2004 pp. 759-760 PMGA 18.35. Russell. 1999, p.258. Reus 2004 p. 762 359 PMGA 18.35 Reus 2004, p.p. 762-763 360 PMGA 18.39. Russell, 1999, p.258 361 PMGA 18.39. Russell. 1999, p.259 358 128 Irradiated by the Passage of a Swan and The Rose Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and of Birds) and another one formally registered as purchased by the poet André Breton (Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird) but that was actually acquired by his mistress Elisa Bindorff 362, for whom Breton had just written the book of poems Arcane 17, perhaps his best poetic achievement. Another was bought for his lover by a wealthy collector (Nocturne). A sixth gouache (The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers) was acquired by MoMA through a bequest provided by a woman. And yet another (The Migratory Bird) appears registered as acquired by a married couple in which the woman –Charlotte Bevans – was a known collector. A single one of the temperas was acquired during the exhibition by a man, who was in fact the architect of the MoMA to whom the complete series had been offered and had not managed to convince the museum either to buy or exhibit it (Acrobatic Dancers). Fourteen gouaches did not find a buyer during the exhibition. And again women come into play. In view that they have not been sold, Pierre Matisse offers a gouache to his wife (Woman in the Night) and another one to his young 23-years-old lover who years later would become his wife (Toward the Rainbow). Four others are bought, after the exhibition, by women (The Escape Ladder, The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain, Ciphers and Constellations in Love With a Woman and The Passage of the Divine Bird). Three others are again registered as acquired by married couples (Women on the Beach, Wounded Personage and Woman and Birds). Two are bought by a gay couple (Sunrise and Woman With Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars ). An important collector –married to a gallerist– acquired one (People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails) shortly after closing the exhibition, possibly influenced by his wife, by the relative success of reviews or the adjusted price. And two last gouaches (The Poetess, Awakening in the Early Morning) were sold in 1946 to one or two private collectors who preferred to remain anonymous. It has also been written that the collectors who bought the Constellations were the most important of the time. But in reality we can say that it was 'second class' collectors: that is, middle class in the sense that was retained in the 40s for that term. The authors are confused: although it is true that Pierre Matisse had managed to place Miró oil paintings with the main American collectors, including several museums, this does not mean that those same collectors were the buyers of the gouaches. Anne Deirdre Robson identifies in her doctoral thesis The market for modern art in New York in the nineteen Forties and nineteen fifties - A structural and historical Survey among the main Miró collectors two buyers of gouaches, the first of them being Eleanor Gates Lloyd ('Lallie' Barnes), adding that she began to collect works by “Klee, Miro and Georges Rouault” 363. But the Mirós of her collection were acquired after the purchase of the Constellations gouache, and especially in the years that preceded the death of the painter –and of herself in 1985. This is for example the case of the 1938 oil painting Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert and of the 1956 362 Hammond 2000, p. 72. Robson, Anne Deirdre The market for modern art in New York in the nineteen Forties and nineteen fifties - a structural and historical Survey. Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. at University College London, 1988. p.222 363 129 ceramic Figurine (Projet pour un Monument), which she bought in 1982 and was sold, like the previous oil painting, at a Sotheby's auction after the death of her husband in 1993 (New York Sale, May 12, 1994, lot 218). Robson also cites Philip Goodwin, purchaser of a gouache from the Constellations, but we have not found in the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery evidence of such earlier purchases of Miró paintings by Goodwin. Robson, however, does cite other major collectors who did acquire works by Miró before 1945, including Walter P. Chrysler Jr., who owned the 1917 Self-portrait; the 1918 Portrait of Heriberto Casany (bought in 1939); the 1925 Personage (bought in 1938) and Etoiles en des sexes d'escargot, of 1925 (bought before 1941). Robson also quotes Peggy Guggenheim, who apart from the works she acquired to sell in her gallery, also kept in her collection works such as Dutch Interior II of 1928, bought in 1940 and Seated woman II, 1939, bought 1941. Another cited collector is Henry Clifford, who owned among others The Tilled Field, 1923-24 (bought in 1941) and Bather, 1932 (bought in 1933). But none of these collectors acquired a tempera of the Constellations series. Other important North American collectors of Miró works before 1945 that we can mention are Thomas Laughlin (Landscape by the Sea, 1926, bought before 1941; Potato, 1928, bought in 1932; Nocturne, 1938 bought in 1939); Albert Eugene Gallatin (Dog barking at the Moon, 1926 bought in 1929; Painting, Fratellini, Three Personnages, 1927, bought in 1928; Object, 1932, bought in 1936 and Painting, 1933, bought in 1935); Saidie A. May (Persons attracted by the form of a mountain, 1936, bought in 1938, Portrait I, 1938, bought in 1938) and Louise & Walter Arensberg (The Hermitage, 1924, bought before 1934 and Nude, 1926, bought in 1936). In any case, none of these great collectors, clients of Pierre Matisse, said 'present' when the Constellations were exhibited in January 1945. More significant is the absence in the list of buyers of the Constellations of the main art critics, who were also early collectors of Miró's work, such as James Thrall Soby (1906-1979), owner among others of the important Portrait of Mistress Mills in 1750 of 1929 (bought in November of 1943); Collage of 1934, (bought in 1935); Still life and old Shoe of 1937 (bought in 1944); Self-portrait I, 1937 and Portrait IV, 1938 (bought in 1944). We can not forget that Soby, at the time of Miró's attempt to place the Constellations at MoMA, was a member of the Board of Trustees (1942-1979), advisor to the Committee on the Museum Collections (1940-1967), and Chairman of the Committee (1944-1945 and 1950-1967). In the interval he was Vicechairman. For the rest, Soby was then Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA (from 27.10.1943 to 1.01.1945). Soby, lover and collector of Miró, declined undoubtedly to acquire the Constellations for both the MoMA and himself, despite their low price and that precisely in that same period he was buying much more expensive works of the painter –earlier ones. The same goes for James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986), organizer of Miró's 1941 retrospective at MoMA, owner of, among other oil paintings, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, 1925, and Seated Woman, 1932 (bought in the 30s), who took over from Soby as Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of MoMA between 1945 and 1946 and who was one of the 130 most influential people in the museum in those years. And he did not buy aither any gouache of the series. When MoMA recovered in 1993 the Constellations for what was probably the most important retrospective exhibition of Joan Miró ever made, the role of the museum, or rather the absence of action of the same in the episode of the Constellations was carefully hidden. Carolyn Lanchner, then responsible for the Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture and who signs the voluminous exhibition catalog with a long essay of 73 pages in two or four columns, devotes much space to the paintings that precede the Constellations while these, true protagonists of the exhibition (they also illustrate the cover of the catalog), were only described in a few paragraphs based on long quotes by André Breton. As we have already seen, Lilian Tone, who made the catalog and the documentation for the exhibition, prepared an interesting text in which she described the story of the series of gouaches. But this short essay is omitted from the catalog of the exhibition, the museum only including it in its Autumn Bulletin of 1993. But even this story, corrected by Lanchner and almost hidden in the bulletin instead of the catalog, ignores the question of the refusal of the museum to exhibit and acquire the Constellations, limiting itself to recording the letter of Paulo Duarte to Philip L. Goodwin offering the gouaches, and to point out that the MoMA could not cope with the cost of shipping to New York 364. Among those who bought Constellations gouaches, but in the secondary market long after the exhibition, when they were already famous and expensive, and apart from 'Lallie' Barnes, only a collector, the couple formed by the Mr. and Mrs. Lee A. Ault had purchased a Miró oil painting before 1945 (Portrait of Ramón Sunyer, 1918, bought before 1940) and they bought another one in 1948 (Personages and Mountains 1936). Although to our knowledge, and as we shall see later, the true buyer of that tempera was not the Ault couple, but Hildegard Von Steinwehr. The couple formed by Jacques and Natasha Gelman, who acquired a Constellations gouache, had bought before that, but in the 1950s, at least two oil paintings by Joan Miró: Landscape 1927 and Two personnages 1935. They also acquired oil in 1987 Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona 1919. But it again happens that the purchase of the gouache –Toward the Rainbow, the one that Pierre gave to his lover and later wife Patricia Matta– took place in 1968, 23 years after the exhibition in New York . We see then that the buyers of the gouaches at the time of the exhibition of 1945 or immediately afterwards did not belong to the category of great collectors to whom Pierre Matisse usually sold, but to a new class of more modest collectors. In fact they are typical of the 40s, when the economic boom that produced Second World War brought a new upper middle class to the art world. The most accurate description of this new class of collectors was provided by James Thrall Soby in a famous article published in the prestigious Saturday Review of Literature in 1946, which began precisely by describing this new type of clients of art galleries: “A basic difference between the picture buyer and the collector is that one acquires a work of art for an empty wall space, the other buys for himself. In this country hundreds of people who thought themselves in the first category now find themselves in the second. Many 364 Tone 1993, p.5 131 Americans are today acquiring more pictures than they need for household decoration; many are becoming collectors, often despite themselves. Their purchases vary greatly in kind, number and price, but most of them are buying works by living American artists, one or two a year, at somewhere between $250 and $1,500 per item.”365. This new type of collectors, which Soby describes as individuals with an income of between $ 7,500 and $ 25,000 per year, revolutionized the art world in the United States and greatly facilitated the development of its museums. The category has been studied in detail since the 40s in specialized journals such as Art News, and later by historians. Soby's reference to the fact that they were the ones who started buying works by living American artists leads us to another work by Deirdre Robson, dedicated precisely to the market of the so-called Abstract Expressionists in those years. Robson points out that in the second half of the 40s there were two million households in the United States with incomes between $ 5,000 and $ 10,000 per year, and a further 650,000 households with incomes over $ 10,000. Among the new early collectors of Abstract Expressionists, which has always been said to have been heavily influenced by Miró's Constellations, Robson quotes several buyers of Miró's gouaches, such as 'Lallie' Barnes and Dwight Ripley366. 365 366 Soby 1946, p.42 Robson 1988. pp. 215-221 132 7. The journey of the Constellations since 1945 In the following pages we will try to describe what was the fate of each of the gouaches of the series. The interest of doing so is on the one hand documentary, given that so far the chain of museums or collectors who have owned them, who are their current owners, what is their estimated value, etc. has not been published. Knowing who were the buyers also helps us to discern how they were perceived in the New York art scene in 1945, endorsing in our view the thesis we developed on the undervaluation of the series and its classification by Pierre Matisse and MoMA as ‘minors works for women’, which led to the museum's refusal to exhibit them. As we have pointed out in previous chapters, the only census published so far is the one made by Lilian Tone in 1993 for the catalog of Miró's centennial exhibition at MoMA. Tone, now curator at the New York museum, has explained to us that she was then a young student in practice fascinated by the Constellations, and apart from the catalog entries she made the aforementioned little essay about the gouaches' trip from Spain to the United States. Before Tone, Pierre Matisse had published a list of owners in the brief catalog of the exhibition in 1959 in which he launched the portfolio of pochoir reproductions, where he ignored the usual practice of not naming the owners of the works. The list was reproduced later by the editor of Yale French Studies at the end of an article by Professor Renée Riese Hubert, in a special issue of 1964367. The information coincides with that contained in the first North American edition of Jacques Dupin's monograph. To carry out the exercise today is also necessary because, as we have already pointed out, the official archives, both of the Pierre Matisse gallery and of the museums in which they have finally landed or where they have been exhibited on occasion, allude, when referring to the owners, to names that do not tell us anything about who the real customers were, because they often correspond to the husbands of the real buyers of the temperas. These women are in some cases extremely strong persons, with a singular track record and whose contribution to society has sometimes been obscured by the simple fact of being known by the name of their husbands. 7. The journey of the Constellations since 1945 367 Riese 1964, pp-52-59 133 We now proceed to a description of the investigation results we have been able to achieve, assuming that, in some cases, all the unknowns facts have not been cleared, especially as regards the current owners, who for the most part now wish to remain anonymous. The main museums of the world know who they are, but the information is confidential and under no circumstances will they make it public. In the compilation that follows, made in chronological order of the production of the temperas, we describe the title of the gouache in English and the original title in French that Miró wrote and dated by hand with a small drawing on the back. We then summarize the history that Lilian Tone gave us about its successive owners until 1993. Then we correct that information to explain who the real buyers were and what their profile was, continuing eventually the chain of owners since then. 1. Sunrise (Le Lever du soleil) Varengeville, January 21, 1940. Gouache and oil on paper. This piece was not sold in the exhibition of 1945, and according to Lilian Tone, the gouache was bought by Dwight Ripley before 1958, later going to Georges Bernier and, in 1965 to the 1993 owner, not named. Miró would have made a sketch for this tempera on December 7, 1938. It is a gouache (white) on watercolor (black) of 33 x 41 cm with characters very similar to the Constellations series. In November 2014 it was still on sale at the Andipa Gallery in London with the same title as that of the 1940 tempera. The title had been inscribed by Miró himself on the back of the paper (Joan Miró. / “Le lever du soleil”/7/XII/1938). This gouache was thus one of the two bought by British linguist and botanist Harry Dwight Dillon Ripley, grandson of the founder of the Union Pacific Railroad and cousin of the ornithologist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Sidney Dillon Ripley. In 1943 he moved with his life partner Rupert Charles Barneby to New York, where he financed the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, in which he exhibited his drawings several times. The versatile Ripley, who spoke 15 languages, wrote in 1947 a poem in Catalan entitled En regardant Le Lever du Soleil de Joan Miró. The painter will return the detail dedicating him (with a good greeting to Dwight Ripley, affectionately, Miró) a drawing with colored wax pencils dated November 21, 1961 and made on letterhead from the Gladstone Hotel in New York. The drawing is preserved in the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, in the Dwight Ripley papers related to Joan Miró (Ref. 1827). Sunrise remained in 1958 in his property according to Matisse's listings. And it also appears in his hands in the list of Yale French Studies of 1963. The gouache was later purchased by Rosamond and Georges Bernier. Rosamond Rosenbaum, Peggy Riley when she married Lewis A. Riley Jr., retained the name Bernier after marrying in 1975 in her third marriage art critic John Russell, author of books on Pierre Matisse, Picasso and Miró. Peggy was an Jewish-American adventurer 134 and journalist who lived in Mexico and then became editor of Vogue magazine, which sent her to Paris as chief correspondent in Europe. There she participated with second husband Georges in the adventure of L'Œil magazine, for which she interviewed Miró on several occasions, and founded in 1962 the art gallery of the same name. She became friends with many painters and artists, including Miró and Picasso, for whom she carried out a very important commission that led to the creation of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. For this intervention –to to track down the works of Picasso's youth in Barcelona– the journalist received in 1999 from the Spanish government the Lazo de Dama of the Order of Isabel la Católica. France was more generous with her, and made her Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. After her marriage to Russell, Rosamond returned to the United States, where she did until her death in 2016 extensive work as a lecturer, writer and art critic. Georges Bernier was a French journalist of Russian Jewish origin, friend of all the Surrealists, who went into exile in New York during the war, becoming a dealer there. After returning to France, he directed L'Œil Paris magazine from 1955 to 1970. But Sunrise did not stay long in the hands of the Berniers, since in 1965 it was acquired by an American collector, not identified by Tone and who kept it until at least 1993. But we have found out who the mysterious collector was, since the tempera appeared in 2010 as a possession of the Toledo Museum of Art, from a donation dated in 1996. The collector who donated the gouache to the museum was Thomas T. Solley (1924-2006), grandson of Evan Frost Lilly, a member of the family that founded the pharmaceutical multinational Eli Lilly & Co. in 1876. Thomas served in the US Army during the Second World War, and when he returned he studied architecture. After working for ten years for Eli Lilly, in 1961 he created his own studio, while studying art history at Indiana University, obtaining a master's degree in 1966 and specializing in surrealism and modern art. Hence probably his purchase of the gouache. In 1971 he was appointed director of the Indiana University Art Museum. 2. The Escape Ladder (L'Échelle de l'évasion) Varengeville, January 31, 1940. Gouache, watercolor and ink on paper. According to the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery consulted by Lilian Tone, the gouache appeared as the property of Mrs. Helen Acheson in December 1957, and passed to MoMA in 1978. The first buyer was therefore Helen Scherer, who appears registered in the gallery with the name of her second husband, the banker George Acheson, who died in March 1957. This unparalleled collector is one of the main benefactors of the Museum of Modern Art of New York, which thanks to the bequest left in her name –Helen had been preparing with curator Dorothy C. Miller this bequest since the death of her husband– could immediately have this gouache (Acquisition No. 743.1978) to add to the one it already had since 1945 thanks to the bequest of Lillie Bliss, and some paintings of exceptional quality, such as Landscape, by Auguste Herbin; Girl at the Piano, by Jacques Villon, Girl with a Bow, by Marie Laurencin, or Four Bedouins with an Overloaded Camel, by Jean Dubuffet. Thanks to Helen's bequest, the museum was also able to acquire later the magnificent painting Hope II, by Gustav Klimt, Balthus's Girl with Red and Green Jacket; woodcuts by Kandinsky; Monument, sculpture by Joan Miró or Stack, by Donald Judd. 135 Helen Scherer had married in 1922 cardiologist Theodore Bame Barringer Jr of the New York Hospital. But the allopathic doctor died prematurely in 1927. The then widow of Barringer soon met a singular banker, also much older than her as her previous husband. It was George Acheson, who had started working when he was not yet 20 years old in one of the most important private banks of the time, Brown Brothers & Co in New York, where he spent almost three decades of his life, a part of which as representative in Paris, where he entered the artistic environment of the decade that preceded the First World War. In 1919, he joined the Fifth Avenue Bank, where the clients he had brought gave him to the position of Vice President two years later, and member of the board of directors in 1931. His knowledge of the French language made Pierre Matisse contact him as soon as he arrived in New York in 1925, making him the reference banker of the Valentine Dudensing gallery first and later also of Pierre's gallery, located a stone's throw from George's bank. The banker went along with Pierre on summers to Paris, and bought paintings directly from the dealers from whom the gallerist also acquired work, such as Leonce Rosenberg, Paul's brother. When he married Helen Scherer in July 1929, he did it in the mayor's office of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, on Rue Bonaparte, in the heart of the Latin Quarter and two steps from the main galleries and Picasso’s studio. Helen was the companion needed to turn the professional relationship between Pierre and George into a personal friendship, which the new Mrs. Acheson established with both Teeny Sattler and later with Patricia Kane. It was the Achesons, for example, who brought Marc Chagall, a newcomer as an exile to New York in 1941, to Pierre’s gallery, with which the Russian painter worked until his death. Helen continued her husband's hobby, personally bought this gouache and continued to buy works of art after George's death in 1957, many of them in the Pierre Matisse gallery, which was responsible for assessing Helen's bequest to MoMA upon her death. 3. People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails (Personnages dans la nuit guidés par les traces phosphorescentes des escargots) Varengeville, February 12, 1940. Gouache on paper (37.9 x 45.7 cm). According to Tone, it was acquired at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in February 1945 by New York lawyer Louis E. Stern, passing to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1963. Actually the buyer, or at least the inspiration for the purchase was his wife Irene Hudson, director of the Milch Galleries in New York. Louis E. Stern was a Jewish lawyer, born in 1886 in Balta, in Soviet Bessarabia, and specialized in representing foreign companies in the United States. Married to the gallerist in 1932, the couple collected 19th and 20th century art until Louis's death in 1962. When Marc Chagall arrived in 1941 to New York without speaking English, George and Helen Acheson sent him to Stern, who spoke Russian and Yiddish as the painter. Louis and Irene became friends with Marc and Ida and acted as de facto representatives of the painter on numerous issues. Hence the significant amount of works of this painter in thier important collection, which was dispersed to the death of Stern between the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA in New York. 136 People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails remained in September 1962 in the hands of the Stern Foundation, which in 1963 accepted its permanent exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, within the Louis E. Stern Collection. This work has been little seen outside of Philadelphia. Stern did not consent to its being exhibited at the Berggruen gallery in Paris or the New York gallery in 1959, and maintained a correspondence dispute with Pierre Matisse because of the excessive time the copying of the gouache in pochoir took. 4. Women on the Beach (Femmes sur la plage) Varengeville, February 15, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper (38.1 x 45.7 cm). According to Lilian Tone, this tempera was not sold and remained in the Pierre Matisse gallery until 1968, when it was acquired by the couple formed by Jacques and Natasha Gelman along with another gouache of the series: Toward the Rainbow. In reality, the buyer was Natasha, since in everything that refers to art it was her who decided and bought, and the couple’s collection should indeed be called the Natasha Zahalkaha collection. Jacques Gelman was a film producer of Jewish origin born in St. Petersburg. His parents settled in France, where he began working as a photographer in film studios. In 1939 he fled to Mexico, where without getting a visa to the United States, he teamed up with Mario Moreno Cantinflas to produce his films. In December of that year he saw an attractive young woman reading a French newspaper on the terrace of a café. It was Natasha, A Jew born in Prostejov (Bohemia) and educated in Austria and Switzerland. She was fond of art and after getting married in 1941 she introduced Jacques to the Mexican artistic milieu, and especially to painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who made two portraits of Natasha. When Jacques Gelman died in 1986, Natasha continued to acquire works to ‘fill in gaps’ in her collection, acquiring new paintings by Miró, Picasso, Léger, Max Ernst and Dubuffet. It was also Natasha who organized the exhibition of her collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1990, and before passing away in 1998 she bequeathed her collection of European paintings, worth 300 million dollars to the Met. The gouache is exhibited since then in that museum as part of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (Accession Number: 1999.363.52) 137 5. Woman With Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars (Femme à la blonde aisselle coiffant sa chevelure à la lueur des étoiles) Varengeville, March 5, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper (37.9 x 45.8 cm). According to Tone, in the count of December 1958 it appears as acquired by Dwight Ripley (see Sunrise). It was later purchased by Mrs. Samuel S. White of Ardmore, Philadelphia, in whose possession it appears on the 1963 listing. The gouache then passed to E.V. Thaw & Co., Inc. in New York and, according to Tone, again returned to the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. In January 1966 it was acquired in the gallery by The Cleveland Museum of Art, which still owns it within its Contemporary Collection (ID Number: 1965.2). The museum, however, does not mention Pierre Matisse, referring instead to Thaw & Co. as seller. Nor does any of the 1965-1966 correspondence regarding this gouache appear in the archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery. The person who actually bought the gouache from Ripley was the painter Vera Roberta McEntire (1888-1966), a pupil of modernist painter Arthur Beecher Carles at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). Vera was the daughter of the prestigious lawyer Walter Francis McEntire, of St Louis, Missouri, descendant of one of the main families of Quakers that colonized Philadelphia in the 17th century. She was always linked to the world of art and hosted illustrious visitors, such as Henri Matisse, Man Ray and Jules Pascin. In 1915 she married Samuel Stockton White III (18761952) a millionaire heir to the S. White White 138 Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia, the pioneer of artificial dentures in the United States. The only thing that interested Samuel was bodybuilding and sports. Traveling in Paris at the age of 25, his sculptural body had attracted the attention of Auguste Rodin, who used him as a model for the two versions of the statue The American Athlete, in 1901 and 1904. Samuel also posed for Rembrandt Bugatti, son of furniture and jewelery designer Carlo Bugatti and brother of car builder Ettore Bugatti. Back in the United States, he joined his father's company. Given the fortune of her husband, Vera introduced Samuel to the world of collecting and asked him to help her emulate John Quinn and Albert C. Barnes. In fact, Vera's first purchase was Braque's Basket of Fish (1910), acquired in the sale of the Quinn collection of 1926, in which Pierre Matisse made his first major operation. Upon the death of Vera, the gouache was excluded –probably by her heirs– from the donation to the Philadelphia Museum of Art of 300 works and objects from the couple’s collection, which included works by Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Braque and Brancusi. And it was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art. 6. Morning Star (L'étoile matinale) Varengeville, March 16, 1940. Tempera, gouache, egg, oil and pastel on paper. It was given by Miró to his wife Pilar Juncosa, who offered it on November 4, 1986 to the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona. 139 7. Wounded Personage (Personnage blessé) Varengeville, March 27, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Following Tone, according to a list of June 1958 it appears as acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Zeisler of Chicago, in whose possession it remained in 1963. Actually it is also a purchase by an exceptional woman. The real buyer was Claire Block, better known as Claire Zeisler (1902-1991) because of her second marriage, and was a great American plastic artist who created the textile sculptures and was a pupil of Alexander Archipenko. Married in 1921 –with only 18 years– to rich heir Harold Florsheim (Florsheim shoes), Claire bought works by Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Picasso and other European artists. After divorcing the shoemaker, Claire remarried in 1946 to Conan Doyle expert and writer Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler –unrelated to collector and MOMA board member Richard S. Zeisler. It was while being married to Ernst that Claire bought the gouache. The painting was later sold to gallerist Richard L. Feigen & Co. of 34 East 69th Street, New York, who later sold it to Galleria Galatea in Turin, which sold it to Count C. Cicogna of Milan. This last collector sold it to the Alex Reid & Lefevre gallery in London, which in 1979 sold it to a private collector in San Francisco. 140 8. Woman and Birds (Femme et oiseaux) Varengeville, April 13, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to the research carried out by Lilian Tone of MoMA in 1993 368, the painting was acquired at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1946 by Mr. and Mrs. Lee Addison Ault, of New Canaan, New York. The next owner, as early as 1948, was Mrs. George W. Helm, of East Hampton, New York, passing in April 1958 to Mrs. Rolf Tjeder of New York. The next buyers were, in 1964, Mr. and Mrs. Jan Mitchell, from New York, then going to the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Helm. It then went on to another unidentified private collection, until sold to the Thomas Ammann Fine Arts Gallery in Zurich, where it was acquired by Mrs. Gustavo Cisneros of Caracas, Venezuela in 1987. But we do not believe that the first gouache buyers were Lee Addison Ault and his wife Dorothy Perin Smith. Lee was a journalist from a family of entrepreneurs engaged in the dye industry (Ault & Wiborg Company). But he liked art and on his return from the Pacific War he founded The Quadrangle Press, which published luxurious monographs of painters. One of them was in 1948 the book by Clement Greenberg Joan Miró, with a preface by Ernst Hemingway. 368 Lanchner 1993 p. 417 141 In fact, the American habit of not naming people when they belong to the female sex unnecessarily complicated the documentation. We have established that there were not so many changes of ownership of the painting. Because Mrs. George. W. Helm was none other than Hildegard Von Steinwehr Ault, older sister of Lee Addison Ault, who according to Matisse's records would have bought the gouache in 1946. In our understanding, what actually happened is that Lee Ault acquired the Constellation on behalf of of his sister – formally, and for some legal reason, possibly a divorce procedure. Hildegard was the daughter of Hildegard Von Steinwehr and Lee Brownell Ault, heir to the dye firm. When her father died in 1918, at the age of 32, and Hildegard only 11, the two main factories of the company were sold to Europe’s CibaGeigy and Sandoz. The fortune that Hildegard made then increased when in 1928 his grandfather Levi A. Ault, founder of the company, sold the rest of the business for the sum of 14 million dollars (about $ 200 million today). Hildegard was then married to Buckner Ashby Wallingford, III, and it is as Mrs. Wallingford that Pierre Matisse had known her since 1932 as a collector and later a friend of the family. And the series continues: Mrs. Rolf Tjeder of New York, who owned the tempera in 1958 was none other than ineffable collector Hildegard, who had divorced and remarried. She also had works by Henri Matisse, Tanguy, Miró, Calder, Tamayo, Picasso, Dubuffet, etc., all acquired from Pierre Matisse. Hildegard died in 1968 and the gouache then passed to Michael Hardin Helm, son of Hildegard and her second husband George Washington Helm, Jr. As for Jan Mitchell, it seems evident that Tone was wrong and his acquisition of the painting was subsequent to the purchase by Michael Helm. Jan Mitchell was, like many art collectors and dealers, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Libau (now Liepaja) in Russian Latvia. Fled to the United States, he took over the prestigious New York restaurants Lüchow's and Longchamps. His marriage to art dealer Ellin Hobbins, also an Ashkenazi Jew fleeing Germany, made him interested in collecting. The purchase may have been made in 1967, when Mitchell sold his restaurants. But as his wife's collector interest was more focused on pre-Columbian objects, it is not surprising that in front of a good offer she got rid of the piece, in a typical action of concentration towards the core of the collection. The buyer in 1987 was Venezuela’s Patricia ('Patty') Phelps de Cisneros, daughter of ornithologists William H. Phelps, Jr (North American) and Kathleen Deery (Australian). In addition to ornithologists, the Phelps were dedicated to communication, founding in 1953 Radio Caracas 142 Televisión network. In 1970, Cuban-born Diego Cisneros, owner of the competitor Venevisión channel, married his son Gustavo A. Cisneros Rendiles with Patricia, and while he was engaged in his father’s business empire, she has managed to build one of the largest collections Latin American Art in the world. Patricia belongs to MoMA’s Board of Trustees since 1992, to the Tate Modern Council, and to the Reina Sofía Museum Foundation in Madrid, and also maintains close ties with the Prado Museum, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Berggruen Museum in Berlin, etc. But after holding the gouache for thirty years, Patricia also decided to sell. The transaction was handled by Sotheby’s, which auctioned it in its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 21 June 2017. Lot 45 Femme et Oiseaux had an estimated price tag of $ 30 million, which was thought to be too high in the art world, since the most recent sale of a Constellation only fetched $5.6m, but in the end it sold for 24,6 GBP or nearly $ 34 million) 9. Woman in the Night (Femme dans la nuit) Varengeville, April 27, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Tone, the gouache was acquired on January 20, 1945 by Alexina Matisse who sold it on an unspecified date to Liechtenstein's "World Arts Establishment" – perhaps a simple postbox in Vaduz– which later sold it to a private collector in the U.S. From there it went to the Matthiesen Fine Art Limited gallery of Duke Street, St. James's London, which sold it to the Maeght Gallery in Paris. The gallery then sold it to David Lloyd Kreeger of Washington, DC. In October 1976, it moved to the Richard L. Feigen & Co. gallery at 34 East 69th Street, New York, which sold it in the same month to Acquavella Galleries of 18 E 79th Street, next to Central Park. In 1978 it was sold to a gallery called Cofinearte in Switzerland. The following year it was acquired bt Art Advisory, S.A., to return on to Galerie Maeght in Paris, which sold it on June 16, 1980 to the Margulies family. Actually, Alexina ‘Teeny’ Sattler, Pierre's wife since 1929, did not acquire the gouache, but it was given to her by the gallerist. Teeny divorced Pierre in 1949 because of his infidelity with Patricia Kane, the wife of painter Roberto Matta, who had also received a Constellation as a gift. Teeny Sattler established herself after her divorce as an art broker before marrying Marcel Duchamp in 1954. As for the subsequent transactions that Tone cites, they seem too many and go through some completely unknown galleries, which suggests a financial setup to hide operations to the treasury or money laundering. In any case, the work was still in the hands of Teeny in 1963 and finally fell in the hands of Miami Jewish property developer Martin Z. Margulies, within his Margulies Family 143 Collection, the private one that he keeps in his luxurious apartment at Key Biscoyne, a private island in front of Miami, and not in the public one exhibited on the campus of Florida International University, known as the Warehouse Museum, a former industrial center of Miami. 10. Acrobatic Dancers (Danseuses acrobates) Varengeville, May 14, 1940. Watercolor on paper. Acquired in 1944, before being exhibited by the Pierre Matisse gallery, by Philip Goodwin, the architect through whom Miró tried to place the Constellations series at MoMA in New York in an operation we have discussed extensively in this book. It was part of the Goodwin Succession in February 1958 and that same year it went to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. 144 11. The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain (Le Chant du rossignol à minuit et la pluie matinale) Palma de Mallorca, September 4, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Lilian Tone's research for MoMA, it was acquired by Mrs. Herbert C. Morris, of Mount Airy, Philadelphia. It passed to Perls Galleries in New York in 1979, which would still have in its possession in 1993. The buyer was in fact Willavene Sober, a reputed collector whose paintings ended in good measure at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Pierre Matisse sent the gouache to Willavene on January 22, 1945, that is, before the exhibition was closed on the 19th of February, which indicates once again the crush felt by the collector for this work. Willavene was married to Herbert Cameron Morris, a modest egg seller who, with $ 23,000 from his wife's father, Edward K. Sober, founded the Tasty Baking confectionery in Boston in 1914. Willavene was involved in the business and personally gave the name to the new product that made the company's fortune: the Tastykake that is still selling today. Herbert was not involved in the collector activities of his wife, who acted on her own, made purchases in her own name and was a regular customer of Pierre Matisse, who sold her from 1935 to 1958 works by Miró, Tanguy, Matta, Chagall, Rouault, Laurencin and Siqueiros. She also had works by Degas, Pissarro and Toulouse-Lautrec in her collection. A part of this collection was sold at the Sotheby's auction Contemporary Art in May 1986, nine months after her death. In any case, according to the MoMA, the owner since 1979 would be the Perls Galleries of New York. But the Perls gallery, founded by the German Jews Klaus and Frank Perls in 1935, was closed in 1997. It could also be a MoMA error here, and that the gouache never actually left Willavene's family since the Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography published in 1998 by Helene E. Roberts, indicates that the gouache was is in the private collection of H. Cameron Morris Jr., of Osterville, Massachusetts, one of the two sons of Willavene. 12. On the 13th, the Ladder Brushed the Firmament (Le 13 l'échelle a frôlé le firmament) Palma de Mallorca, October 14, 1940. gouache and oil wash on paper. As Tone points out, it was acquired in January or February of 1945 by Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd of Washingtron D.C. And it remained in 1993 at the H. Gates Lloyd Collection. According to the archives of the gallery Pierre Matisse, the buyer of this gouache would have been Mary Wingate Lloyd (Mrs. Horatio Gates) 369. This seems to us a considerable error, derived from an identification mistak, since Mary Wingate Lloyd, a prestigious horticulturist and wife of banker Horatio Gates Lloyd, Jr., died in 1934. Actually the buyer was her daughter-in-law Eleanor Biddle 'Lallie 'Barnes (19061985), founder of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and another of the great collectors and patrons of twentieth-century art in the United States. Daughter of a prestigious lawyer and Republican politician of Philadelphia, John Hampton Barnes, she married in 1927 young banker Horatio Gates Lloyd, son of Mary Helen and Horatio Jr. The young financier was a partner of the bank Drexel Burnham Lambert 369 PMGA 117.13 Subseries: Lloyd, Mary Wingate [Mrs. Horatio Gates] 1938–1975 145 and in 1950 he joined to the CIA, which he left in 1964 after holding the position of Deputy Director. Lallie's conversion to modern art came on a boat trip back from Europe in the late 1930s, when the couple coincided with James Johnson Sweeney, a friend of Horatio's since school. The MoMA curator, who was preparing books and exhibitions of Miró and Piet Mondrian Mondrian, convinced Lallie that she should abandon his impulse to collect post-impressionists and embrace the new art he and MoMA promoted. The first thing that the collector did was to get hold of a Mondrian, which hung up presiding over the dining room of her Linden mansion on Darby Road in Haverford, next to Philadelphia. While her husband was involved in complex investment banking operations or administering American espionage, Lallie set out to explore the art world with the help of Sweeney and to collect on her own behalf and without her husband being involved in any operation. She bought works by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning when few knew them, and filled her house with Mondrians Mondrian, Brancusis, Klees and Calders. She bought from Pierre Matisse works by Braque, Matisse, Matta and Giacometti. Before acquiring the gouache On the 13th, the Ladder Brushed the Firmament, she had bought in 1941 Miró's 1939 painting Persons Magnetized by the Stars Walking on the Music of a Furrowed Landscape, work that she immediately lent for the MoMA exhibition that same year. Lallie was one of the first to buy Dubuffet in the United States. But she soon went on to buy works by American artists, such as Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Tony Caro and Sam Francis. Lallie died in 1985, when the gouache passed into the hands of her husband Horatio. After his death in November of 1993, and by express will of the collector, her life collection was divided and sold in auctions in benefit of her children Horatio, Wingate, Mary and Prudence and her 18 grandchildren. Sotheby's was responsible for dispersing the collection, in a famous auction held on May 4 and 5, 1994 in New York. Before dying, the collector had ceded some works to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, of which board she had been a member, and to other museums. The name of the current owner of this gouache is not public. Eleanor Biddle 'Lallie 'Barnes 146 13. Nocturne Palma de Mallorca, November 2, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to the research of Lilian Tone, laconically reflected in the catalog of the exhibition of 1993 370, the piece was acquired in 1945 by Stephen C. Clark of New York. In the list of May 1958, prior to being sent to Paris for reproduction, it was owned by Mrs. Cable Senior, also from New York. Tone goes on to indicate that it was auctioned by Sotheby's on March 23, 1983 (lot 52) passing afterwards to the owner at that time (1993) whom Tone does not identify, although we have managed to do so. Stephen Carlton Clark (1882-1960), first purchaser of gouache according to Lilian Tone, is a personality of the art world in the first half of the 20th century. Born in 1882 in Cooperstown, New York, he was the grandson of Edward Clark, who had founded the Singer Sewing Machine Company in 1851 371, with factories in the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Turkey, etc. But their interests went far beyond sewing machines. For example, his family was behind the Manhattan real estate boom at the beginning of the 20th century. A member of the MoMA Board of Trustees since its foundation in 1929, he became its Chairman since the inauguration of the new building in 1939, remaining in office until 1946. It was he who chose the architects who built the museum, and he was also the person who dismissed the director, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Stephen did not buy his first painting by a French artist until 1920, a Monet, and may have done so simply to imitate his brother Robert Sterling Clark, but over the years he built one of the main collections of art in the United States in the twentieth century. However, that collection, distributed today in different museums – mainly the Yale University Art Gallery, the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York– never included the Nocturne gouache. This tempera was the only one of the 23 of the series that did not make the trip to Paris in 1958 and could not therefore be made in pochoir by Daniel Jacomet, and was thus left out of the Miró/Breton portfolio of 1959 .The incertitude surrounding this, the most original and difficult to admire Constellation, has led experts to confuse it with Morning Star. For example, JH Mathews, one of the leading experts in Surrealism, points out in his work Languages of Surrealism 372 that if Nocturne was not reproduced by Jacomet in 1958 it was because Miró had given it to his wife. This error is then repeated by other authors 373. No one has ever explained the absence in Paris of the gouache that had been bought by Stephen C. Clark, but in fact the name of the person who had bought it was not known until, 33 years after his death, Lilian Tone published it in her discreet note included in the catalog of the MoMA exhibition in 1993. The reason is that Pierre Matisse 370 Lanchner 1993, p. 419 See Fox Weber, Nicholas The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud, Alfred A. Knopf, Nueva York, 2007 372 Mathews, J. H., Languages of Surrealism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia MO, 1986, p. 82 373 See Pierce, Gillian B. Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum. Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York 2012, p. 185 371 147 deliberately omitted it in his 1959 catalog, noting that “This gouache has not been reproduced in color: the original gouache which was included in the exhibition of 1945 was unavailable for reproduction”374. In addition, the listing of Yale French Studies of 1963, in which the gouache appears as property of Clark, had a very limited circulation. The detailed archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery include many documents about his client Stephen Clark, from Valentine Dudensing's 1927 letters on purchases, including one in which Valentine tells his partner Matisse that Clark had returned a Picasso “because of the total refusal of Mrs. Clark's to hang the work at her home” 375. But they do not include Miró's gouache among the pieces acquired by Clark. Although two entries in the folder about Stephen Clark of the gallery put Tone on the track. The first is a note of 1958, two years before the tycoon's death, indicating laconically: "Procedures so that Pierre Matisse can borrow Nocturne by Miró for the publication of the Constellations” 376. Tone certainly consulted the document and thus could indicate in the exhibition catalog that after Clark, who acquired it, the owner “In May 1958 (was) Mrs. Cable Senior of New York”. Thus Pierre Matisse had located the owner of the painting in his 1958 search, but was asked to keep the name secret and could not have it lent for reproduction in Paris and be included it in the celebrated portfolio. The owner had to have a very powerful reason to refuse to lend the gouache. It should be noted that this was Mattisse’s only failure. Despite covering all the shipping and insurance costs and offering the owners not only the prestige of several exhibitions for the gouaches and a copy of the portfolio with the reproductions with their name registered in it, Matisse could not recover Nocturne. A collector refused in a letter, but in the end the tempera traveled to Paris. The affair left perhaps a bad after taste in Pierre Matisse's, for although he keeps no trace of the sale of gouache to Stephen Clark, he kept in files indiscreet references to Mrs. Cable Senior in 1958 and, as we shall see later, another one in 1962 that links Nocturne to the collector. The person in charge of revealing the secret and explaining the mystery of the gouache, whether deliberately or 374 Exhibition catalog Constellations by Joan Miró, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1959 p.3 375 376 PMGA 89.37 Correspondence, 1930 PMGA 113.21 Subseries: Clark, Stephen Carlton (1882–1960) 1940–1958 148 simply by inadvertence, is Miró himself when he was more than eighty years old in a conversation with Georges Raillard, whom he had met a lot during his time as Director of the Institut Français de Barcelona between 1964 and 1969. According to Raillard, the talks took place between November and December 1975, plus an addition in May 1977. Miró does not explain that it is Nocturne, but it is evident that he refers to this gouache, because when Raillard tells him that he has always wondered why in the Bretón/Miró portfolio there were only 22, and not 23 gouaches, Miró responds: “Yes, it's a curious story. Pierre Matisse had sold one of the gouaches to a man who gave it to his mistress. If that had been known, he would have had problems. Only twenty-two were published so that the gift was not discovered.” 377 In short, crossing the information of the archives of the gallery, according to Miró the mogul Stephen Carlton Clark had in 1945 a lover for whom he bought the gouache, as others give a ring or a necklace. Lilian Tone strengthens this revelation from Miró to Raillard in her 1993 catalog, and establishes Clark's evident link with the gouache Nocturne378. But the matter remains there, without anyone having dug to establish the relationship between the question of the lover and the millionaire. Because Clark, unlike his brother Robert, was a man of unquestionable moral strength, whom no one would have imagined had lovers. Precisely for reasons of morality Stephen had with his brother Robert Sterling, a serious physical and legal confrontation. Robert, five years older than Stephen, was a globe-trotter who participated in the colonial adventures of President Teddy Roosevelt –which led him to intervene in the 1998 Spanish-American War in the Philippines and in the war against the Boxer rebellion in China in 19001901. But in 1910 the wealthy Robert had already settled in Paris and started buying Impressionist and modern art to decorate his mansion and please his companion, an actress of the Comédie Française named Francine Clary (her real name was Francine Juliette Modzelewska). In 1919 he married her, and when he tried to make her legal heir, he stumbled upon his brother Stephen, who ran the family businesses in Robert's absence, and who claimed that an illegitimate daughter of a tailor, who in her turn had an illegitimate daughter of a previous relationship, could not inherit the immense family fortune. Robert showed up in New York and the two brothers, unable to agree, engaged in a fist fight which was followed by a long legal dispute that Robert won and kept them separated and without any contact from 1923 until death. If the morally strict Stephen Clark had a mistress, this was one of the things that were kept in absolute secrecy. His distinguished wife Susan Vanderpoel Hun, descendant of the Dutch families Vanderpoel and Hun, arrived in New York in the seventeenth century, should never know, at least officially. The issue of the furtive purchase of the gouache –without any trace in the archives of the gallery– remained in the most absolute secrecy until 33 years after the death of Stephen, in which Tone reveals who had been the buyer of the gouache. We also know, thanks to the second of the entries in the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery to which we referred earlier, that on February 2, 1962 a Miss. Mary Misson “asked the gallerist for an estimate of the value –for insurance purposes– of Nocturne” 379. 377 Raillard 1998, p. 109 Tone 1993, p. 6 379 PMGA 19.19. Correspondence, 1960–1964 378 149 We have not found any reference to the hidden life of Stephen Clark, we do not know anything about the mysterious Mrs. Cable Senior, and the only thing we have found out about Ms. Mary Misson is that there were many Missons in Cooperstown, some of whom worked directly for and with the Clarks. We also know that in October 1944, three months before the Constellations exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, a Miss Mary Misson was listed as the secretary of the museum's military program (MoMA Armed Services Program) in which Stephen (then Chairman of the Board) appeared as a member along with René D'Harnoncourt, James T. Soby and the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.380. But above all we have found out that those two female names have something in common and that in addition links them both to Stephen C. Clark, since upon the tycoon's death in September of 1960, Clark left in his will a legacy of $ 25,000 to Mrs. Susan Cable Senior and another one of the same amount to Mary-Katherine Misson. These are considerable amounts, equivalent to $ 200,000 in 2014, taking inflation into account. It is noteworthy that in his will, whose elements were published in great detail by the local newspaper of Cooperstown, The Otsego Farmer 381, legacies of various amounts appeared, up to a total of $ 11,675,000, more than half of which went to the local hospital. The institutions and individuals favored were identified (a cousin, president of the Committee of ..., etc.), except seven donations of $ 25,000 to ladies about whom only the name was indicated. The mystery about this gouache will cobntinue after the death of Stephen Clark. One might think that Misson had also been Clark's lover, and that they had maintained the relationship for a long time. Or that in reality she was the true recipient of the gouache, given the proximity between her work with Clark (October 1944) and the sale of the Constellation (January 1945). It could also happen that Mary-Katherine Misson acted in 1962 in her request of information to the Pierre Matisse Gallery on behalf of the Clark family, ascertaining the value of the painting to buy it from Susan Cable and thus prevent it being known that it had been acquired by Stephen for his lover. But this would not explain the important legacy that Misson received. In any case, what needed to be done to keep the secret was to hold the gouache for a while or sell it to someone who would commit to do the same, and then whitewash it in a public sale. And indeed, the seller waited more than 20 years, because it only went publicly on sale, and on the other side of the Atlantic, on March 380 Press Release “Museum of Modern Art establishes Art Center for War Veterans”, MoMA New York 10.30.1944 381 The Otsego Farmer, Cooperstown, Nueva York, 09.29.1960, p. 3 150 23, 1983 at Sotheby's in London. The painting bore lot number 52 and was listed as an anonymous sale, that is, “owned by a distinguished collector”, who did not mind getting rid of it for a surprisingly small amount. The buyer of the gouache on that occasion, not identified by Tone, was collector Stanley Joseph Seeger Jr., an American heir who lived a dissipated life in Europe most of his life (including a period in the Canary Islands, where he settled in 1967 after the Colonels’coup d'etat in Greece). His fortune came from his mother, the imposing Helen Buchanan Seeger –in whose memory Stravinsky composed his last great work, the Requiem Canticles. Helen was the daughter of William Buchanan, a timber tycoon in South Arkansas and northern Louisiana... and oil in Texas. In 1979, Stanley inherited $ 50 million when his widowed father sold his grandfather's business, and the first thing he did was take his 25-year-old English lover, whom he had just met, and take him by private jet to Greece. Upon returning to London, he bought the house of millionaire Paul Getty in Surrey, Sutton Place, in which Henry VIII had his first sexual contact with Anne Boleyn. And from there on he started buying art. Seeger paid for Nocturne only $ 361,000 in 1983. And he had no problem selling it –along with Francis Bacon's Triptych Studies of the Human Body– at a special Sotheby's sale of his collection in May 2001: The eye of a collector: works from the collection of Stanley J. Seeger. The works were paraded around the world –Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris and Zurich– before the auction in New York. The Lot Nocturne, No. 41 of Sale No. 7647, was valued between 2.5 and 3 million dollars, and sold for $ 5,615,750, including expenses. Also featured in that sale, togegher with several works by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Dubuffet, Tapies, etc., Miró's 1927 oil painting Deux figures sous la lune, the same size as the gouache, which was sold for just $ 467,750. The purchaser of the tempera in 2001, according to Sotheby's, was C. & M. Art of New York. Actually it was Robert Mnuchin, a banker, Goldman Sachs partner, who retired from finance in 1992 and created together with James Corcoran –a Santa Monica gallerist– an art gallery in his own home, a mansion located in 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan. The gallery was called C. & M. Arts, name that became L. & M. Arts when in 2005 Robert replaced Corcoran by the young and beautiful Dominique Lévy, former expert at Christie's. In 2012, when the two partners split up, Mnuchin joined another young beauty, Sukanya Rajaratnam, and the gallery was renamed the Mnuchin Gallery. The former banker bought the gouache no doubt for a client who wished to remain anonymous, as both he and his associate at the time were experts in discrete transactions, with clients such as hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, owner of Picasso's The dream , for which he paid 155 million dollars in 2013. Mnuchin does not have Nocturne for sale in his gallery, which does not even have Miró among the list of artists he sells, which includes Picasso, Matisse, Bacon etc. Nocturne was not lent to any exhibition until 1988, five years after its sale at Sotheby's. 14. The Poetess (La Poétesse) Palma de Mallorca, December 31, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Tone only indicates in the catalog of the exhibition that the owner in 1993, whom she does not identify, had acquired it from Pierre Matisse in 1946. 151 We can however state that the buyers of this gouache, but also of the one entitled Awakening in the Early Morning were the couple formed by lawyer Ralph Frederick Colin (1900-1985) and Irene Georgia Talmey (1906-1994), in all likelihood at her initiative. Irene, best known in the art world as Georgia Talmey, was the daughter of hat dealer George Nathan Talmey and graduated in 1928 from the prestigious Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. This institution, which had since 1879 its own Museum of Art, with works by Degas, Corot, Courbet, Cézanne, Monet and Seurat, in addition to many North American artists, was one of the first to have a Chair of Art History. As for her husband Ralph, he entered New York’s City College at the age of 13 to study law and for two years was the editor of the Columbia Law Review. Upon his graduation in 1921, he joined the firm Rosenman, Colin, Freund, Lewis & Cohen. His cultural interest was focused, before marrying Irene, on the theater, sharing with playwright and Nobel Literature Prize laureate Eugene O'Neill the direction of the Greenwich Village Theater, later to direct the Actor's Theater and the Broadway Theater Alliance. At age 24, he joined the Board of Directors of the Philiharmonic Society of New York. When Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was founded in 1928, Ralph Colin became its legal advisor, and served on its board of directors until 1969. But when in 1931 he married Irene, who was only 25 years old, Ralph's interest went to art. Since their wedding, the Colin-Talmeys began to collect, and in 1954 Ralph became part of the MoMA Board. But his most famous contribution to the art world was to found the Art Dealers Association of America in 1962. What led him to this was that the Internal Revenue Service asked Congress to abolish the law that made donations or legacies to museums tax-deductible. The legislation had allowed some magnates to earn millions by donating false but highly valued works to alleged museums that were really tax fraud machines. The fraudster donated a false work of art to a local museum and deducted from his taxes the amount declared, certified by an unscrupulous gallerist. It was a net gain. In order to avoid the elimination of the tariff reduction, which was of interest both to the main museums, such as the MoMA, legitimate galleries and to the wealthy good faith collectors, Colin federated the main dealers and launched a war to death against counterfeiting. In his campaign, for example, he personally identified as fake a Picasso painting deposited in the Bass Museum in Miami, founded in 1963 with the donation of 500 works, including fake El Greco, Frans Hals and Botticelli's, offered by collectors Johan and Johanna Bass, Austrian Jews fled to New York. Colin bet for the falsity of Picasso's painting despite of the fact that it was included in the Christian Zervos catalogue raisonné. Warned about the issue, the painter certified that Colin was right 382. Another anecdote told about Colin refers to his intervention in a lawsuit between Heinz Berggruen, and Peggy Guggenheim, who acquired from the German dealer an important work by Fernand Léger. After being sent to Venice, the collector began to complain about the price, asking that it be reduced, refusing to pay the agreed amount. Berggruen sought 382 Cummings, Paul Oral history interview with Ralph F. Colin, 08.15.1969, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 152 the help of his friend Ralph, who managed to block Peggy's accounts in New York, forcing her to pay. Ralph F. Colin died in 1985 and his wife Georgia Talmey survived him until November 1994. Unlike Awakening in the Early Morning, which was sold immediately after the death of her husband, Georgia wanted to keep this gouache. But when she passed away, her sons Ralph and Pamela immediately sold an important part of their collection through Christie's. At Auction No. 8154 (Important Modern Works of Art From The Collection of Mr. And Mrs. Ralph F. Colin) held in New York on Wednesday, May 10, 1995, The Poetess was sold for $ 4,732,500. And it is now in the hands of an unknown private collector. 15. Awakening in the Early Morning (Le Réveil au petit jour) Palma de Mallorca, January 27, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Tone does not indicate in her 1993 contribution who was the buyer of this work, limiting herself to saying that until that date it had remained in possession of the 1946 buyer. But we can say that together with The Poetess, this gouache was acquired by Georgia Talmey and Ralph Fredrick Colin. After the death of the lawyer in 1985, and unlike the other gouache, Georgia put it on sale through the Acquavella Contemporary Art, Inc. gallery, of 18 East 79th Street, New York. The gallery, which still exists, was founded by Nicholas Acquavella in 1921, specializing in works of the Italian Renaissance. But in 1960 William R. Acquavella joined the management of the company, and reoriented it towards art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, catapulting it to economic success. In 1984, when Ralph Colin died, William was the president of the Art Dealers Association of America, the group that Colin had created two decades before, and Georgia Talmey naturally turned to him to sell Awakening in the Early Morning. In 1990, after the death of Pierre Matisse, William partnered with Sotheby's to form Acquavella Modern Art and buy the art works of the Pierre Matisse Gallery warehouse for 143 million dollars. The stock contained some 2,300 works of art, including by Mirós, Chagalls, Giacomettis and Dubuffets. In 1993 the tempera was acquired by the Kimbell Art Foundation, rather specialized in works of art prior to the 19th century, but which in 1984 had decided to buy something from Miró. In that year it acquired the 1918 Portrait of Heriberto Casany, one of the works that Miró had sold to Belgian dealer René Gaffé in the 20s. Pierre Matisse bought it from the Belgian in 1937 and it was sold two years later to Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. An opportunity for Kimbell was presented in 1991: the couple formed by oil tycoon Perry Richardson Bass and Nancy Lee Muse decided to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary by donating one million dollars to each of a total of 50 institutions of all types. As Nancy was a native of Fort Worth, Texas, where the Kimbell Art Foundation is located, this institution was included in the list. With that million dollars, the foundation acquired the gouache in 1993. This 15th work of the Constellations series is now part of the permanent collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (reference APg 1993.05). Three years after buying from 153 Acquavella Awakening in the Early Morning, the museum acquired a monumental Miró sculpture, Woman Addressing the Public, measuring 3.72 by 2.43 meters. 154 16. Toward the Rainbow (Vers l'arc-en-ciel) Palma de Mallorca, March 11, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. This gouache was not sold in the 1945 exhibition, and according to Tone, a 1951 list places it at that time in property of Patricia Matisse, passing in 1968 to the collection of Jacques and Natasha Gelman. Actually, Pierre had given the gouache to Patricia Kane Matta, the wife of painter Sebastián Matta, with whom Matisse had been having an affair for years before his divorce from Teeny Sattler in 1949. Pierre immediately married Patricia, and the fact that Tone cited the date of 1951 is because in that year an exhibition was held in which the gouache was exposed, for which a census of the owners was carried out. Patricia died in 1972, but before that she had returned the painting to the market, being acquired in 1968 by collector Natasha Zahalkaha, the wife of Jacques Gelman, to whom we have already referred when talking about the 4th gouache of the series Women on the Beach. Like this piece, Toward the Rainbow was part of the legacy left by Natasha to the Metropolitan Museum of New York upon her death in 1998. And there it is exhibited since then as part of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (Accession Number: 1999.363.53). 155 17. Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird (Femmes encerclées par le vol d'un oiseau) Palma de Mallorca, April 26, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Tone, this gouache was acquired from Pierre Matisse by poet André Breton, apparently in the course of the 1945 exhibition (catalog number 16), who sold it later to the person Tone cites as 1993 owner, a private collector. In fact, the painting was acquired 383 by pianist Elisa Bindhoff (not Bindorff, as it is usually written in France), the Chilean that Breton had known in 1943 and for whom he had written months before one of his most successful book of poems, Arcane 17. The case of Elisa, known in the United States and in France as Elisa Breton or Elisa Caro, is another example of the errors induced by the habit or legal norm of attributing to women the name of their husbands. In the first place, there is a repeated typographical error, since the person André Breton married in August 1945 –that is, months after Elisa acquired the gouache– was not Elisa Caro, but Elisa Claro, the name she used since in 1928 she married in Buenos Aires Chilean politician Benjamin Claro Velasco. Her name was not Bindorff when she was single, but Bindhoff. For the rest, when she married Breton, she had been divorced for years from Claro, who had remarried in 1942 Mary Munizaga. André Breton died in 1966, and from that moment Elisa Bindhoff tried to convert the apartment where the poet had lived since 1922 at number 42 on rue Fontaine, two steps from the Moulin-Rouge, into a museum to pay tribute to his memory. In 1988 a group of Surrealist survivors appealed to President François Mitterrand to ask the state for support for this initiative, which would lead to maintaining the 'ideal palace of surrealism'. The president visited the apartment, but promised nothing to Elisa, and did nothing to move the project forward. In view of the lack of funding, Elisa had to sell Miró's gouache discreetly before dying in the year 2000, because when the contents of the apartment were dispersed in 2003, for the benefit of Aube Elléouët, the daughter of Breton (and painter Jacqueline Lamba), the gouache does not appear listed. The auction held at Hôtel Drouot in Paris in several sessions in the month of April 2003, closed with sales of 46 million euros, including the 2.8 million paid for the Miró oil pàinting Le Piège (The Trap) (1924) but without the Constellation. The gouache was shown in the exhibition La Maison de Verre, André Breton, découvreur, initiateur, at the Musée de Cahors Henri-Martin between September 20 and December 29, 2014. The museum confirmed to us that the owner wanted to remain anonymous. 383 Hammond 2000, p. 72. 156 18. Women at the Border of a Lake Irradiated by the Passage of a Swan (Femmes au bord du lac à la surface irisée par le passage d'un cygne) Palma de Mallorca, May 14, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Tone, this work was acquired during the 1945 exhibition (catalog number 17) by Mrs. Stanley Resor, Greenwiich, Connecticut, and then passed to Helen Resor (future Mrs. Gabriel Hauge) and around 1953 to Ann Resor (future Mrs. James Laughlin), of Norfolk, Connecticut. In 1974 it was acquired by the 1993 owner, a private collector. The buyer of 1945 was in fact Helen Bayleff Lansdowne (1886-1964), married to Stanley Burnet Resor, an authentic self-made woman, genius of advertising in the United States who was raised as the daughter of a single mother –her mother had the audacity, in 1890, of leaving her husband taking her children with her. Without university studies, Helen started to work at age 18 as a clerk in chemicals manufacturer Procter and Gamble, a giant of detergents, but she later moved to advertising. With her ability to interpret the wishes of women, which were responsible for most purchases of P & G products in stores and supermarkets, Helen became Vice President of the J. Walter Thompson Co. agency, where she controlled up to twothirds of its accounts and created some of the most innovative advertising campaigns in history (for example, Pond's) 384 . Helen Bayleff was one of the leading suffragists of her time and fought tirelessly for women's rights, forcing her company and many others to hire female account executives. She was a client of Pierre 384 See Sutton, Denise H. Globalizing Ideal Beauty: Women, Advertising, and the Power of Marketing, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2012 157 Matisse from the beginning of the 30s and in her personal collection he had works by Miró, Picasso, Klee, Dali, Balthus and Vieira da Silva. The annotation of Lilian Tone in the sense that the gouache passed to Helen Resor may indicate that Helen Bayleff Lansdowne gave it to her daughter Helen, possibly because of her marriage to Gabriel Hauge in 1948. But then it passed to Ann Clark Resor, her third daughter, who in 1957 married poet James Laurence Laughlin. And from there to its current anonymous owner, unless there have been private sales, so common in the art world. 158 19. The Migratory Bird (L'Oiseau-migrateur) Palma de Mallorca, May 26, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Tone indicates that it was acquired during or shortly after the 1945 exhibition (Catalog No. 18) by "Mr. and Mrs. William McKim, of Palm Beach, Florida, who sold it to its 1993 owner, a private collector, on a date not determined. The couple of buyers of the gouache in 1945 consisted of collectors Charlotte Bevans (1899-1977) and William (Bill) Lee McKim (1894-1977) founders of the Society of the Four Arts, a cultural and artistic association created in 1936 in rich Palm Beach, Florida. The McKims were very well connected with MoMA (through their friend Alfred H. Barr.) and the Met and left several works in legacy to museums. Charlotte was a seasoned collector and also bought art on her own, being a client for example of the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery. Charlotte’s collection was sold by Sotheby's in several 1979 auctions, such as the Estate Sale of May 17, 1979, in which the gallerist Richard L. Feigen acquired a drawing of Cezanne (Sousbois) that the Mckims had purchased from Pierre Matisse and Valentine Dudensing during their association. Parts of their collection were also sold in another auction on October 19, 1979. Photo: 1950 Mr and Mrs Alfred Barr Jr, Mr and Mrs William Lee McKim 159 20. Ciphers and Constellations in Love With a Woman (Chiffres et constellations amoureux d'une femme) Palma de Mallorca, June 12, 1941. Gouache and ink on vellum paper. It was not sold during the 1945 exhibition (catalog number 19) nor in some years. According to Lilian Tone, in a 1957 listing it appears as property of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman, of New York. It was then offered by Mrs. Chapman to The Art Institute of Chicago, where it is currently exhibited. We are here again in a case of ‘usurpation of personality’ prompted by the imposition on wives to adopt their husband's name. The authentic buyer of the gouache was Elizabeth 'Bobsy' Fuller (1893-1980), one of the key figures in the history of modern art in Chicago. Bobsy had been sent to France by her parents after finishing high school and there she learned the language and studied fine arts and literature while residing at the residence for young ladies of Villa Dupont Street in Paris. Upon returning to the United States, she continued her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and participated in numerous feminist initiatives. In 1916 she married the sole heir of an Ohio steel fortune, Charles Barnett "Barney" Goodspeed. The family had founded of the Buckeye Malleable Iron Co., in which they were associated with the grandfather and great-grandfather of the Bush Presidents and also the Rockefellers. Bobsy made her suffragist activities compatible with other artistic ones. Thus, together with other women, she created the Arts Club of Chicago, which she presided after 1932. The club aimed at raising awareness of new art trends and hosted one of Picasso's first exhibitions in the United States, as well as the first Miró exhibition in 1934. During the 1920s and 1930s, Bobsy and Barney maintained an active social life in Chicago, in the case of Bobsy promoting the visual arts and in Barney's, charity in favor of the Presbyterian church and the university. Elisabeth often traveled to France, where she became friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, writers and art collectors. There she personally met Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Duchamp, Dali and Derain and even recorded them in 16 mm films attending the lectures she gave in the French capital. And those she met in France were invited to visit Chicago, many of them staying at her home, like Stein and Toklas. In 1947 Barney Goodspeed died, and Bobsy donated to the Art Institute of Chicago the Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler by Picasso (1910, Zervos IIa.227) which was part of the first sale of goods confiscated from the gallerist during the First World War –for having German nationality– and that Elisabeth had bought in 1934. In 1950, Bobsy married another millionaire, in this case Gilbert Whipple Chapman, of New York, president of the Yale & Towne Manufacturing Company, that is, the locks. 160 Since moving to New York, and without neglecting her close relationship with the Art Institute of Chicago, Bobsy Fuller –now as Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman but without any involvement of Gilbert– had close ties with MoMA. For example, she formed part of the organizing committee for the 30th Anniversary celebrations that David Rockefeller presided over. Upon her death in 1979, Bobsy left MoMA a bequest with which the museum acquired, among other items, a collection of lithographs by Picasso (The decomposition of the bull, 1945) to complete its collection. Besides this original gouache 385, the Art Institute of Chicago also has a complete portfolio of the 1959 edition, but not the one that corresponded to Bobsy Fuller for lending the original, since it was donated in 1975 by 'Mrs. Walter P. Paepcke' , that is, by 'Pussy' Nitze 386. The gouache has not traveled much since Bobsy Fuller gave it away in 1953 to the Art Institute – not after 1957, as Tone points out. Bobsy, Stein; Fanny Butcher & husband, Richard Bokum; Alice Roullier; Toklas; and Thornton Wilder 385 386 Art Institute of Chicago, Cat. No. 1953.338. Art Institute of Chicago, Cat. No. 1975.168.1 8. Forcing Matisse: the chimera of the exhibition in Paris (1945-1948) 161 21. The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers (Le Bel oiseau déchiffrant l'inconnu au couple d'amoureux) Montroig, July 23, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. This painting was acquired (through Lillie P. Bliss’ bequest) by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in January 1945, during the Pierre Matisse gallery exhibition (catalog number 20). Lizzie 'Lillie' Plummer Bliss (1864-1931) was one of the most important figures in the art world on the East Coast of the United States in the first half of the 20th century and the true 'mother' of the MoMA permanent collection. Born in 1864, daughter of Cornelius Newton Bliss, a Massachusetts wholesaler –and politician–, Lillie began collecting very early and was the main contributor of works for the famous exhibition of the Armory Show in New York in 1913, the first exhibition of modern art in the country. Lillie bought nonstop since the death of her father in 1911 works by Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Redon, Gauguin, Seurat and Daumier. Intimate friend of Abby Rockefeller, with whom she had founded in 1911 a women's club in New York, the birth of MoMA was due to the fact that the Metropolitan Museum refused to exhibit modern works, so in May 1929, Abigail Greene 'Abby' Aldrich –known as Abby Aldrich Rockefeller since her marriage to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.–, Lillie Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan and Anson Conger Goodyear met for lunch to create a new museum. Upon her death in 1931, and to the surprise of the museum, Lillie bequeathed her entire collection to MoMA. There were 150 works of art, including paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Modigliani, and they constituted the basis on which the MoMA permanent collection was built when the museum had just been born. Lillie knew that she was going to die from cancer and had time to prepare her will, which included a masterly formula: she granted MoMA the possibility of selling one by one all the works of her collection –except two Cezanne and one Daumier– to acquire other pieces to complete or accompany the evolution of the art gallery. The only condition was that MoMa provided itself with a fund that would guarantee the permanence of the collection. The museum took three years to collect the one million dollars that would constitute the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest with which the Miró gouache was acquired in 1945. The Rockefellers contributed a third of the amount. The instrument invented by Lillie, allowed MoMA, for example, to acquire Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1939 through the previous sale of a Degas painting contributed by Lillie for $ 18,000 and another $ 10,000 that the legacy put into the operation. Or to acquire The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. 162 The ‘daring ladies’, Lillie in the centre 163 22. The Rose Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and of Birds (Le Crépuscule rose caresse le sexe des femmes et des oiseaux) Montroig, August 14, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Tone, this painting was acquired during the 1945 exhibition by Elizabeth L. Payne Card of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, who later sold it to its 1993 owner. To the confusion originated by the practice of attributing to women the name of their husbands, two typographical errors committed by Lilian Tone are added here. There is no Elizabeth L. Payne Card, and the acquirer was undoubtedly collector and great protector of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Elizabeth Mason Paine, also known as Elizabeth Metcalf, Elizabeth Card or her full name Elizabeth Mason Paine Metcalf Card (1896 -1992), since at the death of her first husband in 1951 and after marrying Thomas Card, she retained the name of the first, also adding the second. Elizabeth Paine belonged to one of the most prominent families of Massachusetts, descendant of one of the 41 signatories of the Mayflower Compact or first statute of the pilgrims, signed on November 11, 1620 before descending ashore. In Europe, the Paine traced their genealogy to William the Conqueror and Charlemagne, while in the United States, Elizabeth descended directly from lawyer Robert Treat Paine, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence of the country, acting as Massachusetts representative. Her father was Robert Treat Paine the 2nd, great-great-grandson of the previous Robert and distinguished art collector, already a buyer in the historic Armory Show of 1913 (International Exhibition of Modern Art). He was a client of the most prestigious dealers, like Georges Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg, Valentine Dudensing and Pierre Matisse himself, who sold him a Renoir in 1931, a Corot in 1933 and a Picasso in 1937. Elizabeth Paine was one of the main patrons of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to whom she gave fifteenth-century tapestries, drawings by ancient masters, French porcelain and paintings by French impressionists and postimpressionists, including Manet, Degas, van Gogh and Cezanne. Still in her twenties, Elizabeth married a man 33 years older than her, Thomas Newell Metcalf, discoverer and publisher of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan's 'father', in the popular weekly The All-Story Magazine he edited. And she managed to attract him to the art world that she had frequented with her father. Together they founded in 1936 the Boston Museum of Modern Art –now Institute of Contemporary Art– created at MoMA’s image, and that same year they welcomed Salvador and Gala Dalí, who came dressed as sharks to their Modern Art Ball, held to raise funds for the museum. In 1944 she placed her husband, who was already 72 years old, as director of the museum. After his death in 1944, Elizabeth remarried another Thomas, this time Card, which is why she appears with that name at the time of the purchase of the gouache. And she continued to collect and donate works, especially to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that his father sponsored. Although The Rose Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and of Birds traveled to Paris to be reproduced by Jacomet, it was never lent for any exhibition until the one of the Centenary of the birth of Miró in the MoMA in 1993 (catalog number 177) or after this one. 164 23. The Passage of the Divine Bird (Le Passage de l'oiseau divin (El paso del pájaro divino) Montroig, September 12, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Tone explained that this painting was not sold at the 1945 exhibition, but Pierre Matisse subsequently sold it to Elizabeth Paepcke of Aspen, Colorado, who sold it in May 1974 to a private collector, its 1993 owner. The buyer was Elizabeth 'Pussy' Nitze (1902-1994), sister of Paul Nitze, secretary of the United States Navy and promoter of the arms race of the 70s and 80s with his false alarms about alleged Soviet weapons of mass destruction. Pussy was the daughter of an academic at the University of Chicago, where she studied fine arts and music. Despite having gone down in history for having discovered in 1939 the ski slopes of Aspen, Colorado, and having made her rich husband Walter Paepcke invest millions in developing the station, including the creation of the Aspen Institute, in what Pussy Nitze focused was on 20th century art. She was responsible for the conversion of her husband's cardboard factory, the Container Corporation of America, into a design leader. For this she personally made the first plans, chose the designs and, after rejecting her husband's offer to become the company's art director, had an executive of the J. Walter Thomson advertising agency, where Helen Bayleff worked, appointed to the position. In any case, Pussy imposed the incorporation of European designs, especially of the German Bauhaus school, to all CCA advertising and hired artists such as Fernand Léger and Man Ray. Pussy was also an unparalleled collector, often buying in Pierre Matisse's gallery, of which she was a customer since 1937, without any intervention from her husband, and she collaborated assiduously with the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as helping to found the Museum of Contemporary Art of the city. The Toledo Museum of Art acquired the gouache in 1996 with money from the bequest of Edward Drummond Libbey, a glass magnate who had founded the museum in 1901. It did so shortly after receiving as a donation –from Thomas T. Solley– another gouache from the series: Sunrise. But it has not been able to expand the collection. Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke just after wedding in 1922 165 8. Forcing Matisse: the chimera of the exhibition in Paris (1945-1948) The effort of Joan Miró to make a great exhibition in Paris is not only a reaction to the failure of the MoMA exhibition, but is part of the strategy of his clan (Prats, Gomis, Sert) to put pressure on Pierre Matisse before negotiating a new, more remunerative contract. To be at the expense of what the New York dealer could do to relaunch the painter in the United States, was not the same as achieving an important success in Paris without his help. The aim was to demonstrate to the gallerist that Miró was in a position to relaunch his career in Europe regardless of what Matisse did. And that this should be reflected in the economic conditions of the new contract. The first reference we have found to the plan of Miró and his advisers Prats and Gomis to hold a large retrospective exhibition of his war work, is Miró's letter to Paulo Duarte of May 15, 1944, written when they still trust the MoMA exhibition with the Constellations, the ceramics and the Barcelona series will be carried out. In their exhultation, they foresee another one in Europe to cover all his war work, an exhibition that will never take place either: “Thus, with the paintings from1941 and 1942, jumping to the most recent works of 1944, you can do something great importance, leaving the parenthesis of what was done in 1943 and part of 1944, which since it is all very representative and numerous it makes it impossible to select it, we could leave everything for a subsequent large block exhibition” 387. The following mention we have found appears in the letter of March 26, 1945, also to Paulo Duarte, in which Miró shows his disappointment for not having received news of Pierre Matisse on the Constellations exhibition in January and thanks him for his efforts to try, without success, to organize the MoMA exhibition. He communicates laconically that “It is very possible that next winter he will make a great exhibition in Paris” 388. It seems that it is in that same month of March when the encounter that blows the spark ignitig the imagination of Miró occurs. To understand what it is about we draw from another unpublished letter that we have found 389. It is dated in Barcelona four weeks later, on April 22, 1945, and is addressed to Dr. Henri Laugier, at that time Director General of Cultural, Scientific and Technical Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is a reminder of Miró to Laugier that he had written to him several weeks ago through Philippe Rebeyrol: “I suppose that the letter that I entrusted to Mr. Rebeyrol, of the French Institute and Consulate some weeks ago, has been delivered to you. As I said, I am entirely at your disposal to organize an exhibition of my works in Paris, and I would also like to tell you how honored I feel for your proposal. I also told him that I have a lot of material to do it.” In short, the idea of the exhibition in France comes from the Institut Français in 387 Reus 2004, pp. 751-753 Reus 2004, pp. 764-765 389 Sold by Ketterer Kunst auction house in Sale No. 385 Rare Books, 11.21. 2011, Hamburg, Lot No. 755. 388 166 Barcelona, where they have suggested to the painter that he write directly to Laugier to indicate his interest and offer his full collaboration. But Laugier has not reacted. Without apparently having received confirmation that Laugier has launched the initiative, Miró does not hesitate to give Pierre Matisse detailed explanations of the plan. In his letter of May 13, 1945, and in order to rescue from his hands the Constellations gouaches not yet sold, Miró informs him that: “I have been proposed to make a great exhibition in Paris next winter of all the work done during the war. As it is not a simple artistic event, but a fact of a humanistic scope, to show the work done in circumstances in which they wanted, and still want in my country, to trample and murder the things that we most appreciate in the world, it is essential that the gouaches, lithographs and ceramics that you have exhibited are also shown in Paris. To send the material to Paris, it will be the French Embassy in Washington that will take care of everything and write to you in due time to formally ask you.” 390. As we can see, Miró shows the power of his contacts. This time it will be the Quai d'Orsay itself that will be in charge, says Miró, of carrying out the transfer by diplomatic bag. To show Matisse that it is not a bluff and see who he is dealing with now, he adds: “I hope this letter will reach you. If you wish to write me, do so by sending the letter to my name and address but by diplomatic pouch, either to the attention of the General Consul of France in Barcelona or through Dr. Laugier, to the Direction Générale des Rélations Culturelles, 16 rue Lord Byron Paris 8e”. He is telling his dealer that his main contact in Paris, and so close as to accede to act as mailbox for the painter's correspondence, is Henri Laugier himself, the man who had commissioned Raoul Dufy to paint 'La fée Électricité' for the International Exhibition of 1937; the one who in 1939 had been the first general director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the first scientific institution in France; the one who had organized during the war the expatriation of French scientists to the United States in cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation and that at the time Miró writes to Matisse had just been appointed head of the new Directorate General for Cultural Affairs on the Quai d'Orsay 391. And Laugier is not only a great personality of the new French administration, of sciences and culture, but he has been for twenty years the secret love of Marie Cuttoli, the businesswoman, gallerist and collector without whom you can not understand art in the France of the twentieth century. Intimate friend of Picasso, Juan Gris, Léger, Chagall, Dufy, Henri Laurens, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, etc. Miró says to whoever wants to hear him that Laugier is the initiator of the idea of exhibition. But the only reliable fact is that the idea comes after a Miró meeting with Rebeyrol, whom he identifies as an official of the French Institute of Barcelona. Miró provides more details of the plan in another letter of the same date, May 13, 1945 to Christian and Yvonne Zervos. The object is to request their collaboration in the plan to celebrate the great exhibition in Paris: “My friend Mr. Rebeyrol will go to see you in my name and will talk about the proposal that Dr. Laugier has made me to organize a large exhibition of my work done during the war next winter in Paris. To organize it, 390 PMGA 18.35 See Cremieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis Henri Laugier en son siècle, Cahiers pour l’histoire de la recherche, CNRS Editions, Paris 1995 391 167 I will take the liberty of asking for your advice and your help. As I told you, I worked tremendously during this period. You had to take action in one way or another or shoot yourself in the head and I had no choice: I worked on entirely new aspects of my work –50 large lithographs, ceramics, sculptures. In total I have about 400 works more or less –drawings, watercolors, pastels, paintings– of all formats, from the smallest to the largest. As you can see, I have enough material to make a very important show” 392. A fully accelerated Miró will remind his New York dealer on June 18, 1945 of the plans of the great exhibition in Paris: “I have been officially offered to make a great exhibition of my works made during the war, which will take place in Paris next Autumn. I may now avail myself of the opportunity to send a batch of large canvases. In order to achieve the aim that all my work done during those years is represented, it will be essential to also exhibit some gouaches, lithographs and ceramics. The Embassy of France in the United States will be in charge of all this, and will cntact you to arrange the details. They will contact you from Washington” 393. In view of the absence of Dr. Laugier's reply to his letters of the end of March and of April 22 about the dream of a great exhibition, Miró writes on June 18, 1945 to the collector (and friend of Laugier) Marie Cuttoli : “During these years I have worked a lot, it was the only way not to sink and stay erect in the middle of this horrible tragedy. I hope you have seen the exhibition I did in New York at the beginning of the year. I suppose you will also be aware of the great exhibition that I will do in Paris next autumn” 394. The painter wants to remind the collector that he has work available and tell Laugier's lover that he hopes that he will go ahead with the plan of the exhibition. 1950s Picasso with Henri Laugier and Marie Cuttoli But evidently, in view of the alleged origin of the initiative, the question of the exhibition had to be discussed with the Quai d'Orsay. Within the Directorate of Cultural Affairs that manages the teaching of French abroad, Philippe Rebeyrol was the person Miró considered to be the messenger between him and Dr. Henri Laugier. Rebeyrol was then a young former soldier who escaped from a German prison in 1942, at the age of 25 and, recently graduated, was offered to become an assistant to Pierre Deffontaines, director of the French Institute of Barcelona, who was dismissed the following year by the Vichy authorities. Philippe then went to work –from an office in the British consulate– to send to England French soldiers who crossed the Spanish border, coordinating the action in Algiers with the forces of General de Gaulle. Henri Laugier had arrived in the Algerian capital in 1943, back from the United States. Child friend Roland Barthes –for whom he will find a first job as a librarian at the French Institute in Bucharest– Rebeyrol was not the right person to organize the exhibition that Miró wanted. This official, who months after his contact with Miró was sent to Romania to organize the resumption of teaching of French and later became an ambassador in several countries, was a man of action and literature and was not a man of art or museums. But Miró did not know this when he met him during his Barcelona period of, and therefore he concentrated all his efforts to collaborate with him. 392 Reus 2004 pp.768-770 Reus 2004 pp.771-774 394 Reus 2004 pp.774-775 393 168 The correspondence that follows demonstrates the difficulties involved in trying to make an exhibition with an organization that does not have among its powers to orchestrate them. On June 19, 1945, a day after writing to Marie Cuttoli, a desperate Miró addresses himself to Rebeyrol, who had sent him a letter on May 30: “I have reflected a lot on the exhibition of my works made during the war that should take place after the holidays. I believe that we must disregard the date that best suits me personally and that I must make an appearance in Paris as soon as possible. Even in the event that the important paintings that I am now working on are not finished, in my opinion we would have to sacrifice that rather than delay my exhibition” 395. Miró is nervous and wants the exhibition to be done by all means in the fall, only three months ahead. He tries in any case to convince his interlocutor that he has enough material for the showcase: “Otherwise, as you know, I now have enough material: Paintings, gouaches, watercolors, drawings, pastels, lithographs, ceramics and sculptures. In total some 400 pieces with which you can make an important exhibition. We had the intention of making a first shipment with the batch of large canvases together with the material of the French pavilion of the Barcelona Fair, but there have been difficulties that have prevented this”. Miró refers to the XII Barcelona International Trade Fair, which had just been inaugurated, and the difficulties probably had to do with the fact that the French pavilion at the fair was under the responsibility of the Minister of Economy and Finance René Pleven. He belonged to the Union démocratique et socialiste de la Résistance (UDSR), a left party to which Education Minister René Capitant also belonged and wchich was in strong opposition to the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) of right-wing Catholic Georges Bidault who headed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first provisional government of General de Gaulle after the liberation, in which all parties, including the communists, were represented. Miró's men also belonged to the cultural framework of the Quai d'Orsay, always viewed with suspicion by the Ministry of Education, in charge of museums, and by the Economy ministry, in charge of the trade fairs. Such ministerial confrontation, in addition to being common in all administrations it was in this case reinforced by a clear political antagonism. Capitant was not going to tolerate Bidault imposing a large exhibition in whose genesis his ministry had no role. And the officials of Pleven’s Ministry of the Economy of were not going to allow those of the Institut Français in Barcelona to smuggle works of art in the boxes of material coming from the fair. In view of the difficulties he has encountered in the management of the exhibition by the French Institute in Barcelona, Miró addresses himself Rebeyrol, who is back in Paris, entrusting him with the most technical questions and hoping that he will find the solution. The painter once again shows signs of impatience and lack of understanding of how an exhibition is made, since he seems to estimate that it is a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who will examine the art works to be presented and decide how to make the exhibition. He also asks the diplomat about technical issues of packing and shipping the material, which obviously is not among the competences of 395 Reus 2004, pp. 775-779 169 Rebeyrol, who in the best case should limit his actions to try to sell the exhibition to the Réunion des Musées Nationaux directed by communist Jean Cassou. It could be possible that for crafty Joan Prats, the Parisian exhibition was no more than a smokescreen through which to surreptitiously sneak out of Spain –and of New York– a significant amount of Miró's work under the protective mantle of the Quai d'Orsay and place it in Paris, where the first movements of restoration of the art market after the war are already taking place. We already saw that Miró stresses the importance of Rebeyrol having in Paris all the paintings, ceramics and sculptures: “For the exhibition, it will be necessary to make a choice naturally, but this selection I think it is imperative that it be done in Paris, where all the material in its entirety must, in my opinion, be sent. The same applies to framing, which in addition to facilitating packaging, will allow it to be done by the specialists who have always taken care of framing my works. As for the glass, in any case, what we could do is have it sent from Barcelona once the selection has been made and the framers have taken the exact dimensions”. The painter then takes care in his letter to Rebeyrol of underlining the importance of getting his New York gallerist send the Constellations to be part of the Paris exhibition: “Another important issue that needs to be addressed is to bring from New York as much as possible of what I exhibited in the Pierre Matisse gallery: gouaches 1940-1941; lithographs of 1944 and ceramics. It is of the highest importance that all my work done during the war be represented in this exhibition, without any omission, since it is not only an aesthetic fact but above all a human fact”. To understand how the operation has been organized, we must keep in mind that in the letter from Miró to Rebeyrol of the Quai d'Orsay, the painter says that “I keep Mr. Deffontaine (sic) and Mr. Matet informed of what I am writing and we will have to hope that everything will be arranged in the best way”. Miró refers to the director of the Institut Français in Barcelona Pierre Deffontaines and the deputy director of the center, philosopher Maurice Matet. Deffontaines was a prestigious geographer and with strong ties with Brazil, which makes us suppose that Miró has also made contact with him through Paulo Duarte. In 1939 he was appointed Director of the Institut Français in the Catalan capital, a post he retains until 1964, save the period 1943-1944 in which, having been dismissed by the Vichy authorities, he created a parallel and unofficial Institute. The people Prats and Miró entrust the management of their exhibition in Paris are officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a young diplomat, a geographer and a philosopher. The result, as we shall see, is that the exhibition will never be held. But the painter is undeterred. Two months after writing to Rebeyrol and without having any reliable news yet, Miró continues to think that both he and Laugier are working actively on the project. In a letter to Pierre Loeb dated August 30, 1945, he repeats: “Monsieur Rebeyrol and Docteur Laugier want to do a big exhibition of my work in Paris soon, which I consider a great honor. I have already asked Zervos and Pierre Matisse –and now I ask you as well– to come to an agreement with our friends, 170 since I want to stay out of this completely. Monsieur Rebeyrol will give you my perspective on the question” 396. When he sees Rebeyrol again in January 1946, during a visit of the diplomat to Barcelona before leaving for Bucharest, which we know of from a letter from the painter to Pierre Loeb on January 27, Miró continues to dream of the chimerical great exhibition of Paris, but still speaks of Rebeyrol, without saying at any time whether he has discussed the exhibition with Bernard Dorival, assistant curator of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, who visited him and would actually be with whom he would have to plan it. Miró believes he has established a very close relationship with Rebeyrol, although he should have tried to promote it with Jean Cassou's team. In any case, this is what Miró says to Loeb in his letter: “Mr. Rebeyrol will also tell you about my ideas for the exhibition of my works that should take place in Paris and the very great difficulties which I should necessarily confront now if I tried to ship all my work of these years. I have the clear impression that things here are going to change very soon and the difficulties that I face now are going to become facilities.” Miró referred to the package of small reforms with which the Franco regime tried to face the unfavorable perspective in which the defeat of the axis powers placed it in the world. In July 1945 a new government was formed. In September the fascist arm salute was abolished; in October the regime announced a pardon for crimes committed during the Civil War and a referendum law; and in March 1946 a new electoral law was passed. Miró knows that the preparation of the exhibition will take a long time, so he says to Pierre Loeb: “It will be necessary that this exhibition that we contemplate be presented very well, which requires time... I insist on telling you that this exhibition has to have a great impact. I insist on my idea of quality, in these moments you can not do anything that is mediocre, you have to invest yourself thoroughly and play hard. I doubt that a sufficiently spacious gallery could be found in Paris to exhibit all these works, many of which are very large. Speaking of the idea that things are going to change here, we have to think about the possibilities we will have then to find very large venues, that a private gallery could not offer us. In short, you have to take a big hit or limit yourself for the moment to make a small exhibition that simply marks my presence. In any case never never halftone or mediocre things.” And he offers his former gallerist the 'commercial side' of the exhibition 397. We can say again that Miró and his advisers Prats and Gomis have been wrong. Laugier, of whose real involvement in the project we have no proof whatsoever, was a man turned abroad, whose mission at that time was to project French culture out of the country, not to bring foreign culture to France. In addition, Rebeyrol will disappear when he was appointed director of the French Institute of Bucharest in the course of 1946. For the idea of exhibition to come to fruition, the initiative had to be taken by communist hispanist Jean Cassou, friend of Picasso, who had just been named Head Curator of the National Museums of France and Director of the National Museum of Modern Art. 396 397 Rowell 1992 p.p. 197-198 Reus 2004 pp. 785-788 171 Another even more bulky error of the Miró clan in Barcelona is to present to the Quai d'Orsay the planned Paris exhibition as an act of resistance. Miró tells Zervos in his letter of May 13 that he explained to Rebeyrol that the show had a humanistic character: “As I told Mr. Rebeyrol, this exhibition should not be considered as a simple artistic act, but as a fact of humanistic scope, because it is work done during this terrible period in which they wanted to deny all value of the spirit and annihilate everything that man considers as more precious and worthy in life”. In his presentation of the idea to Pierre Matisse in his letter of the same date, the painter goes even further, insisting that the purpose is “to show the work done in circumstances in which they wanted, and still want in my country, trample and murder the things we most appreciate in the world”. And he repeats the militant style in his letter of January 1946 to Pierre Loeb. Prats and his people understand undoubtedly that this militant, anti-fascist character is the one that should be adduced before the French Institute of Barcelona, whose prorepublican trajectory is well known. But it escapes them that since September 1944 the foreign minister, and therefore boss of Laugier and Rebeyrol, is Georges Bidault, a right-wing Catholic, visceral anti-Communist who did not see in the Franco regime an enemy, but an ally in the the crusade against communism he guessed was going to spread throughout the western world. In fact, Bidault was, since the liberation, the main defender of a thaw in relations with the Franco dictatorship as soon as the opportunity presented itself. When the very Catholic Robert Schuman, celebrated 'father of Europe' today in the process of beatification, reaches the presidency of the French government in November 1947, one of his main objectives is to reopen the border with Spain. To achieve this, his Foreign Minister Georges Bidault entrusts aristocrat and army man Pierre de Chevigné, who had been de Gaulle's military representative in Washington and is imbued with the anti-communist philosophy of the Truman administration, to begin discreet negotiations with the Spanish minister of Foreign Affairs Alberto Martín Artajo, negotiations that are launched on January 22, 1948 398. A month later the circulation of passengers and goods between the two countries was restored. A year later, when Bidault is president of the French government, with Schuman as foreign minister, an official report 'alerts' the government that the association of former Spanish resistance members “and the Spanish Communist Party are so closely linked that they can be confused. Their bosses ... include the most significant names of communist militants, fully dependent from the Kominform in France” 399. 398 See Dulphy Anne, La politique espagnole de la france (1945-1955), Vingtième Siècle, revue d'histoire, Vol. 68 No. 1, Paris 2000 pp. 29-42. See also Martínez Lillo, Pedro Antonio La normalización de las relaciones diplomáticas hispano-francesas después de la IIª Guerra Mundial (septiembre de 1950 - enero de 1951), Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez Vol. 29 No. 3 , Madrid 1993 pp. 307-325 399 See Denoyer, Aurélie L’opération Boléro-Paprika : origines et conséquences. Les réfugiés politiques espagnols : de l’expulsion à leur installation en RDA, en Résonances françaises de la guerre d'Espagne, Editions d'Albret, Nérac, France 2012, p.p. 295-312 172 The result is that on September 7, 1950, the government decreed the banning of the Communist Party of Spain in France and the arrest and deportation of its leaders. Only in mainland France 268 Spanish communist leaders are arrested, and in total 300 are expelled from the territory, 142 of them to Algeria and Corsica, 43 to the Soviet Union and the rest to Eastern Europe. A great favor to General Franco. Bidault would join in 1962 the extreme right organization OAS, and had to go into exile, and in 1972 participated in the creation of the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Education minister René Capitant, a leftist, was on the other hand the candidate managed to defeat Le Pen in the fight for a deputy seat in Paris between 1962 and 1968. In view of the background of Georges Bidault, it is not surprising that he did not show interest, or boycotted Miró's exhibition initiative that the painter and his environment present as an anti-Franco exhibition. In fact, in the archives of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, which keep the documentation not only of the exhibitions made, but also of the plans that were never came to fruition, there is no exhibition project by Miró in 1945, although there are other failed plans for exhibitions scheduled for that year, such as Salon de la Renaissance française; Henri le Sidaner; Retrospective de Prins; René Jean Clot; La France d'Outremer dans la guerre; Retrospective de peinture américaine and, most significantly, Œuvres d'artistes espagnols amis de la France. What seems to indicate that the plan did not even come to be formulated as a proposal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to that of National Education. In fact, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux –under the authority of antifascist René Capitant –only organized an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 (Amédée de la Patellière, peintures, 29 September to 10 November) and three in 1946: the famous Art et Résistance, organized by the Association of French Snipers and Partisans between February 15 and March 15 (which had to have all museum staff fully busy in the fall/winter of 1945); La tapisserie française du Moyen-Age à nos jours, from June to October and the Exposition internationale d'art moderne in November. The first Parisian exhibition of Miró in the postwar period took place in the modest Galerie Vendôme between March 27 and April 28, 1945, but what was exposed there were 23 works made before the war and that were in the market in the city. In November, Germaine Hugnet, the wife of surrealist poet and friend of Picasso Georges Hugnet, organized another one in La Peau de Chagrin gallery, but in this case it was only of graphic work. In short, the inadequate efforts of Miró and Joan Prats through the Quai d'Orsay will not bear any fruit, and the National Museums of France will not organize their first retrospective of Joan Miró until 1962, and of course coordinated by Jean Cassou (Joan Miró, Musée National d'Art Moderne, June to November 1962). Meanwhile, Miró's entire presence in Paris from 1945 to that date was limited to individual or collective exhibitions in private galleries: Vendôme, Altarriba, Denise René and Jeanne Bucher in 1945; Charpentier and Lucien Reyman in 1946; Galerie du Luxembourg and Maeght in 1947; Nina Dausset and Maeght in 1948; Maeght in 1950, 1951, 1953 and 1956; Berggruen in 1958 and 1959; and finally Maeght in 1960 and 1961. 173 3rd PART: ECONOMIC SUCCESS AT SIXTY 9. Ultimatum to his dealers (1945) Faced with the failure of his strategy of 1941-44 to get other sales channels parallel to Matisse and to hold two major exhibitions of his war work in New York and Paris, and despite feeling undoubtedly irritated to find that despite of the sales success of the Constellations exhibition he has not seen in 1945 a penny, Miró will not be discouraged, but on the contrary, he will send a crack to the art market, threatening his dealers with retiring to the countryside in Montroig and stop marketing his work if they do not agree to invest in him in a serious and professional way and pay sums of money that have nothing to do with what he had been receiving until then. The ultimatum that he launches to his dealers has been forging in the years 1941-1944 but it breaks out in the summer of 1945. Miró had already warned Matisse in June 1944 of where his plans were going, of how he felt, but at that time he still believed that his strategy of bypassing him could be successful. The Constellations leave those days from Lisbon to New York and Matisse has not been informed by Miró, but the gallerist is already aware of the maneuver. That is why in his letter of June 17, perhaps to prepare him for what is coming, the painter announces that he is fully aware of the key role that his painting must play and that at the age of fifty-one he has to place a strong bet, to be or not to be. And he adds that it is therefore legitimate for him to contemplate things in an objective way. In short, what he conveys is that regardless of his relationships with his friends, there is only one way to see the situation, which is the one transmitted to him by the Prats, Gomis, Artigas clan in Barcelona. He wants to keep his works and not send them to Matisse, to bet heavily in order to finally achieve the status he believes to deserve.400. Miró does not go any further in this June 1944 letter. But eleven months later, the cup of his patience has been filled. His strategy of bypassing his gallerist has collapsed and he has no choice but to surrender to Matisse returning to the fold or pose an ultimatum: 400 PMGA 18.34. Russell 1999 p.251, Umland 1993 p. 336 & Reus 2004, p.753-755 174 either the dealer accepts his conditions or the artist will stop selling his paintings, retiring to live in the countryside. Miró announces in his letter of June 18, 1945 that he is willing to “bet everything for everything”: either he manages to live at 52 as Picasso, Braque or Matisse did at his age, or he manages to cancel his debts selling a building inherited from his mother and retiring to Montroig to work but without selling his work absolutely to anyone, so that it will go unnoticed. And he adds to make himself understood a phrase that summarizes his feeling of humiliation: “The mediocre life of a little man is forever ruled out by me” 401. Treating him like a 'little man' is over. He knows that Matisse is going to feel offended, because he continues to excuse himself from speaking to him in that tone, which he justifies by the hard existence he has led in recent years. And then he points out that he must now contemplate his life in a clear and courageous way and become worthy of his time. Miró no doubt feels that he finds himself at a crossroads not unlike the one he faced 25 years ago, when he decided to go to Paris. Then, when he told his friend Enric Ricart of his imperious desire to flee from “these dirty and stinking waters of Barcelona”, he had considered his age and his situation and the two possibilities that remained open to him, pointing out in a letter: “Meanwhile I am taking stock of the situation, as I force myself to do from time to time: A. I am 26 years old; B. Of the small capital that I earned as a clerk I only have 25 or 30 pesetas left (the capital was spent on paintings and a study); lately I have been forced to admit that my 'fortune' was running out and I asked, with great disgust on my part, that my mother give me some money. D. If I stay in Barcelona I do not see any other solution than to do any crap to be able to paint and earn the money I need”402. One of the aims of the letter of June 18, 1945 is to warn his dealer that, without a contract with him since 1940, he is going to place in Paris –and therefore in the market– a lot of large paintings, which constitutes the greatest fear of gallerist. But to get what he wants from Matisse, Miró has to apologize for his attempt to bypass him a year earlier. The painter had not yet given explanations, hiding behind an alleged failure of the postal service. In the letter of June 18, Miró goes somewhere further, but not without first reminding Matisse of what the gallerist owes to him: “On what you tells me about being the first European artist to have exhibited in America, this was an objective that I intended to achieve and that has been achieved. Your gallery can be proud to have been the first to have organized this exhibition, which is a major achievement. I was very upset by the fact that the letter referring to the sending of my works, which I entrusted to Duarte, was not delivered to you. My silence would have constituted a sin of discourtesy towards you. In your letter you talked about the gouaches that belonged to you. As I have already told you, I keep all our correspondence in a dossier, and it will therefore be very easy to specify exactly, when I see you, everything that concerns our affairs.” It is the first direct recognition that more than half of the Constellations legally belong to the gallerist. Miró, before raising the main theme that motivates his letter, sends a message of sympathy in relation to the mother and the stepsister of the gallerist: “We were very 401 402 PMGA 18.35. Umland 1993 p. 337. Reus 2004 pp. 771-774 Epistolari 2009, p. 144 175 sorry to learn what happened to your mother and Marguerite and we are happy to know at the same time that all ended well. I received a letter from your father, which seems to be doing well.” He refers here to the episode of April 1944, in which Henri Matisse's wife, Amélie, and the painter's daughter –not of his wife, but of model Caroline Joblau– were arrested by the Gestapo for participating in resistance activities. His wife spent six months in a German prison, while Marguerite, wife of critic and Matisse biographer Georges Duthuit, managed to escape from the train that was transporting her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and was hidden by the resistance until liberation. And then Miró turns to asking for money from Matisse: “As I find myself in an increasingly embarrassing economic situation because of the death of my mother, which forced us to divide her fortune between my sister and me, and on the other hand my expenses that increase significantly due to the increase in the cost of living with a wife and a daughter, I ask you to take all the necessary steps so that, from the money that you have cashed-in from the sale of my paintings, you send me regularly every month through telegraphic draft as much money as possible, as a family aid, and I speak of a minimum of $ 300 per month. It would be even better if you could send me a check by secure means. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm forced to do it.” Note that Miró does not have any contractual basis to ask the gallerist to send him money. He mentions money that has come from the sale of his paintings but in fact he has not sent any work since 1939. Thus Matisse does not have any of Miró's paintings after that date, except the Constellations. And he only has ten gouaches in deposit on which Miró can expect to receive a remuneration. Five of them had been sold, from which the gallerist could cash-in between 2,000 and 2,500 dollars. But of the 50% of the total amount that would correspond to Miró and Prats, Matisse would have to deduct all shipping, insurance and tariff costs. In short, the dealer did not owe anything to Miró in June 1945. Portrait of Pierre Matisse by Balthus Miró tackles next the issue of his demand to renew the contract on entirely new bases: “As for what you tell me about not doing anything with other dealers before we see each other, I'm willing to do it, but always to the extent possible and taking into account the unforeseen events of life and the more or less cruel shocks that it may still reserve for me. Time passes and I no longer have the strength to content myself with stopping the blows. I must march on the basis of concrete facts because the phraseology of proposals and projects will not get me out of trouble”. Miró needs to place himself at the levell of the great masters of twentieth century painting, which in his case was not evident in 1945, even if he had read Clement Greenberg's review in The Nation the previous year –eight months before he saw the Constellations– in which the critic pointed out: “Miró belongs among the living masters. He is the one new figure since the last war to have contributed importantly to the great painting tradition of our own day –that which runs from Cezanne through fauvism and cubism. During the last ten years his work has maintained a very high level with a consistency 176 that neither Picasso nor Matisse has equalled. Painting as great as his trascends and fuses every particular emotion; it is as heroic or tragic as it is comic”403. Miró, who has already turned 52 years old, has a blind confidence in himself: “I am fully determined to bet everything for everything. Either I can live as the men of the previous generation did at my age –Picasso, Matisse, Braque– or I manage to find a way to cancel my debts, what I would achieve selling a property, and with what I would have left I would go to live in Montroig, where I would continue to work with the same passion and enthusiasm with which I have always worked –which constitutes a necessity for me and the reason for my existence– but completely ending all trade with anyone, so that no one will ever hear about me or my work. The mediocre life of a little man is now discarded from my conceptions. I'm sorry to speak to you in this tone, but life has been hard enough for me in recent years for me to act otherwise. I must contemplate my future in a clear and courageous way and be worthy of my time” 404 . Miró is saying that he prefers to stop marketing his work rather than continue to sell it at prices as ridiculous as those paid by the dealer in his last contract of 1939, which we recall was 320 dollars a month for the entirety of his work. The painter now points out that these economic conditions belong to the past and are far from what he expects to obtain as compensation for his work in 1945. Either Matisse agrees to substantially raise his offer, or Miró will stop selling. Pierre Matisse fits the blow and tries to buy time, answering Miró in two telegrams, the first undated telling him that he has received his letter and that he will be in Paris in August, and the second one dated August 10 indicating that “I have already done what is necessary”, asking for patience until they see themselves “in two weeks” and begging him “if it were possible” not to send any canvas to Paris, that is, to the supposedly great exhibition and, by extension, to the market. Matisse is nervous. He does not really know what's going on in Paris, what happened to Pierre Loeb, Louis Carré, and other dealers, but he does know that several American gallerists, like Sam Kootz, want to travel to Europe and start buying works by painters from the continent. He also knows that in the 1940s he has lost the quasi-monopoly he exercised over the painters of the European avant-garde in the United States. 'Peggy' Guggenheim, niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, had opened after marrying Max Ernst in 1941 the The Art of This Century gallery at 30 West 57th Street, practically next to his. Peggy arrived in New York after two decades in Europe and loaded with dozens of paintings bought – especially in her last weeks in Marseilles– to Jews like her who wanted to rush out of France. For his part, Paul Rosenberg had established another gallery, also in 1941, at 79 East 57th Street, a few steps from Matisse. And among the European diaspora in New York anyone who had art or contacts to get it had become a dealer. Too much competition, thinks Pierre Matisse, who has realized that Miró's idea of a large exhibition in Paris in the autumn is a chimera and wants to avoid that suddenly appear in the Parisian market a good number of works of the painter on whom has no rights 403 Greenberg, Clement Review of exhibitions of Joan Miró and Andre Masson. The Nation, Volume 158 No 21, 05.20.1944 Russell, p. 251 404 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp.771-774 177 anymore. Besides, he has confidence in Miró's potential and does not want to let him go. Note that the gallerist's fear is justified. Miró, if he returned to settle in Paris, could use the Picasso method, which since the 1920s has left behind the unrewarding procedure of global sales of all his production to market his work selling little by little, small groups of paintings to dealers who knock on his door, like Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paul Rosenberg, Louis Carré or Pierre Loeb himself. Picasso is also the proof that American dealers can come to Europe to buy directly from painters, as the episode by Sam Kootz attests. But in Barcelona there are no buyers, and Miró does not have at that time the economic means to settle in Paris. His only income comes from the maternal inheritance, and the Spanish authorities do not allow the purchase of foreign currency. His only dealer in Paris is out of the game when he needs him imperatively, not only to have an outlet for his work in Europe, but also to frighten Matisse and obtain better conditions from the New York gallerist. Pierre Loeb's difficulties in recovering his gallery make things difficult for Miró too. What had happened to the dealer was that, affected by the Aryanization laws of occupied France, he had been forced to transfer his Galerie Pierre at number 2 of the rue des Beaux-Arts in 1941 to his colleague, the dealer Georges Aubry. As happened on many occasions –for example, the purchase of major printing press L'Union by lithographic printer Fernand Mourlot– in that forced arrangement there was a tacit agreement that provided for the return of the establishment when the circumstances that forced the transfer were over, this is, when the German occupation ended. But in 1944, upon the return of the Jewish art dealer from his exile in Cuba, Aubry refused to comply with the pact. Faced with the difficulty of recovering the gallery, Loeb shared his tribulations with Picasso and the painter, always solidarious with those persecuted by Nazism, called Aubry and announced laconically: “Pierre has returned and retakes the gallery.” And so it was done. In 1945, no gallerist could afford to contradict Picasso. 405. Miró gets news from Pierre Loeb a month after writing to Matisse, thanks to two letters from the gallerist dated July 27 and July 31, 1945, in which he asks for his collaboration to restore the prestige of Galerie Pierre he has just recovered. On August 30, before seeing Pierre Matisse (“I am expecting him any day”) Miró writes to Loeb to assure him of his good disposition: “You can absolutely count on me. I will be happy to lend whatever help I can to getting your old gallery started again; and I’m sure that you will manage very quickly”. First he offers all, but then the painter makes it clear that their relationship can not be the same as before the war: “You understand, of course, that I cannot tell you what my terms would be, since everything has been entirely disrupted and I have no idea what things are worth nowadays. The only thing I know for sure is that here, like everywhere else, prices have changed and gone up. As far as you and I are concerned, this should be a matter of mutual trust”. 405 Information provided by Albert Loeb, son of Pierre, in interview dated 02.27.2009. Cited by Polack, Emmanuelle La Galerie Pierre au prisme des lois de Vichy, exhibition catalog L’Art en Guerre : France 1938-1947, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012. 178 Before explaining what his economic situation is and what his conditions will be, Miró asks him to accept that a new epoch opens up in modern art in which he has an essential role to play: “For many years, I’ve known that you have an open mind and that I cannot ask you to get rid of all preconceived ideas on the subject of painting. I also know that you are not one of those people who thinks that painting stopped with our forebears; their discoveries were brilliant nd their works were wonderful, but the horizon always remains infinitely open, and we too are marching forward, always forward.” Once established what is the panorama that opens before him, Miró must explain to his former dealer why he can not accept a simple restoration of the status quo ante, and does so in terms similar to those used with Matisse: “These past years have been very hard for me. Luckily, the war ended when it did –just at the moment when I had spent the last money I had left, when I had nearly exhausted all my resources. During these tragic years, I have continued working every day, and this has helped me keep my balance –my work has kept me on my feet; otherwise I would have gone under; it would have been a catastrophe”. Next, Miró goes on to explain to Loeb what his aspirations are, warning him that he does it “in the same terms I used recently with Pierre Matisse”. It is about letting him know that he is negotiating with both of them and that he has posed the same scenario to both of them. He does so trying to get the message clearly expressed and separating the sentences into different paragraphs: “I am 52 years old, and I must look at things very seriously, in a clear and precise manner, with full awareness of the responsibilities I have in life –which I cannot avoid. There are only two paths available that are worthy of me: a) make a financial arrangement similar to the ones made by artists of my age during the last generation –there is no reason for it to be otherwise. b) sell some property to pay off my debts and with the money that is left retire to the country, where I would continue to work with the same passion and enthusiasm I have always worked with –which is my reason for living– but in total isolation and silence. What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman. Mediocrity does not have the right to exist”. As we can see, Miró has excluded in the letter to Loeb the comparison with Picasso, Braque or Matisse, which he possibly reconsidered as exaggerated in view of his works’ market value of the moment. In addition, he knows that Loeb has always worked with other painters, buying them directly, and that in a contract he can not pay the same as in the occasional purchase of work from the artist on the basis of an existing real demand. But he reinforces the message by adding that there is no excuse for him to be less than them. And again assumes that the recipient of the letter will feel insulted: “Think about this, my friend. Perhaps my language is overly brutal –but times like this are not for beating around the bush.” Next, Miró goes on to inform Loeb about the old project of the exhibition in Paris, of which he does not speak now as an exhibition of the autumn but for which he asks for the gallerist's help and offers him a commercial participation: “Assuming it works out, 179 we will try to arrange for you and Matisse to handle the commercial end –and for the name Gallerie Pierre, which has already had such an important history, to play a significant moral role”. And he ends by reiterating the importance of acting quickly, reminding him that in a few days he will see Pierre Matisse: “Allow me to tell you that I believe –from what I feel in the air– that this is the precise moment when my work should be launched in a truly serious way. Obviously you cannot commit yourself now, since you have not seen the work I have done during the past few years. As soon as I get back to Barcelona, I will take care of organizing my trip to Paris and sending all the material there. Pierre Matisse has cabled me, saying that he will come to see me soon. I am expecting him any day. He can talk to you about me and all the things I will be showing him, and you will have a better idea of what is involved. He also asked me to tell you how happy he will be to resume his old association with you” 406. Once launched the summer of 1945 defiance, Miró is waiting for the result, which in reality will be mitigated and will not crystallize in monetary terms for the overwhelmed Miró until 1948. As Margit Rowell points out, the economic situation of Miró in August from 1945 was “extremely precarious” 407. It is true that the following year he will achieve important concessions and a 'salary increase' from Matisse, but it will take a year to have that formally documented. With regard to cash, the first monthly transfers will not arrive until the beginning of 1947. And to receive a large sum ($ 17,500 in partial payment of his production from 1942 to 1946) Matisse does not commit to pay until the end of 1947, a timetable that, as we will see, he will not fulfill either. In addition, Pierre Loeb will not be in a position to respond to his demand, so that the improvement of his situation in the art market in Europe must wait four more years until he signs with Aimé Maeght in 1948 and the contract begins to produce economic results, which does not happen until the beginning of 1949. In the end, the great exhibition that Miró planned since 1944 in MoMA and later in Paris was reduced to the modest Maeght 1948 show of 39 rather small paintings and 49 ceramics. With his letters to Matisse and Loeb on June 18 and August 30, 1945, the painter has laid the foundations of what he understands should be their economic relationship from that moment on. He only has to wait, and theoretically little time, because he expects Matisse in Barcelona at the end of August or the first days of September and Loeb is aware of the situation and will undoubtedly meet Matisse before he comes to Spain. But a new setback shakes Miró at that moment. Pierre Matisse does not appear in Barcelona as he had announced in his telegram of August 10. In a letter sent by Miró from Montroig on September 14, 1945, the painter asks Matisse “How are the Paris friends going? I hope you have talked at length with Pierre and Zervos.” On October 3 Miró wrote again to Matisse, this time a postcard sent from Barcelona, in which he said “I am awaiting your visit to guide me and make a decision about my future”. And again he wrote on October 8, 1945: “I have always promised to wait for you before making a decision, and that what I would most like would be to continue with you and with Pierre Löeb as in the past, on new bases naturally. I have 406 407 Rowell 1992, p.p. 197-198 Rowell 1992 p. 196 180 received several offers from dealers, very serious, from Paris and New York and I have always responded politely non-committal saying that I still did not have any commercial project for the future” 408. Miró looks forward to Pierre Matisse as a godsend, but the dealer makes a risky decision. In Paris he sees his sister Marguerite, who upon hearing that Pierre has difficulty in getting money to the painter, suggests an extremely risky plan. From her time in the maquis she is used to organizing the crossing of borders, and she proposes her brother to cross the Spanish border illegally through Andorra taking the amount of money he needs hidden in a tooth paste tube. As Pierre Matisse will tell years later to Vogue journalist Rosamond Bernier 409, the dealer came into contact in the French town of Foix, near the Andorra border, with a doctor who in turn put him in contact with a specialized passeur. The dealer had introduced – according to his own statements– three thousand dollars in bills in a toothpaste tube and then crossed traversing the mountains and avoiding border controls. Once in Andorra, continuing with Matisse's story, he went to a hotel, where a detachment of gendarmes immediately appeared, interrogated and beat him, easily finding the tube of toothpaste. After laughing at him for using such an old trick, they took away the $ 3,000, which he said they kept, and escorted him to the French border. On October 23, Pierre wrote a letter to his father from Foix, where he awaited his appearance before a judge. He was then sent to the prison in Toulouse and finally released. As Matisse told Barnier, when he was finally able to see Miró, he told him what had happened. The painter gave him an intense look as if he thought he was crazy and told him that nobody would have thought of doing something like that. And it did not seem that the episode reported by the dealer placed Matisse in a more favorable position before the eyes of Miró, who avoided recalling the matter. For him, the way to get him money was a Matisse problem, and he probably found the dealer's story implausible. The truth is that it is hard to believe the story at face value. On the one hand, Matisse says that they left Foix one morning heading to the mountains until they reached the capital of the principality on foot. The problem is that Foix is 100 km away by road from Andorra la Vieja, 60 km in a straight line on the map, which means that even if they made part of the journey by car, in the Pyrenees Mountains it is a trip of several days which in October requires professional equipment. For the rest, his statement that the gendarmes kept the money contradicts his being accused of currency trading. And it also seems very difficult to get thirty hundred-dollar bills into a tube of toothpaste. This episode gives us a new proof of the fragility of the testimony of the elderly Miró, the main source of information for his Catalan biographers. According to his statements to Lluis Permanyer, the protagonist of the adventure would not have been Pierre Matisse, but his half sister Marguerite: “Once released ... Miró asked her if she was not crazy and reprimanded her for his imprudence” 410. 408 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp. 783-784 The story, not revealed by Rosamond Bernier in her 1991 book, is however mentioned by her husband. See Russell 1999, pp. 253-255. 410 Permanyer 2003, p. 143 409 181 In January 1946, Miró had not heard from Pierre Loeb for five months, and as we have seen he needed, to make sure that his strategy was going to work, having a European foot before committing himself to Matisse for the American foot. Taking advantage of a short trip to Barcelona by Philippe Rebeyrol, the painter send him a letter again insisting on his demands for a new commercial and artistic relationship. We also learned from this letter of January 27, 1946 that Bernard Dorival, deputy curator of the Musée National d'Art Moderne and therefore number two of Jean Cassou, has visited Miró in Barcelona. Miró informs Loeb that “at the beginning of next week I will have the opportunity to send to Paris –through unofficial channels– a recent painting that Dorival chose for the Perpignan museum” 411. Miró takes the opportunity to point out to Loeb that, in spite of not having any contract with him, he considers him as intermediary in that sale to the French State: “Be kind enough to go and see him (Dorival) and agree with him about the price; I fully authorize you to take the decisions you deem necessary and to set yourself the value of this painting. Also keep the money, which I will need when I arrive in Paris.” Miró at old age will pretend however before Permanyer that this great canvas (La Course de Taureaux, 114 x 144 cm) would have been given away and not sold to the French State 412. The painter will also tell Rosamond Bernier in 1980 that this work, the only one that French museums would have for decades, would have been a gift by him 413. Dupin, however, attributes to Jean Cassou the initiative of the purchase, which he presents as a favor done to the painter at a time when he had no buyers for his work. Although it is likely that finally the national museums of France never paid the price demanded by Loeb, because in the archives of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it is exposed today, it appears as “donation of the artist and Pierre Loeb” dated 1947 414. Pierre Loeb with Joan Miró in 1947 In his letter of January 27, Miró reminds Loeb that he expects to be treated with the dignity he deserves: “never half measures or mediocre things. You know me enough not to interpret what I just said as a feeling of personal vanity on my part”. In case the dealer takes his description as a way to belittle him and his gallery, Miró adds: “I also want to tell you once again that you should not see in all this a preconceived idea of going over your head. I absolutely want this exhibition to be organized by you, by Pierre Matisse and by Zervos and I want you to take care of the commercial side. I am also convinced that no second intention will bring us apart and that, speaking man to man, loyally and sincerely, any agreement will be possible.” And he also asks Loeb to pay bills for him: “I have attached an invoice from Argus de la Presse. Could you be kind enough to pay it on my behalf and put the amount in my account?” Loeb would not have done what Miró asked him for, since he asked Christian Zervos for the same favor three months later. 411 Reus 2004 pp. 785-788 412 Permanyer 2003, p. 143 413 Bernier 1991. p.148 414 See Miro. La collection du centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, París 1999, p. XVIII ; Collection Art moderne, Musée national d'art moderne, París, 2006 p. 462 182 A few days after writing to Loeb, Miró sent a new letter to Pierre Matisse on February 3, 1946 –replying to his letter of January 17 from Paris– in which after making a quick indirect reference to the episode in Andorra, he confirmed his satisfaction at the fact that the two gallerists have reached an agreement on the sharing of their contract with the painter. Frustrated by the inability of the Quai d'Orsay to bring the works destined for the Paris exhibition out of Spain, Miró also accepts that it is Matisse himself who will take care of it: “We agree, I will wait until your return around the 10th of March to go to Paris and I will not do anything about sending paintings. This, on the other hand, entails great difficulties and it is infinitely preferable that you personally come here to take care of it yourself, since you have much more experience than I in these things and you will know how to cope better.” 415. Miró sees himself closer than ever to the exit of the tunnel: his New York dealer has made a great effort, although failed, to bring him money; Matisse and Loeb have agreed; and he thinks he has managed to bypass both to organize a large retrospective in a major museum in Paris. What is missing now is to close the operation with the dealer who now has the economic capacity to lead the initiative and buy his war work; bringing the paintings out of Spain; receiving payment for that work and start collecting high monthly payments for future work. But for all this to happen, he needs Matisse to come to Barcelona to see the work and discuss prices and modalities of the new contract. That is why the painter is impatient about the gallerist's visit: “Be kind enough to keep me informed of the exact date of your next trip so that I can organize myself. I also ask you to send me catalogs of my paintings on a regular basis. The annoying thing is that I am forced to sell them at very low prices here”. It is surely a reference to the unfavorable exchange rate practiced at that time by the Franco regime. In fact, if Spanish exports could not take off at the time of the autarky (1939-1950) it was because Franco's exchange rate policy implied an overvaluation of the peseta for reasons of prestige. The national currency was then pegged to the British Pound, so for the few hundred dollars – the 'catalogs'– that Matisse would send him on account of the future contract, what Miró would receive in pesetas was a real misery. It was not until 1948 that the regime established a system of multiple exchange rates, which did not solve either the problems of the painter. From the reference to the low price of the catalogs we deduce that Miró's arrangement through Joaquim Gomis or Paco Sert to exchange currencies on the black market does not work at that time. If Matisse comes, he can nevertheless provide him with dollar bills, which were valued in Barcelona far above the official price. As he had said a few days earlier to Pierre Loeb, Miró needs that personal encounter with his dealer to conclude an agreement: “I was pleased to learn that you have reached an agreement with Pierre regarding the resumption of commercial relations.... I must point out that I am very optimistic about this”. But things get complicated. In March, Miró wrote again to Matisse requesting news of his planned visit. Spring passes, summer arrives and Matisse still does not come. Who shows up in mid-July 1946 is not Pierre, but his wife and collaborator at the gallery Alexina (Teeny), sent by her husband to review in detail the painter's studio and assess the works of 1941-1945 deposited there. In the end it is good news for Miró, because with Teeny –whom he 415 PMGA 18.36. Reus 2004 pp. 788-790 183 had met in Paris in the 20s when she was studying sculpture with Constantin Brâncusi in the Grande Chaumière school– relations are more personal. She can discuss professional issues with full competence, but the pricing and conditions rest for Pierre. Alexina will take to Matisse a complete vision of what Miró has in his studio and of the aspirations of the artist. Miró is over the moon and writes to Matisse on July 20, when Teeny leaves: “You cannot imagine, my dear Pierre, with what emotions I set eyes on Teeny again. It brought back the old times. She will tell you what happened, and what we talked about, but above all I felt, as I hope you also do, that if we work together on a human basis and in mutual understanding, it will be easy for us to collaborate. There are great obstacles to be surmounted, but I hope that we shall overcome them. We didn’t waste our time, I can assure you ! Allow me to offer you compliments of every sort in respect of Teeny, You have in Teeny an excellent partner, and one who is as intelligent as she is sensitive” 416. Although Pierre Matisse did not show up himself, because of the difficulty of obtaining a visa –Alexina Sattler was American and it was easier for her– the reunion had finally taken place. With the Andorran episode and the visit of Teeny, the painter had obtained the proofs he needed about the seriousness of Pierre's intentions. Miró was euphoric and tells his dealer that he is ready and full of energy for the time when the international art market returns to normal. And he informs him of his projects: making a cartoon film –Walt Disney had already produced Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi and was preparing a short film with Dalí– painting murals; make multiple sculptures; make tapestries; illustrate books, etc. With the information provided by Teeny, Pierre is in a position to make a final offer to Miró, as the painter had hoped for years. And the dealer acts quickly, making the painter a proposition he can not refuse. The result of years of negotiations, of tug-ofwar between the painter and the gallerist is reflected in the contract offer signed by Pierre Matisse in Paris on July 25 and by Miró in Barcelona five days later, on July 30, 1946 417. As we will see, in this agreement, which takes the form of a letter-final proposal by Matisse that Miró accepts and signs without discussion, all pending issues that the painter discussed with Teeny are tackled. The gallerist adopts a serious business tone, announcing that as a follow-up to his wife's visit to Barcelona, and after a thorough examination of the lists of works and photographs that she has taken with her, he has made a final decision, in the form of a firm but non-negotiable offer to purchase of all the paintings, gouaches, watercolors, drawings and sculptures that constitute his war work (1942-1946). The dealer begins by indicating the works that he will cede to the painter, in order to satisfy his desire to constitute a work reserve. From 1946, he leaves an oil painting of 146 by 114 cm, another of 65 by 54 and another of 25 by 25 cm, as well as two gouaches and copies numbered 4-8 of eight sculptures in progress. But he reminds him that he should send to New York two paintings of 146 by 114, one of 145 by 22, one 416 PMGA 18.36. Russell 1999, p. 255 Letter/contract proposal from P. Matisse to Miró dated 07. 25.1946. PMGA 18.36. Reus 2004, p.p. 790-797. 417 184 of 106 by 44 and another of 65 by 51 cm, as well as numbers 1-2-3 of the sculptures not yet finished. He adds that to compensate that he is only going to leave him a small number of paintings from 1944, he has decided to give him a total of six large canvases of 1945 of a size between 146 by 114 and 195 by 130 cm, together with a gouache of 100 by 11 cm and three watercolors between 21 by 18 and 45 by 20 cm. But he adds that Miro must send two gouaches of 100 by 11 cm, as well as seven gouaches on canvas between 86 by 10 cm and 49 by 25 cm, all of that year. From 1944, year of great production of the painter Matisse only leaves him a painting of 227 by 20 and three small ones of between 22 by 16 and 35 by 27 cm, along with three paintings on fiber cement difficult to transport, fifteen gouaches on canvas and the Barcelona series of 250 lithographs that were sent with the Constellations –Matisse has not sold a single one. From 1943 he only left Miró three pieces, from 1942 17 works and from 1935 two. But let's see how much money Miró was supposed to receive: for all the works that Teeny has seen in the Barcelona study, including those that, rolled up, she has personally taken with her –it is understood that they date from 1940 onwards since those produced until the end of that year legally belong to him– Matisse offers Miró an amount of thirty-five thousand dollars net for him, the equivalent of about 425,000 $ of 2016 taking into account the accumulated inflation in the last seven decades. It was a quantity that Miró had not seen in his life and that turns him green with envy, to the point of accepting the gallerist's offer without arguing. Although the money will take time to arrive, since Matisse offers to pay a first half a year and a half later (in 1947) and the second half even later (in the course of 1948). To see the first peseta, Miró will still have to wait six months, and much more to receive the promised amounts, because he never ceased to have difficulties to receive the remittances. The troubles he went through to receive Matisse's payments are documented in Miró's letters to his informal 'representative' in the US, Josep Lluis Sert, for example, on 07.12.48: “He had to have sent me this money for a while now. given, but he didn’t do it... Be exacting, because even though he might currently be in crisis, I do not care, it compensates for all for the time when things were going well for him” 418. Or the one of 08.15. 48, in which he confirms that has not received any money yet: “In Paris I agreed with Pierre in that as soon as he arrived to N.Y. he would give you the pending catalogs ... If he has not yet done so, please I ask you not to stop insisting, because I'm not taking more nonsense” 419 . But the painter has managed to raise his monthly emolument from the few hundred dollars that he was paid –or not– in his previous contract up to the 1,250 dollars a month that Matisse now offers (about $ 15,250 in 2014) for three quarters of his production. When Miró begins to see real money arrive, as he had never seen before, he takes the necessary measures to be able to benefit again from the black market exchange rate. In February 1948 he passed through Geneva on his trip to Paris and informed his bank that he had ordered Pierre Matisse to send him half of his monthly stipend there. In New York, and with the help of Josep Lluis Sert, he opens a new checking account. He did not trust the one he had until then, opened by Pierre Matisse, and in which he was 418 419 Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p. 113 Juncosa, , Patricia 2008, p. 117 185 supposed to deposit the money. Now Sert will be responsible for collecting the cash from the gallerist and depositing the amounts himself in the bank, informing immediately his Barcelona brother, who will be in charge of communicating it to Miró. And the painter agrees with the architect a new communication code for sending black money through informal channels. The code is based on the one he already had with Pierre Matisse, that is, when Miró asked for a catalog, this meant that Sert had to send him a hundred dollars. From 1948, the painter may request catalogs, but also engravings, each equivalent to one thousand dollars 420. The system began to roll quickly and successfully for Miró, especially since Aimé Maeght enters the scene. On October 14, 1948 Miró writes to Sert: “Before leaving Barcelona I received your cable announcing that you had received 3 engravings and 5 catalogs for your office. Pierre has sent me a cable confirming it and announcing that by the 12th of this month he will send you the rest of the order (I suppose there will be 1 engraving and 5 catalogs) that I ask you to claim from him”421. Evidently he is not talking about engravings, but about collecting $ 5,000 in two installments from Pierre Matisse, money that Sert will transform through his brother into many more pesetas than the official exchange would provide. The fact that Pierre Matisse only offers to acquire three quarters of Miró's production does not indicate that he wants to share the production of the Spaniard with another gallerist, but that he knows that Miró will always want to keep production, theoretically to feed official exhibitions without depending on the always problematic shipments of canvases from New York, which Matisse has always obstructed. But Matisse takes precautions and imposes strict control of Miró's work, noting that the $ 1,250 stipend will only be paid “for each month spent in his studio doing a regular job”, thus discounting the time the painter spends on trips or making decorations or other commissions. As an example of the distribution proposed, he indicates that sculptures will be limited from now on to eight copies, of which the numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 correspond to him. Copies 4 and 8 –the ugliest numbers–will be for Miró, who will be free to sell them at prices agreed between the two. It is important to note that Matisse's offer –which Miró finds very generous in view of his economic misfortune– is valid for a period of two years starting January 1947 with the option of renewing for another two years. This means that he only agrees to pay him some 15,000 dollars a year for two years. That is the bait he offers the Spaniard to accept to sell almost all of his production of previous years for the equivalent of two years of production. Obviously, it is a matter of seizing the spoils of the painter's war work with the lure of a fixed income of a level that he had not seen in his life. In addition, the dealer, fed up with the ill-fated influence of the painter's friends, who had pushed him to try to bypass him in 1944, explicitly forbade Miró in the contract to discuss the new proposal with Prats and Gomis. To understand what the operation meant for Pierre Matisse, it is enough to keep track of one of the paintings he acquired then. For example, the canvas titled Woman 420 421 Letter from Miró to Sert of 03.02.1948. Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p.p. 100-103 Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p. 121. 186 dreaming of escape (Femme rêvant de l'évasion) 422, dated on theback 1.2.1945, 146 by 114 cm, was shown to the public for the first time at the Joan Miró exhibition, held at the New York gallery from May 13 to June 13, 1947, in which catalog it was reproduced. But Matisse took time to sell it, so it continued in the gallery stores until it was acquired in 1964 by the couple formed by Miriam Gottesman, daughter of paper and banking magnate Samuel Gottesman and Ira David Wallach, who after marrying Miriam entered the company of his father-in-law, Gottesman & Company, which he would preside until his death. Well, after the death of Miriam in 2012, this work was sold at the Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on February 5, 2013 for the coquettish sum of 8,441,250 pounds sterling (13 million dollars). Besides, Matisse also imposes more conditions on the painter: if he wants to make engravings, he must reserve three-fourths of the –numerous– artist copies (épreuves d'artiste). Miró will not be able to make more than one pochoir a year, in short editions and with a dry stamp to avoid that they can pass for original work. The gallerist himself will skip this rule in the future, since he will edit Miró's pochoirs in his exhibition catalogs, that he will sell at a good price. Another condition is that apart from not being paid for the time spent traveling or making commissions, he will take a 30% commission when they come through the gallerist, a percentage that will drop to 10% if Matisse had not intervened. The painter must in any case consult him “before discussing or signing any proposal”. As for the work that the gallerist leaves with the painter, both from his war work and later, Matisse knows that the Spaniard will at some point want to sell on his own paintings to collectors with whom he has established contact and expressly forbids any sales in the contract. If Miró wanted to sell something anyway, he must grant his dealer a right of first refusal on these works for the entire duration of the contract. If the 1946 contract with Pierre Matisse provides Miró, for the first time in his life, enough income to have the comfortable lifestyle he wants, we can say without fear of making mistakes that the real liberation of Miró, the true leap to economic success, only comes from the hand of Aimé Maeght, with whom he signs in 1948. In his relationship with dealers, Miró did not stop suffering until well past his 50 years of age the fate of the young painters, the same that Picasso had suffered until his twenty-fifth anniversary. The dealers' technique was well shot. From the outset you have to have a base capital to build a stock of paintings that you do not need to sell immediately. You need to identify young painters with potential and buy them the maximum possible of production at the lowest possible price. And you have to sell with a dropper, which is not difficult if you put a high price of paintings of painters whose only credential is to have been sponsored by the gallerist. Collectors who buy from the beginning will be guided both by their personal taste and by relying on the advice of their investment advisor, the dealer. In parallel, and as the painter becomes renowned, you have to lend paintings from your stock for exhibitions in public museums. The message to the painter is always the same: “You have to persevere and you will see that over time the 422 Dupin, Jacques & Lelong-Mainaud, Ariane Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 2001, vol. III, No. 744, p. 68. Not to be confused with the painting of the same title, painted 18 days later, sized 130 x 162 cm, Fundación Miró, Barcelona. 187 value of your paintings will rise and I will be able to pay you more, but now you see that nothing is sold. In the meantime, I'm killing myself to get museums expose your œuvre.” In this way, and especially if there is an exclusivity contract, the vast majority of painters' work is accumulated in the hands of their dealers, who acquired them for next to nothing and sell them when the painters are older and the works reach very high prices in the market. Picasso managed to avoid that trap. Given his early success, the Spaniard had a non conflictive relationship with dealers. He could control and dominate them because the demand for his paintings was always greater than the number of works he was willing to sell. When he arrived in Paris at the age of 19, and after selling drawings to merchant Eugène Soulié, his first dealer was Pere Mañach, but two years later, in 1902, he was already exhibiting in the gallery of the Alsatian Jewess Berthe Weill, the discoverer of Matisse. At 27, Picasso is already selling to Weill, Vollard and DanielHenry Kahnweiler. And in 1918, at the age of 37, he concluded an agreement with Jews Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein to represent him all over the world. Picasso had met Kahnweiler in 1907 and had signed his first contract with him five years later, precisely because he offered him 1,000 francs –some $ 4,560 in 2016– for a painting of 81 by 65 cm, far more than what Vollard paid him. But first world war brought the first conflict: the dealer has to go into exile, the stock of his gallery is confiscated –and sold in auction– and what is worse, he owed then 20,000 francs to Picasso. It is not until Kahnweiler reimburses the sum to the painter in 1923 that he agrees to give him some business, but only the commercialization of lithographs. Rosenberg, for his part, had promised to buy him a constant volume of works and could choose from those that Picasso showed him, and remained his main buyer until in 1940 he moved to the United States, fleeing the Nazis. Kahnweiler managed to buy paintings little by little and tried to approach the painter, who continues selling directly to Rosenberg, Carré and Loeb. The war of 1939-1945 physically separates them, since the dealer hides and 'sells' his gallery to his stepdaughter Louise, who was not listed as an Israelite. When he returns to Paris and the artist begins to make lithographs with Mourlot, he renews Kahnweiler's exclusive marketing of his graphic work, but in painting he refuses to sell at the prices offered by the dealer, and when he starts selling in 1947, after the success of Kootz's exhibition in New York, he puts him in competition with Rosenberg, Louis Carré and other dealers, selling with a dropper and not without a dose of humiliation that involves long waits until Picasso agrees to receive him. Françoise Gilot recalls that Picasso often summoned Kahnweiler and Carré at the same time and forced them to wait in their anteroom before seeing them one by one, in order to put them in competition, get better prices for his paintings and remind them that the true boss was him, who could decide not to sell them anything because he had other dealers in France and abroad 423. Unfortunately for him, Miró was not so lucky. 423 Orozco 2015, pp.191 and following. 188 10. The third man (Maeght) or late life opulence (1948-) While negotiating his contract with Pierre Matisse, Miró is still looking for a gallerist in Europe who lives up to the expectations he has set. He has time to do so, because the contract of July 1946 for 75% of his production will expire in December 1948, leaving him enough room to negotiate new conditions and a distribution of his work between Matisse and the new gallerist. For the painter, Matisse was “an honest man, but too cautious and without energy” 424. He distrusts established merchants, with whom he has had no pleasant experiences. He would like to find someone new, someone whose main concern would be to sell today and not accumulate work for tomorrow, someone who also treats him as he believes he deserves. And he will find thar person in Aimé Maeght, an adventurous and daring man thirteen years younger than him. The gallerist was a member of a family displaced by the First World War. With a lithograph engraver diploma in his pocket, he moved to Cannes in 1927, where, benefiting from the status of war orphan, he got a job at the Robaudy printing company. There he receives the first compliments from an important painter: Pierre Bonnard. Five years later, his wife Marguerite opened a small radio and built-in radio cabinet’s shop that she decorated with some pictures of painter friends. When the Second World War broke out, there were no more radios to sell and all that was left were the paintings. Little by little young painters put more pictures to sell. In 1940 Marguerite had the audacity to show up at Bonnard's house to offer to sell his works. When the painter tells her what he asks for them, the young woman considers the price unreasonable, but agrees to take one and try to sell it at the demanded price, and she manages to sell it. When Aimé sees that selling expensive paintings works, he gets involved in the business, dedicating himself to travel to Paris to obtain works that are sold in haste in those turbulent days. Vendors could be Jewish collectors or dealers who wanted to escape from France and needed cash, established merchants who – unlike Maeght because of his status as a displaced person– had no safe conduct to go to and from the Vichy zone, or fans with contacts who take advantage of the art business at war, like Christian Zervos 425. Buyers were rich refugees in the sunny French Riviera or dealers who had cash and saw the opportunity to get hold of works which price they expect will go up a lot. Maeght is an ace of public relations and has a political nose. Through Bonnard he meets Matisse, whose wife and daughter were arrested by the Gestapo for acts of resistance. Maeght will also pretend after the liberation to have been very close to Jean Moulin, the myth of the French resistance. Moulin, who had a business in Nice similar to that of Maeght, can not contradict him because he was killed in July 1943, being 424 Permanyer 2003, p. 143 See a description of some of these activities in the book by Zervos’ adopted daughter: Szczupak-Thomas, Yvette Un diamant brut, Vézelay-Paris 1938-1950, Éditions Métailié, Paris 2008 425 189 replaced as head of the non-communist resistance... by Georges Bidault. When the occupation ends, the dealer has a unique obsession: to settle in Paris, where he is convinced that with his stock of works, his sales techniques and his new concept of art gallery will surpass all the dealers of the capital. His idea is to unite the work of publisher with that of gallerist, in order to give his trade publicity and an intellectual aura; enhancing the new figures of art and poetry and attract the great names of painting. He counts for it on the collaboration of two young people: Jacques Gardies and Jacques Kober, who launch a collection of texts. But the dealer still needs an establishment in Paris. The opportunity presents itself in October 1944. Maeght accompanies an old Pierre Bonnard to Paris to help him recover his paintings that are impounded by justice in the framework of the actions against dealer André Schoeller for his dubious activities during the occupation. Maeght then takes advantage of Schoeller's difficulties and obtains the transmission of the rental contract for a large space on rue de Téhéran, near the elegant Boulevard Haussmann. Once settled in Paris, preparations begin for the launch of his gallery, which opens on December 6, 1945, with a modest exhibition by Henri Matisse. Soon he launched the publishing house, with three publications: Pierre à Feu as a collection, Les Mains Éblouies to accompany the exhibitions of young painters and, above all, Derrière le miroir, which is a catalog with original lithographs of the main exhibitions of the gallery. The lithographs were made by printer Fernand Mourlot, the man who had recovered Picasso for the technique in November 1945. This is a revolutionary novelty introduced by Maeght, who had a greater commercial and media sense than the other gallerists: for each exhibition, Maeght asks the artists to make original lithographs, printed by Mourlot, which will be published in a large catalog (28 by 38 cm), in current and luxury editions, the latter signed by the painter. Since they have original graphic work, these catalogs are sold by the publisher at a good price to collectors who could not afford to buy the exposed oil paintings, and they will later reach prices of tens of thousands of dollars in auctions. But if it was relatively easy to obtain some paintings by great painters in the French Riviera, it is not easy to attract those same painters in Paris, where they have all worked for decades with established gallerists. Except Matisse's first and a small exhibition by Georges Braque in June 1947, the first regular exhibitions, which take place as of December 1946, are therefore of less known painters than the Maeghts had treated in Cannes, like brothers Geer and Bram Van Velde, André Marchand, Rigaud, Jean Signovert, Berry, Jean Villeri, Jean Peyrissac, Étienne Béothy and Germaine Richier. According to the Maeghts, the first meeting between the gallerist and Joan Miró took place in 1940: “Joan Miró and Aimé Maeght meet when Miró moves in with Braque in Varengeville” 426. The claim is daring and erroneous. On other occasions they said that the meeting took place in 1946 in Paris, to prepare an exhibition. The same date is cited by Mourlot in his first memoirs, Souvenirs et Portraits d'artistes, published in 1972, in which he states that the Catalan painter returned to Paris in 1946 and began to 426 Maeght, Jules, Exhibition catalog Miró en son jardin, Fundación Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, 2009 p.3 190 make lithographs in his workshop in Rue Chabrol 427. In his second memoirs, Mourlot corrects the shot, although he insists that he met Miró in 1946, when he “had already made some lithographs”. He adds that the first lithograph that the painter does in his workshop is through Aimée Maeght, who sent him to the printer in 1947 to prepare a lithograph for a book published by Maeght on the occasion of the exhibition Le surréalisme en 1947 promoted by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp and inaugurated on July 7 428. In fact, both the first contact with Mourlot in 1946 and his visit to the workshop in 1947 are clearly impossible. On one hand, there is no record of Miró's trip to Paris in 1946, and we also have proof that in that year the border with Spain was closed. If he had gone to Paris as Mourlot claims, Miró could have personally discussed with Pierre Matisse the details of his contract. On the other hand, Miró is in New York from February to November 1947, so he could not be in Paris preparing the lithographs or have met neither Mourlot nor Maeght. It is true that the book published by Maeght on the occasion of the exhibition –the cover of its luxury edition was a rubber female breast designed by Marcel Duchamp with the inscription: Please touch– has a lithograph by Miró as frontispiece (Mourlot 56), and that the painter also made another lithograph for the poster announcing the exhibition (Mourlot 57). But the fact that neither of the two lithographs was printed in a signed edition, as Maeght would always do, proves that Miró's first visit to the printer took place later. Chromist Charles Sorlier will confirm in his memoirs that the painter visited Mourlot's workshop for the first time in 1948 to execute a poster 429. Actually we can say that he came first, always in 1948, to make the lithographs of Album 13 and prepare the ones in his major livre d’artiste book Parler Seul, published by Maeght. Photographer Herbert List left a good evidence of this first visit: a long series of photographs of the painter and Jean Celestin, preparing stones and reviewing proofs of the two lithographs. Later, Miró came back for the preparation of the Derrière Le Miroir catalog of his first exhibition at the Maeght Gallery, inaugurated on November 1948 430 . Miró himself, with his usual bad memory, does not help clarify when did he meet the Paris gallerist for the first time. But it is not difficult to guess when and how the encounter and the “crush” between the two occur. We know that on the occasion of the preparation of the failed exhibition in Paris there is an epistolary contact between the painter and the gallery. We also know that on February 11, 1948 Miró traveled to Geneva, ostensibly to prepare the book À Toute Épreuve with publisher Gérald Cramer, and possibly also to discuss with his bankers how to manage the flow of liquidity that he began to receive of Pierre Matisse and that under no circumstances he wants to come to Spain through legal channels. On Wednesday the 18th he arrives in Paris, where he stays in Hotel Pont Royal on rue du Bac, just in front of what will be the headquarters of the Galerie Maeght on the rive gauche. Maeght has set a trap for him. He brings him to Paris, no doubt paying the trip himself, and pretends it is only to 427 Mourlot 1973 (The De Luxe edition with original lithographs had appeared a year earlier) Mourlot, 1979, p.p. 143-145. 429 Sorlier 1985, p. 188. 430 Derrière Le Miroir N°14-15, Miró, Maeght, Paris 1948 Texts by Tristan Tzara, Jean Cassou, Raymond Queneau, Paul Éluard & Ernest Hemingway and 7 original lithographs. 428 191 help him make the great exhibition with which Miró dreamed since 1944 and never materialized. Miró has nothing to lose. He has been satisfied with his first epistolary contacts with him, he visits the premises of rue de Teheran and he verifies that Maeght's has nothing to do with any of the galleries he has known. Venues like Maeght's is what he was thinking of when he wrote to Pierre Loeb two years earlier: “I doubt if you could find a sufficiently spacious gallery in Paris to display all these works, many of which are very large." Maeght looks to Miró like an authentic multinational: large premises, numerous employees and bombastic titles for the main collaborators of the dealer, whom he has been robbing from other gallerists by offering them more salary and the dignity of a business card. Critic Louis Gabriel Clayeux of Galerie Louis Carré becomes Artistic Director of Maeght. And poet Jacques Dupin, whom he draws from Cahiers d'Art where, of course, Christian Zervos pays him almost nothing, becomes the Publications Director of the gallery's, a more important post than it seems because the engravings and artist books provide a constant flow of income. Clayeux will be the planner of Miró's main exhibitions in Europe since then, and Dupin, in addition to being the driving force behind the graphic work that provided Miró with endless income for more than thirty years, will become his main biographer. On February 21, three days after arriving in Paris, Miró has already seen Aimé Maeght and writes to Pierre Matisse telling him that the gallerist plans to hold the Paris great exhibition in the summer and that he has discussed the details with him 431. Miró with Picasso during his 1948 visit But Maeght does more than interviewig Miró and introducing him to his collaborators. He wants to dazzle him and invites the painter to come down with him to the French Riviera. There he shows his power and what his painters could enjoy: trips everywhere in Rolls-Royce, stays and meals in the Colombe d'Or of Saint-Paul de Vence – Picasso's favorite luxury hotel-restaurant. In addition, the gallerist puts his car at Miró’s disposal so that during this first visit to his fiefs, the painter goes to see Pablo Picasso in Mougins on March 4 and Henri Matisse to Vence on day 5. To Miró appearing before Picasso and Matisse driven in a Rolls has a not insignificant importance. It is not unreasonable to think that Georges Braque, crazy about cars, was led to the dealer precisely for his passion for the beautiful machines. The contract between the two was sealed the day the gallerist offered Braque a Rolls-Royce. Maeght did everything in a big way, as Miró always thought his art had to be treated. When the painter indicated that he wanted to do graphic work, instead of trying to dissuade him as Matisse did, Maeght put him in the hands of Dupin, who made him produce more lithographs and etchings than any other major painter of the twentieth century, an area that Maeght took care of marketing. The same thing happened with artist books and ceramics. The trip had its effect: Miró had decided. Pierre Loeb had informed him on December 12, 1947 that he had broken with Pierre Matisse, so the painter was free to look for a new dealer in Europe. Aimé Maeght will be his gallerist and agent for all of Europe. This meant renegotiating the contract with Matisse, in force until the end of 1948. And 431 PMGA 18.39. 192 it also made it necessary to clarify once and for all the accounts with his dealer in New York who, despite the promises of two years ago, continued to show, for the Spanish painter, a diligence and punctuality in payments that left a lot to be desired. The problem of the exhibition of the war work that Maeght prepares as a welcome gift for Miró is that the painter had sold two years ago the bulk of that work to Pierre Matisse, who despite having promised to send paintings for the great exhibition, sends only a few pieces of relative interest. Matisse does everything possible to sabotage the show. In a letter to José Luis Sert from Paris in October 1948, Miró explains that he has been preparing for a week the 'retrospective' exhibition in Paris, which was due to open on the 20th but “due to the inconceivable negligence of Pierre Matisse, it will not be able to open until November 16, due to the delay in sending the canvases” 432. Matisse sees the Paris exhibition as what it really was, a simple commercial operation by Maeght, and not as Miró presented it: a retrospective level show. Maeght returned the discourtesy when in the exhibition he marked the few paintings sent by Matisse with a red dot, that is, as if he had sold them, instead of indicating that they had been borrowed from the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, where they were actually for sale 433. Of the 88 works that were presented in this great exhibition, in reality there are only 34 'paintings', which accompany 54 ceramics that will remain unsold. Of those 34 paintings, eleven are works on paper (pastels, gouaches, watercolors). The only 23 canvases are oils paintings dated between 1944 and 1946. Nothing between 1939 and 1943. And of course, no sign of the Constellations, which Pierre Matisse refuses once again to send to Paris. Miró also does not preach with the example, because he does not send for the exhibition the gouache he had given to his wife. Of the 23 paintings exhibited, only five have a size exceeding one meter in width or height, they are all from 1945 and come from those that Pierre Matisse had refused to take and had allowed him to keep to compensate for the fact that he himself kept almost all of the war work, which was the raison d'être of the exhibition. The catalog does not indicate anywhere that it is a retrospective exhibition of the war work of the painter. The cover only mentions Joan Miró, and in the following seven pages, in addition to some simple original lithographs, very similar to those made in those days for the book Parler Seul, 22 short texts by different authors are reproduced, most of them extracted from previous works, and that are grouped in three rubrics: Joan Miró and the incipient interrogation, The return of Miró, The birth of Miró y My cooperation with Miró. There is therefore no great retrospective, but a simple exhibition with five medium-sized paintings, 18 small ones, eleven works on paper and some fifty ceramics. Besides, Miró is forced to accept that the option he has made has consequences. Working with a dealer like Maeght, who only wants to sell and today, being little interested in the long-term construction of the prestige of a painter, is not the same as doing it with one like Pierre Matisse, focused on building the painter without worrying for giving immediate economic results and in each exhibition. Undoubtedly, Matisse 432 433 Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p.121 Russell 1999, p. 270 193 does not act in a disinterested way: if he manages to place the paintings in the great museums and among the great collectors, a few decades later what he bought for very little money will be worth a fortune. Or not, as happened to Kahnweiler, who for many years paid a monthly fee to painters who later failed to stand out, like José de Togores. To achieve his dream of a large retrospective exhibition in Paris, Miró would have had to work with an old-fashioned art dealer like Matisse or Pierre Loeb, who would have prepared the exhibition in permanent contact with the top Museums of France, exercising a lobbying job essential for the construction of the prestige of a painter. Maeght and Miró in the 1950s But the person that could provide the income that Miró wanted was none other than Maeght, always on the move, always with new projects of lithographs, artist books, ceramics, exhibitions, etc. Although he did not always pay quickly: Permanyer reports that at the death of the painter, the gallerist “owed him a fortune and the only solution was to go to a lawyer” 434. In fact, what happened was that at the end of the seventies, the economy of the Maeght empire suffered, both for objective reasons –the Pharaonic cost of the Saint Paul de Vence Foundation– and the death in 1977 of its wife Marguerite, who was the one who controlled the impetuous Aimé and brought sanity and business sense to the gallery. To save the ship from wreckig, Aimé was forced to create a partnership with his main collaborator Daniel Lelong, who managed the gallery. At Maeght’s death of there was a 'perfect storm' in which an economic situation that could lead to bankruptcy was combined with a main heir, Adrien Maeght, more interested in luxury cars than in managing the art business; the entry into the ranks of Sylvie, illegitimate daughter of Aimé, who claimed her part of the inheritance; and finally the ownership of the Foundation/museum that the Maeghts had opened in Saint Paul de Vence, built by Josep Lluis Sert and inaugurated by André Malraux in 1964. The result was that Lelong, associated with Jacques Dupin and Jean Fremon, kept the gallery of Rue de Teheran, while Adrien took over the Rue du Bac venue. The debts were distributed and the ownership of the Foundation remains still subject to disputes in 2015.435 Clayeux, Miró, Sert and Maeght examine scale model of the Maeght Foundation building 434 435 Permanyer 2003, p. 146 See Maeght, Françoise (Yoyo), La Saga Maeght, Robert Laffont, 2014 11. Breton jumps on board as the Constellations are reborn (1958) 194 11. Breton jumps on board as the Constellations are reborn (1958) If since 1945 the Constellations had been much talked about in the art world, the true consecration and popularization of the series does not occur until Pierre Matisse reissued it in 1959 in a luxury edition of 345 hand-painted copies. It is these pieces, and not the originals gouaches, that millions of visitors have seen since then in hundreds of museums and exhibition venues around the world. The realization of Matisse's plan to reprint the Constellations in the form of a portfolio of reproductions carefully made by hand from the originals, and not photographs or lithographs, takes place in a period of re-launching of the artist in Europe and the United States. In 1956 a Miró retrospective had taken place at the Palais des BeauxArts in Brussels, an exhibition that was then brought to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1956 an individual exhibition is also held at the Kunsthalle in Basel. From June to August, Maeght exhibits in Paris the ceramics of Miró and Artigas, which display will be transferred to Pierre Matisse’s in New York in December of that year. The graphic work is not forgotten, because 1957 Sala Gaspar de Barcelona exhibits lithographs of the painter, and an itinerant exhibition of his graphic work travels until early 1958 through the German cities of Krefeld, West Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Hannover and Hamburg. The graphic work also reaches MoMA, which in 1958 exposes him along with Braque and Morandi. Henri Matarasso organizes another solo exhibition in Nice in 1957. In 1958, and within the framework of the Universal Exhibition in Brussels, Miró will be one of the best represented artists, with five canvases, including The Harlequin's Carnival. In April 1958, the presentation at the Berggruen gallery in Paris of À toute épreuve. Bois gravés pour un poème de Paul Eluard also took place. Miró had been working on it for ten years for publisher Gerald Cramer and he had carved 233 blocks of wood to achieve 80 woodcuts, printed by Jacques Frélaut. For this presentation, Heinz Berggruen, who will market the book, will make a catalog with a prologue by Douglas Cooper, in phototype and pochoir by Daniel Jacomet and sold by Berggruen , as a cheap alternative to the book of woodcuts. Although already in 1944 or earlier Matisse had shared with Miró his desire to get 'some gouaches' with a view to a publication 436, the first concrete news that we have of the project of making an album with the reproduction of the Constellations are from 1957, which indicates that the plan –which implied very complicated logistics– was executed with an amazing speed. The explanation of that haste and of the considerable effort that the dealer dedicates to the matter can be found in several planes. On the one 436 In his letter to Miró dated 04.06.1944, Matisse reminds him that he had already transmitted this request in several prior letters. PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004 p.751 195 hand it is a commercial operation to make cash. He calculated that he could sell the edition for at least 400 or 500 dollars a piece, that is a total of at least 160,000 or 200,000 dollars for an edition of about 400 copies and that is not counting the 'luxury copies'. It is a considerable amount, equivalent to between 1,350,000 and 1,700,000 dollars in 2015 and exceeding his gallery’s normal annual turnover. The success that the series had found in the previous decade showed that a reissue of temperas, if it could be done with exquisite care, had a very large sales potential and could be placed even to large collectors who had not been interested in the series in 1945 –he sold portfolios to many important collectors, such as the founder of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Joseph Randall Shapiro, as well as to the millionaire wi, dow of Yves Tanguy. He also knew that the popularity that the series had acquired and their dispersion in private collections made it almost impossible for any museum to gather them all in an exhibit. There was therefore a considerable sales potential in museums around the world. He also knew that, unlike in original works, in which the intermediation of other galleries presented problems, with a porfolio he could sell without problems to dealers from all over the world who would take care of marketing. A second reason to act was that in the mid fifties, when Miró finally achieved the desired economic prosperity, a situation made clear by his acquisition of the Son Abrines and Son Boter estates in Majorca, the painter, very satisfied with Maeght on the European side, raises again the question of the poor economic performance of his arrangement with Matisse. And Miró thought about offering another opportunity to Paul Rosenberg, who was exhausting in New York the stock of paintings stolen from him in 1941 in Bordeaux, a part of which were returned in 1953. After the Miró exhibition at MoMA that year, his paintings were sold quickly to great collectors, such as Louis E. Stern, buyer of the gouache People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails. Matisse learns of Miró's initiative to contact Rosenberg, whisch he thinks is supported or driven by Aimé Maeght, and demands explanations in a letter of August 9, 1957 to the painter 437, to which Miró responds two weeks later indicating to the gallerist that he is “very dissatisfied” with the way his paintings were being sold in New York 438. The reason for Miró's anger is in the fact that in ten years his dealer has organized one solo exhibition (Miró recent paintings of 1953), and simply continued to sell his stock of previous work acquired with the contract of 1946 or the paintings of his first period that Matisse had acquired in the exhibition of the Galerías Layetanas in Barcelona in1949. Nor can he expect to obtain much income in the United States in the following years, because between 1955 and 1958 Miró practically did not paint, making only ceramics and dedicating himself to the well-paid graphic work that Maeght sold in Paris 439. And without production, Matisse paid nothing. But the New York gallerist does not give in to Miró's criticism. On the one hand he knows that the elderly Rosenberg and his son Alexandre are too busy trying to recover the eighty stolen paintings that have not yet appeared, and will not have time to take care of Miró. Despite the painter's protests, even in 1958 Matisse continues to sell his 437 PMGA 18.62 PMGA 18.57 439 Ribot Martín 2010. p. 200 438 196 savage paintings, leaving aside his recent work, which will not be exhibited until the end of 1961. The art dealer will respond to Miró's criticism two months later with a long letter in which, once again, he expresses his enthusiasm for the work of the painter and defends his handling of the matter, arguing that it is thanks to him that the painter has achieved the success he enjoys in the United States 440. Among the additional reasons the dealer has to launch a Miró initiative in the United States at that time is the fact that Maeght is making a considerable effort to promote Miró. The Parisian dealer gives the painter exactly what he wants: a huge workload and a considerable and fast remuneration for his paintings and sculptures, payments that will also be proportional to the sale prices of his works, an advantage the painter had never enjoyed. Although the sale of paintings, ceramics or sculptures is slow, the painter can always count on the safe and abundant income from the sale of artist books, lithographs and other engravings. Maeght also instructs his employee Jacques Dupin to write the definitive treatise on the painter's work, which will appear in France in 1961, published by Flammarion, and will be immediately issued in the United States by Harry N. Abrams with a mass circulation. The first time that Matisse informs Miró of his plan to reprint the Constellations is precisely the letter of August 1957, whose main purpose is the preparation of Dupin's book. And one last but primordial reason to do something with Miró at that precise moment is that Pierre Matisse has just learned that MoMA is preparing a Miró retrospective exhibition for early 1959, for which James Thrall Soby is writing a book-catalog, although in fact the text will be prepared by William (Bill) Lieberman, Barr's. assistant, founder and head of MoMA’s prints department and friend of the dealer. Matisse wants to match the launch of the Constellations portfolio –and not the exhibition of the savage paintings, which will precede it– with the MoMA exhibition, and on several occasions shows his fear that the work might not be ready by the time of the MoMA exhibition. Pierre Matisse knows that the key to the success of his ambitious Constellations portfolio project is to ensure that the reproductions are as good as the original gouaches. For this, he is willing to make the considerable investment in time and money that implies obtaining that all the owners of the gouaches lend them for a period of several months to be –with a millionaire insurance– sent to France and reproduced with precision. The dealer is fortunate that all the temperas have been sold by him and to people located in or around New York, so the operation will not be too complicated, except in terms of convincing the owners to lend the fragile paintings. Matisse could have chosen to reproduce the Constellations in lithography, what Fernand Mourlot could have done in Paris even from color photographs made in the United States, as rumours said he did in some occasions to produce lithographs passed as originals. But the gallerist wanted a much more reliable reproduction, handmade with thick gouache colors, exactly the same as Miró used in 1940-1941. In order for the colors to coincide with total fidelity, it was necessary that the workshop where they were to be reproduced had the originals at hand and thus made sure that the choice of each tone was appropriate. 440 Letter to Miró dated 10.02.1957. PMGA 18.57 197 But the final coloration by hand did not solve the whole problem of reproducing the Constellations, because these had been carried out in three stages. As we have seen, Miró had painted the original series in 1940-1941 wetting the brushes used in a previous painting in turpentine and rubbing them against the white sheets of a paper notebook, thus making a background for each wash. He then went on to draw, with charcoal shapes, figures, stars, etc. And finally he completed them coloring with tempera. Pierre Matisse, who knew how the gouaches had been painted, is aware that there is a perfectly adjusted method to reproduce them, because it combines a preparation of the paper to give it a certain roughness and then print the background or main lines using the necessary colors, and finally finish by hand gouache paint made by expert hands. This is the procedure that Daniel Jacomet has developed since the 1920s, mainly to reproduce old documents or drawings by the great painters. The first of the two stages of the Jacomet process was a background impression by means of collotype, that used a glass plate with a water-repellent gelatin layer treated with dichromate to make it sensitive to light. After baking in an oven, this layer was sensitized in contact with a negative plate. The parts of the layer which have been exposed to light are tanned and the gelatin loses its impermeability, while those protected from light will be swollen with moisture. The glass plate is then washed to remove the dichromate, and moistened. It is then ready for the press run. Once the base was printed, Jacomet employees would proceed to complete the reproduction using the pochoir process, using templates cutting with a steel sheet a zinc foil just one tenth of a milimiter thick. For each pochoir plate, several templates were used. These stencils were then placed on paper and painted by hand with gouache. Hand movements with the pompom at the Jacomet atelier The pochoir method had been chosen by the gallerist's father, Henri Matisse, to make the majestic livre d’artiste Jazz, published in 1947 by Tériade. In this case, easier to make given the much larger size of the gouaches decoupés of the fauve painter, the work was executed by book illustration specialist of the first half of the 20th century, Edmond Vairel. But for the Constellations a much more delicate work was needed, in which the 198 preparation of the papers was combined with collotype, the ideal selection of the gouache colors to be used –which Vairel could have also made– and a meticulousness that only Daniel Jacomet’s workers could provide. The main reason why Pierre Matisse chose Jacomet must be found in another personality that enters the scene: Heinz Berggruen. , The German Jewish gallerist had met Pierre during his exile in New York, and in the early 1950s tried to convert his small bookshop in the Île de Saint Louis in Paris into an important gallery, for which he had the complicity of Picasso, always solidarious with Jews persecuted by Nazism and interested in having new dealers that limited his dependence on Kahnweiler or Carré. Matisse also wanted to avoid at all costs that Aimé Maeght had any intervention in the Constellations-bis operation. In fact the idea was to annoy him by making a Miró exhibition in Paris without Maeght and without him participating in the benefits that it would generate, just as the new Miró gallerist had boycotted the sales of works owned by Matisse in the 1948 exhibition. In addition, Matisse needed an associate in Europe to manage the complicated operation at this side of the Atlantic. And the clever Berggruen , seized the opportunity, obtaining not only the honor of hosting the only Constellations exhibition ever made in Europe, but huge profits through the sale of numerous copies of the Miró-Breton portfolio and another backroom operation to which we will refer later. Matisse was also attracted to the idea of the Parisian exhibition taking place in the new Berggruen Gallery in the Latin Quarter, to which Heinz had moved in 1950, and which was located at 70 Rue de l'Université, less than 300 meters from the new gallery Maeght had opened in 1956 at 42 of the Rue du Bac (the still surviving Galerie Maeght). Daniel Jacomet was not a stranger or a newcomer. The Parisian printer had already made, in 1920, the splendid Picasso pochoirs for Le Tricorne, the book published by Paul Rosenberg that reproduced the 32 sets and figurines by the painter for the representation of The Three-Cornered Hat by Manuel de Falla, released with Diaghilev's choreography at the Alhambra Theater in London in 1919. But the reason why he was chosen for the Constellations operation is that since 1952 he had been working with Berggruen, doing in phototype and pochoir the illustrations of the interior of the small catalogs of the gallerist's exhibitions. These, with a Mourlot lithograph on the cover, were sold to visitors and today reach high prices in the art market. His first works were the catalogs or plaquettes for the exhibitions of Paul Klee (24 Gravures) and Henri Matisse (Gravures récentes), both in 1952. The following year, and in view of the enthusiasm of Berggruen, and small collectors, Jacomet repeated the feat with Arp, Braque, Matisse and Seuphor. In 1954 he made the catalogs of the exhibitions by Kandinsky, Picasso and Matisse in the Berggruen Gallery with the same technique of pochoir on phototype. In 1955 Klee, Laurens, Marini and Arp came again, and in 1956 Picasso, Severini and Ernst. In 1957, when Pierre Matisse decided to launch the reissue of the Constellations, the collaboration between Jacomet and Berggruen, had intensified with the catalogs of the exhibitions by Dora Maar, Julio González, Moore, Magnelli, Soulages and Poliakoff. The following year, when Matisse offers to Berggruen , to be associated for the operation, Jacomet realizes for him the catalogs of the Joan Miro exhibition Bois gravés pour un poème of Paul Eluard as well as those of Henri Matisse and Hamaguchi, and he will make also the facsimile of the Carnet Catalán de Picasso, also for Berggruen,. That 199 same year of 1958, Jacomet will print the impressive portfolio Mes dessins d'Antibes by Picasso, but his main task that year, and the one that will occupy his employees, will be the reissue of the Constellations. The Jacomet workshop in 1958 For MoMA curator Lilian Tone, the pochoirs that Daniel Jacomet made, reproducing with great fidelity too the drawings and titles that Miró recorded on the back of each original gouache, were of such a high quality that “excluding their slight difference in size from the originals, they are virtually indistinguishable” from those Miró painted 441. Of course, the small difference in size was deliberate, so that a pochoir could not pass for an original gouache. These had dimensions of 45.7 x 38.1 cm, while the pochoirs measured 43.2 x 35.6 cm, that is 2.5 cm smaller in height and width. Both the painter and Matisse will be so s4atisfied with the work done that in the following years Jacomet will make the magnificent pochoirs for the luxury editions of the catalogs of the exhibitions Miró 1959-1960 (1961), Cartons 1959-1965 (1965), and Oiseau Solaire Oiseau Lunaire Étincelles (1967), pieces that today are quoted at thousands of dollars. Jacomet will also reproduce in pochoir paintings for the exhibition catalogs in the Pierre Matisse Gallery by Yves Tanguy (1963), Chagall (1968) and Dubuffet. But the Parisian printer will not be as patient as Miró when it comes to not receiving payments for his work, and the collaboration with the New York gallerist will end after numerous protests by Jacomet for unpaid bills and delays in sending the funds 442. Jacomet will nonetheless continue to work with other European publishers until the 1990s. Once Berggruen, decided that Jacomet will be responsible for reproducing the Constellations temperas and convinced Pierre Matisse that the choice is appropriate, the gallerist must launch the complicated operation. The first thing he does is to contact the owners of the sold gouaches one by one and to organize directly with Jacomet the insurance for the shipment of the originals, which he does in the course of 1957. Some owners saise some objections about lending their gouaches, despite the gallerist's offer to give them in return a copy of the valuable portfolio and the guarantee that the publication will only increase the fame and value of the original gouaches. At the end of the year, Matisse has already obtained the last pieces, from the hands of Dwight Ripley and Philip Goodwin. He tells Miró of his plan, the painter answering in a letter of September 6, 1957 in which, apart from conveying some ideas 441 442 Tone 1993, p. 6 PMGA, folders 176.42, 43 y 44. 200 about what he understands will be a 'book', he reiterates to the gallerist owner his great dissatisfaction with the cash flow that comes from New York. Matisse answers him four weeks later –October 3– with details about the publishing plan 443. At the end of January 1958, when the paintings had already been sent to Paris, the gallerist informed the painter that he had spoken with Breton to prepare a text to accompany the gouaches 444. And an excited Miró has finally in February the opportunity to see for the first time the complete set of the Constellations –except Nocturne– since he said goodbye to the series in 1944. Jacques Dupin, who needed to see and photograph the paintings for his book, was alerted by Jacomet, and as soon as the temperas arrived, he warned the painter, who rushed to Paris and went to the workshop accompanied by his biographer, of which visit Dupin gave an account to Matisse in a letter of February 26, 1958 445. Miró wants to control as much as possible the reissue of the series and decides to return to Paris to talk about the project with André Breton, which he does in May. It is the wrapper, because the essential part of the project, that is, the preparation of the reproductions of the gouaches by hand in the workshops of Jacomet continues separately. The printer must decide with the help of the painter what part or 'phase' of each gouache will be reproduced in a phototype and where the hand coloring will superimpose the phototype. The operation is delicate and has to be repeated for each of the 22 gouaches, some of which have more than a dozen colors. As all critics have pointed out, the result is extraordinary, but as in all manual labor some barely perceptible errors slip. For example, to paint the sclera of the eyes of the Bel oiseau déchiffrant l'inconnu au couple d'amoureux, instead of painting the outline of the pupil in white, the Jacomet workers apply –at least in some copies– white color in the whole circle of the sclera, thus lowering the intensity of the pupil’s black. This is at least the case of the copy that the author of these lines has in his collection, because the essential characteristic of the pochoirs is that, being made by hand, each one is unique and different from the others. Berggruen, wants to strengthen his role as leader of the operation in Europe; Matisse worries about the cost of the operation; Miró wants to control it when he noticed that as Raillard would later point out 446, André Bretón is determined to 'appropriate' the series and be the main protagonist of the publication; Jacomet does not want any interference in his decisions and technical work; and new participants join the business. Pierre Matisse is forced to incorporate to the project Fernand Mourlot and Roger Lacourière, the historic printers of Picasso’s lithographs and etchings. The reason is that Miró would not have received a cent for the operation as it was proposed, since copyrights were only applied at that time in a summary manner and the porfolio contained nothing but reproductions. By contributing original engravings, Miró, whose collaboration was required for the marketing of the operation, would also participate in the benefits. The inclusion of 'original work' also served to attract buyers and ensure the inclusion of the new publication in the catalogues raisonnées of 443 PMGA 18.57. PMGA 18.57 445 PMGA 18.62 Jacques Dupin 446 Raillard 1976. pp 52-60 444 201 original graphic work. For the rest, including original graphic work allowed a separation in categories of the copies of the edition. This hierarchy allowed Matisse to modulate the prices of the porfolios based on the content, modulation that, without much justification in our view, remains in the auction prices at Sotheby's or Christie's decades later. The gallerist therefore incorporates two etchings and two lithographs by Miró into the portfolio. Matisse gives Breton on August 22, 1958 details of his final plans for the album447. but Miró, in his efforts to control the process, continues to come up with suggestions, including some in a letter to Matisse dated August 25 448. The gallerist takes advantage of his annual summer stay in France to meet Berggruen,, Jacomet and Breton and tie all the ends. In October, back in New York, he puts in writing the terms of the agreement with Berggruen to distribute the costs and benefits of the operation and set the terms of the January 1959 exhibition of the Constellations original gouaches in Galerie Berggruen. This aspect had not been communicated to the owners of the temperas, who were forced to wait even longer to recover them. The Matisse/Berggruen , relationship is at its best, and after agreeing on all the details, including the number and distribution of copies of the portfolio, the remuneration of Breton, the payments and role of Jacomet and the work assigned to Mourlot and Lacourière 449, the two will also agree to exchange future exhibitions in Paris and New York, for which Berggruen, will prepare the catalogs, with Mourlot lithographs on the cover and Jacomet pochoirs inside. Knowing the painter's susceptibility, Pierre Matisse takes the trouble to explain in detail to Miró the agreements he has reached with Berggruen, in relation to the exhibition and the edition and distribution of the album 450. But the gallerist starts to get nervous. The reason is that James Thrall Soby is preparing, with the help of Jacques Dupin and Maeght in France, Miró's retrospective in MoMA for February 1959. Miró will attend the show taking advantage of his trip to Washington to collect the Guggenheim award from the hands of President Dwight Eisenhower. He was scorted at the ceremony by Franco’s Ambassador to the U.S. Matisse wants the exhibition to precede his with the temperas and launching of the Constellations portfolio. An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art heats the atmosphere, puts the name of Miró in the press and facilitates sales in the next exhibition of his gallery. Matisse was already preparing the MoMA exhibition of with Soby and Bill Lieberman –the thirty-year-old specialist in graphic work that will organize it– since the end of '57. But the proximity of dates between the exhibitions of Paris at the Berggruen Gallery and those of New York in MoMA and the Pierre Matisse gallery implies the album must be ready, a close coordination and impeccable logistics, to allow the quick transfer of the works. Finally, the exhibition chain will not be the one that Pierre Matisse had wanted. Because of André Breton, the one at Berggruen gallery will take place between 447 PMGA 18.59 PMGA 18.57 449 PMGA 93.25 Berggruen 450 Letter to Miró dated 10. 13.58. PMGA 18.57 448 202 January 20 and March, at first only with the gouaches and at the end just with the portfolios. But without all the gouaches, since some owners, fed up with waiting, had demanded the return of four of them before the opening of the Paris exhibition 451. Another group of gouaches will leave in February for MoMAs Joan Miró exhibition, inaugurated on March 18 and that will last until May 10 in New York, to then go to Los Angeles (from June to July). And a last part, including those which remain unsold, will be exhibited in the Constellations exhibition that Matisse organizes in his gallery between March 17 and April 11 to sell the Miró/Breton album. And while Soby goes ahead with his plans, of which Bill Lieberman has informed the gallerist, on October 25, 1958 Matisse writes to Miró signalling his concern about the absence of news from Breton –for the text– or from Jacomet –for the reproductions 452 . Miró can not give any news to Matisse because he also lacks news from Breton, but takes the opportunity to provide, no doubt belatedly, new suggestions for the realization of the album 453. Breton will finally write to the painter on November 4, 1958 regarding the preface that he prepares for the portfolio454. What Breton does not say, neither to Miró nor to Pierre Matisse, is that until that moment he has done practically nothing of the assignment. In fact he has not begun to work on the preparation of the text until a few days before writing to the painter, and although time was pressing, the manuscript texts of the parallel proses prove that he will not complete the assignment until well into the month of December. The manuscripts of the preface and the Breton poems are kept in the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet at the Sorbonne, and are dated between the months of October and December 1958 455. Miró chooses to forget about the text and focus on the reproductions, working closely with Jacomet to monitor the background preparations and choose the colors accurately to achieve an optimal result, and he informs his New York gallerist of the progress of the printer's work 456. As for the printing proofs of the Breton text, which we assume were all delivered at the same time to the writer by printer Fequet et Baudier, we have found in one of the originals returned by the poet with his handwritten corrections a single date, 27 January 1959, written by someone in the printing press. In the same corrected printing proof, corresponding to the poem that would accompany the gouache Woman in the Night, someone –possibly Marthe Fequet or Albert-Pierre Baudier– has posted an annotation to hurry the workers: “It is urgent. The book will appear soon (in New York and for 150,000 Francs)” 457. In short, while Miró and Jacomet have worked tirelessly to prepare the phototypes and gouaches, Breton has done nothing and the printed texts are not ready and corrected in the printer until January 27, 1959, this is a year after Pierre Matisse asked the poet, eight months after meeting Miró and Jacomet to prepare 451 Tone 1993, p. 6 Letters to Miró dated 10.25.58 and to Jacques Dupin dated 10. 31.58, PMGA 18.62 Jacques Dupin 453 PMGA 18.57 454 PMGA 18.59 455 Fonds André Breton, Constellations. Reference Ms 46020 456 Letter to Matisse dated 12.20.1958. PMGA Miró 18.57 457 Drouot Sale of the Archives of André Breton on 04.12.2003, Lot 2472. 452 203 it ... and seven days after the opening of the Berggruen gallery exhibition on January 20 where they should be presented. Because of Breton, the show must therefore start only with the Miró original gouaches, but without the portfolio it is really about and is for sale there. The abum will not reach the gallery until a month later, when the gouaches have left for the United States. Nor does Breton tell Miró the content of his prose poems to 'illustrate' the Constellations, but simply invites him and Pilar Juncosa to eat on a Saturday in December in his small apartment at 42 Rue Pierre-Fontaine –known as rue Fontaine–, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He also invites his daughter Aube, a friend of hers, and poet Octavio Paz, who was in the French capital to attend a writers’ meeting –and probably to prepare his return as a diplomat to France a few months later. The Mexican Nobel Prize in Literature described in detail the encounter in a text of 1984 458 . After a lunch in which he spoke “of painting and poetry, politics and magic” with Breton’s traditional eloquence and the usual silence of Miró and his wife, who “looked at each other, nervous and smiling” as they waited for the main course of the day, Elisa Breton invited diners to have coffee in the studio. The French poet then proceeded to reveal to the painter the content of his recent work and began to read the text of the prose poems. Miró listened quietly, with his usual air of “amazed child” and when Breton finished reading he just mumbled a few words of thanks, while Pilar Juncosa did not open her mouth. Octavio Paz relates that he did not know then what they really thought of Breton's complicated poetic prose, difficult to understand for any French graduate in philology because of its arbitrariness. What Miró could not avoid noticing was that, in writing his parallel proses, Breton had discarded the titles that the painter had inscribed, along with a drawing on the back of the gouaches. In most of Breton's texts 459, the poet seems to try systematically to move away from the spirit that the painter had insinuated. Or to be more generous, we could say that the poet repeats the exercise that Miró had done with the signs and characters, which lead him to other signs. But Breton plays not with Miró’s images as he should, but with his own words, giving these a magical freedom to reproduce, call others to produce a mystery as indecipherable as the gouaches. Miró's drawings thus liberate i Breton a flow of verbal images that develop by themselves giving rise to proses that are not interpretative, but "parallel" to the temperas 460. Definitely, Breton’s texts, which Miró could not understand when the poet recited them, left the painter stunned. The irritation of both Pierre Matisse and Miró with André Breton for his lack of seriousness in the matter of the portfolio is patent. The gallerist and publisher of the album did not get to see the text of until he got the copies to sell, so he could not approve them as he should, or start the copyright process until the 'book' was already on sale. But the way to punish the poet is not to pay him, not to write, to ignore and to annoy him in some other project in which he is involved. The painter imitates the dealer’s technique and chooses to ignore Breton for two months, and Breton writes on February 27, 1959 to Matisse complaining that the portfolio have just been presented 458 Paz 1984. Published in English in Hammond 2000, p.p. 195-239 460 Adamowicz, Elza Ceci n'est pas un tableau: les écrits surréalistes sur l'art, Editions l'Age d'Homme, Lausanne 2004, pp. 65, 99 459 204 at the Berggruen Gallery, but that Miró has not had the slightest gesture towards him, nor answered his messages, which, says Breton, produces him great sadness 461. The commercial operation is particularly advantageous for Pierre Matisse, insofar as all his costs are incurred in French francs, but since he is slow to pay, he does so in a devalued currency, i.e., paying less dollars. In effect, the Franc undergoes two devaluations in 1958, the first of 20% in June and the second of an additional 17.55% in December. It is the moment of the birth of the new Franc, equivalent to 100 old francs. After the devaluations, selling the album in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, etc., and much less in France, is the best option for Matisse because he can not raise the French advertised price, already high, of 150,000 F.F. But the gallerist is confronted with a problem that needs serious coordination with Berggruen,, since any European dealer who has buyers for the Constellations will have an interest in acquiring the porfolio from Berggruen,, given that the price that Matisse estimated at about 400 dollars –for the cheaper copies– were equivalent after the devaluation to almost 200,000 FF (2,000 new francs). Buying Berggruen they saved 25% of the cost. And in fact they had the right to do so, because what the agreement between Heinz and Pierre envisaged is that the Parisian gallery could not sell to American customers, there being no limitation to supply copies to European dealers. Although nothing prevented the New York dealer either from selling to those same dealers if they were not French. Berggruen , in fact did not deprive himself of selling copies of his quota to whoever requested it, provided he was not American. But the dealer devised a stratagem to increase his income for the series without having to pay anything to Matisse. As we have seen, the gallerist had been publishing catalogs since 1952 in each exhibition he made. These were small plaquettes of 22 by 12 cm and between 15 and 30 pages, with a cover made in lithography by Fernand Mourlot and reproductions of the works for sale made in phototype and pochoir by Daniel Jacomet. The small catalogs, shot to several hundred copies, were not distributed free, but remained in the back room and were given to his best customers with accredited purchases or buyers of a painting in the exhibition. The rest of the copies followed the fate of Picasso, Matisse or Chagall’s posters that Mourlot made, and that were never stuck on any wall. They went to the market, sold by the same dealers as the original graphic work. To give an example, in 1956 Picasso made a beautiful poster in original lithography for the Galerie 65 in Cannes, owned by Gilberte Duclaud. 2,100 copies of the poster were printed, of which at least 100 numbered and signed. And in Cannes there were not enough corners at that time to glue in them so many posters, printed in lithography only to be sold 462. Collectors who could not afford to buy a painting of 100,000 F.F. at the Berggruen exhibitions were willing to pay a few thousand francs for a 'plaquette'. As the catalogs of the Paris exhibition fell within the exclusive responsibility of Berggruen,, he did not have to give an account or answer to Matisse about his initiative. 461 462 PMGA 41.12. Subseries: Artists' manuscript letters. Orozco 2015, pp. 188-189 205 For the case of the Constellations exhibition, where what was on sale was a portfolio with Jacomet reproductions of Miró's gouaches, a difficulty arised. On the one hand it was impossible to further reduce the size of small gouaches of 38 by 46 cm and reproduce them with fidelity by hand. Jacomet had copied them by reducing them slightly, but to reduce them to a size similar to the pochoirs he made for Berggruen, 's plaquettes (22 by 24 cm once opened) was, if not impossible –they would contain millimeter color signs– at least extremely laborious and without doubt quality and clarity would be lost. To overcome the problem and provide an alternative with a market value that would interest potential buyers –and therefore the gallerist– Jacomet proposed to Miró to make a few hundred more copies of the Constellations pochoirs and cut them into three pieces. Each pochoir included in the porfolio had dimensions of 35.6 by 43.2 cm, this is 1,538 square cm of surface, and each double page of the plaquettes had 22 x 23.4 cm, or 514 square cm, this is exactly one third of the pochoir. The idea was to include in each catalog three fragments of complete pochoir, but the edition in the catalog could not compete with the porfolio, because the cut was made in the middle of the side of 43.2 cm and until it reached 23, 4 cm. In this way, of each pochoir of the porfolio what was used was the right part if it was vertical and the top part if it was horizontal, 'discarding' the remaining 13.2 by 43.2 cm. The small pochoirs of the plaquettes, in number of three for each catalog, also corresponded to portions of three different original pochoirs, so that the collectors could not put them together and compose a complete pochoir. What they could do was to buy several catalogs and, if they were lucky, put together two small pochoirs from the same Constellation to form two thirds of an original pochoir. With this condition, Miró gave his approval, Jacomet printed several hundred copies more of the pochoirs and Berggruen , ended up with hundreds of catalogs that included in this case not a reproduction of the works that were proposed for sale in the exhibition, as it was customary, but pieces that were exactly equal to the 'originals' that the expensive portfolio included, only cut in three and mixed. And Berggruen , was even more Machiavellian. Since he had a few hundreds pochoir pieces of 13.2 by 43.2 cm, discarded when cutting the pieces for the plaquettes, he decided to use them, folded in two, to form the invitation card for the opening cocktail of the exhibition. In order to avoid that at some point the three pieces of pochoir could be put together to build a complete one, the invitation card was cut very slightly. It was again, as was the case with the catalogs, the first-and only-time when the invitation card for the vernissage contained a part of the original work that was on sale at the exhibition. When the devaluation of the French Franc took place in December and Matisse limits the sale of the album to Berggruen, because of the price fixed in advance, the copies of the Constellations plaquette increased in value. Heinz did not publicize the fact that this catalog contained fragments of the original pochoirs instead of reproductions and kept the copies for sale to collectors when he had no more copies of the complete album, which did not take long to occur because of the demand of gallerists who tried to buy cheaper than the market price in the United States. The result has been that this plaquette, number 28 of the Berggruen catalog collection, is the only one completely 206 absent from the market, and can only be purchased when it is sold –very rarely– at an auction, coming from a private collection. But let's go back to the portfolio itself. One of the concerns of Pierre Matisse when publishing the Constellations was to control the number of printed copies. It was not enough to have limited numbered copies, because the gallerist knows well the practice of Aimée Maeght, with the complicity of Mourlot and Miró, of printing more artist copy lithographs that those formally edited as reflected in the catalogues raisonnées. The hors commerce (out of trade) or 'HC' copies were distributed to the painter, who had his own sales channels for small quantities of lithographs, and the publisher, who kept and sold them years –or decades as we can see today– after the commercial edition was exhausted. Matisse therefore limits the number of copies of the Miró/Breton Constellations porfolio and warns his associates –especially Mourlot– that, on this occasion, he will not tolerate cheats. 384 copies of the portfolio are printed in total, and we haven’t found in twenty-five years of market surveillance more than a single unnumbered copy. Although we have found loose unnumbered copies of the lithographs that accompanied the pochoirs, which proves, that once again, Miró and Mourlot managed to do business secretly behind the publisher’s back. Pierre Matisse, who did not sell individual lithographs, did not participate in the scam. The 384 copies of the portfolio were distributed as follows. Three hundred and fifty copies constituted the trade edition, separated in five price categories: The most expensive were the first ten albums, numbered from 1 to 10, which in addition to the 22 pochoirs contained an original etching ( Miró Engraver nº 269) printed by Frélaut in black with gray background on 45 by 36 cm Arches vellum paper, that is, practically of the same size as the Jacomet pochoirs (43.2 x 35.6 cm); the same etching printed in black with a green background (Miró Engraver 270) and another proof of the etching printed in black but enhanced by Miró’s own hand with watercolor. We have only had access to one of these specimens, which Miró improved with large green and yellow spots, a 'crown' in violet and two eyes in red and yellow. The ten 'super luxury' copies also carried two lithographs in colors printed by Mourlot on Arches vellum paper 36.1 by 45.1 cm (Miró Lithographs 260-261). These first ten porfolios also had a page handwritten by André Breton. Evidently, the five engravings that accompanied the portfolio were numbered and signed by Miró. The following forty copies of the album, numbered 11 to 50, carried, accompanying the 22 pochoirs, a proof of the etching in black, another proof of the same print with the background in color, as well as the two lithographs, the four prints being signed. The next fifty copies of the set, numbered from 51 to 100, were accompanied by the etching printed in black and the two lithographs. The next group of fifty copies of the portfolio, numbered from 101 to 150, no longer carried any etching, but had the two lithographs in colors. And finally, the last two hundred copies, numbered from 151 to 350, had as sole complement to the pochoirs a signed proof of the lithograph in colors bearing the number 261 in the catalogue raisonné. In addition to the 350 copies of the trade edition, Pierre Matisse authorized the printing of exclusively thirty-four out of trade copies. Twenty-two were nominative copies 207 numbered I through XXII and were given as compensation to the owners of the original gouaches who had lent their fragile pieces to be sent to Paris and thus reproduced in pochoir by Jacomet. One of the copies was printed in the name of Pilar Juncosa as owner. According to the catalogue raisonné of Miró's books 463, these copies –free for the recipients– corresponded to the cheaper ones of the trade edition, and therefore they carried only the second lithograph in colors (Dupìn 261) signed by Miró. However, the justification sheet of the Constellations album does not specify that copies out of commerce carry a lithograph or any etching. The remaining nontrade copies of the Miró/Breton album, those marked hors commerce, were the ones that concerned Pierre Matisse most due to the lax habits of Maeght and Mourlot. He thus limited them strictly to twelve copies of the unnumbered porfolio but marked 'HC '. This is an exceptionally low number in this business, and were to be distributed among the collaborators who had allowed the work to be carried out, among which Miró himself; André Breton; Pierre Matisse; Daniel Jacomet; Fernand Mourlot, Jacques Frélaut, owner of the Atelier Lacourière-Frélaut; Marthe Fequet and AlbertPierre Baudier, owners of the Fequet & Baudier printing company; Heinz Berggruen , and probably Jacques Dupin. According to Cramer, these copies of the album would also carry a proof of the second lithograph. To understand how the dealer's income could increase thanks to the gradation of the copies, we would say that the price of 2,000 new francs for the basic copies was not excessively expensive. To compare, we have looked for an example of an artist book from the same period and with a similar price: for the 199 cheapest copies of Jean Cocteau'.s book "Picasso de 1916 à 1961", which contained twenty-four black lithographs by Picasso of very simple facture, the publisher charged in 1962 2,250 francs. But, as happened with the Constellations album, the price of Cocteau's book went up for the most expensive copies: twenty-five copies at 3,250 francs, fifteen at 5,000, ten at 10,000, five at 20,000 and up to 25,000 francs ($ 43,000 of 2016) of a single copy that contained different originals by Cocteau.. In short, if the Éditions du Rocher in Monaco obtained 447,750 new francs for the 199 plain copies, the 56 most exclusive copies provided another 381,000 francs. That is, a total of 828,000 francs in 1962 (more than one million four hundred thousand dollars in 2015). And in the case of the Constellations, there were two hundred cheaper copies as opposed to one hundred and fifty 'specials', ten of which carried among other additional elements besides the pochoirs, an etching colored by hand by Miró. If we are to believe the catalogues raisonnées of engravings and lithographs, the first by Jacques Dupin and edited by Daniel Lelong and the second initiated by Mourlot, then continued by Maeght and finished by Lelong, the prints that accompanied the portfolio would have been printed –with the numeration corresponding to the book– at only fifty copies of the etching with a green background and one hundred of the same black print, plus the ten of the black etching that Miró colored. As for the lithographs, one hundred and fifty copies of the first and three hundred and fifty of the second would have been produced. But more copies of the prints were printed than those admitted by the catalog of illustrated books and lithographs. We must bear in mind that the hors commerce copies were actually formally reserved to the publisher, not the 463 Cramer 1989, pp. 166-167 208 artist. They are a deformation of the concept of 'épreuve d'artiste' that Picasso agreed with Kahnweiler and Mourlot accepted in 1945. In the case of Picasso, and apart from the trade edition that was generally 50 copies, the number of 'e.a.' was limited to 5 plus 1 copy for the printer, although Mourlot printed behind Kahnweiler’s back many more, giving Picasso a dozen and keeping a handful (we estimate that from 3 to 5). Picasso used his to help friends or to finance the Communist Party. But publishers and dealers did not like the arrangement of artist copies, which devalued the commercial edition and from which they obtained no income. For example, Pierre Matisse had the following clause included in his July 25 1946 contract with Miró: “In the event that you made engravings in Paris, or in any other place, we would seek an arrangement, but you commit yourself anyway to reserve me ¾ of the artist's copies, as we did in Paris in 1939”. The publishers then came up with the idea of copies out trade or 'hors commerce', which derives from the publishing world. These were copies for the legal deposit and for the press for which, not being traded, author's rights were not paid. The pretext for introducing the concept in graphic work was that there was also a deposit of prints in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the case of the Constellations, we have found many H.C. copies of the Miró etchings and lithographs in the market, some even without a signature. 209 12. Octogenarian Militantism (1970-1983) While he manages to consolidate his professional relations with Matisse and open a new way of remunerative marketing with Maeght, Miró is still absent from the Spanish art market. He is especially angry about the way he is treated in Barcelona, where the bourgeoisie had received Franco with open arms and is not interested in modern art at all. The group of intellectuals Cobalto 49 organizes an individual exhibition in Galerias Layetanas in 1949, but the effort of Rafael Santos i Torroella, Sebastià Gasch, Joaquim Gomis and Juan Eduardo Cirlot is futile. The exhibition, held from April 23 to May 6, 1949, could not provide any income to the painter, since not a single painting was sold. Actually, as Santos Torroella recalls, the exhibition had been an initiative of his, shortly after meeting Miró, and derived from his idea of publishing a monograph on him after the one he had just brought out about Dalí in a Cobalto Editions collection directed by Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño 464. The text of the book was commissioned to Cirlot, it was made with unusual luxury for the time, and it included two pochoirs reproducing one from 1934 D'Aci and D'Allá (Figures by the Sea) and one from 1936 (Woman and Dog in Front of the Moon). Both were made by the same printer of the original engravings, J. Mateu. Torroella, who in just two years had become very close to the painter, proposed to accompany the edition of the book with an exhibition in homage to Miró at the Layetanas Gallery, which he directed. But the exhibition did not include new work, but 57 early Miró paintings, lent by the friends to whom he had given them, such as Joan Prats, Gomis, Federico Mompou, Rafols, E.C. Ricart, Xavier Vidal de Llobatera etc. It has been said that Joan Prats was his main client, but Miró himself denied it when Raillard tells him in 1975: “Joan Prats was one of the first buyers of your paintings...”, being interrupted by the painter, who states: “...until his death he remained my closest friend. He gave me advice. But he did not buy me anything. At that time people wore hats, and Prats gave them to me continuously. From time to time I gave him a painting ... It was an exchange” 465. 12. Octogenarian Militantism (1970-1983) 464 465 Cirlot 1949 Raillard 1998. p. 137 210 In fact, the Barcelona exhibition of 1949 had an extremely beneficial consequence for American museums. Santos Torroella committed an indiscretion: in the catalog of the exhibition, published as the first issue of magazine Cobalto 49, instead of indicating in each painting the mention 'private collection' that is usually used to protect the anonymity of the owners, he wrote the name of the owner of each of the canvases. Pierre Matisse, who was in Paris, travelled to Barcelona and, annoyed as he was by Aimé Maeght’s joining the Miró business, tracked down the address of each owner, visited them one by one and managed to get hold of the vast majority of paintings 466. It was the purchase of the year for Matisse and one of his best commercial operations. With the works acquired at very low prices he would make in 1951 the The Early Paintings of Joan Miro exhibition, which would supply main museums and North American collections early works of the artist. In spite of the tribute that his friends and Eugenio D'Ors had offered him, Barcelona and Miró still did not reconciliate and the painter decided to leave the Catalan capital, what he did as soon as he had enough money to acquire the Majorca estate. Never again will he reside in the city of Barcelona. Miró was luckier in Madrid, where D'Ors sponsored him in the Salon de los Once in 1949, with important institutional support. Parallel to the myth of the political role of opposition to Franco by the Spanish –and especially Catalan– post-war avant-garde, a fable exposed by authors of diverse political origin, both close to the regime and fierce opponents of the same but who denounce the initial collaborationism of artists such as Oteiza, Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tapies, Modesto Cuixart, etc. 467 another folk tale has been developed that attributes to Joan Miró an anti-Franco political commitment, a determination of 'internal exile' and a silent denunciation of the dictatorship. This vision should be nuanced, taking into account that he chose to return to Majorca, one of the regions with more staunch supporters of the 1936 uprising, only fourteen months after the end of the civil war. According to the same delusion, and using words of his grandson, the painter would have been during the 35 years in which he lived peacefully in Franco's Spain “ignored by the Spanish government, which does not forgive his commitment to freedom during the civil war” 468. Mironian historiography of the last 40 years has been inspired and driven by the establishment that has dominated Catalan politics throughout this era, including of course the tripartite government years between ERC’s ultra nationalists, Pascual Maragall’s PSC social-nationalists and ICV’s national-communists, heirs of the PSUC. Of those 40 years in which, as Professor Francesc de Carreras recalls, “nationalist forces have been pushing for political, social and cultural hegemony within Catalan society” 469. The nationalist establishment has turned Miró and the post-war Catalan artistic avant-garde into champions of democracy and the fight against the Franco 466 Vidal Oliveras, Jaume El tiempo del arte: conversación con Santos Torroella, Kalias. Revista de Arte, nº 17-18 IVAM. Instituto Valencino de Arte Moderno, Valencia, 1997, pp. 86-113 467 See for example Marzo 2006. 468 Punyet Miró, J.& Lolivier-Rahola, 1998 p. 102 469 De Carreras, Francesc La independencia que viene de lejos, El País Opinión, Madrid 05.05.2014 211 regime, a paradigm that has spread throughout the world but that would certainly require a critical review. The myth of the progressive, Catalanist, republican and anti-Francoist Miró is based on dubious premises. Joan Miró was a painter of universal sentiments and ambitions who could not help but feel constricted and trapped in a provincial nationalist environment from which he fled as soon as he could and to which he never wanted to return. It is true that he accepted in his old age the flattery of the nationalists because they helped turn him into what he had always wanted to be: an important personality, an artistic monument in the twentieth century. According to the official nationalist discourse, for Miró the central thing was his devotion to the 'Catalan land'. But the adoration of the countryside in art is not linked to cultural or national issues, but to emotional reasons and the search for the simple, the basic, the 'authentic', liberated precisely from all cultural and mythical supplement, and which occurs especially in times of crisis. For the rest, although born in Barcelona, Miró considered himself as Majorcan as Catalan, as he explained in 1966 to Baltasar Porcel, who reminded him that Pilar was from the island: “Yes, but so am I. I'm half Majorcan. The fact of being born in Barcelona counts little for your roots. My mother was Majorcan” 470. Besides, as Cirlot pointed out, if Miró's art is reminiscent of the paintings of Romanesque churches and Catalan folk art, it is in the same way close to Egyptian and Roman sarcophagi and tablets, Byzantine and Russian icons, or to Celtiberian schematism and the Sumerian aesthetic world 471. It is striking that the artistic and political intellectuals of late-Francoism (1965-1975) – almost all of whom came from Falangism or the Franco bureaucracy– have built a legend of resistance to the Franco regime that has become the paradigm, the mantra repeated non-stop since the return of democracy. As Jorge-Luis Marzo explains “In this voluntary blindness, stories have been devised that are not entirely objective about the postwar avant-garde: heroes subjected to moral pressures and who find in the introspection of matter the refuge of freedom” 472. The Spanish artistic avant-garde, and especially the Catalan one, which in the second half of the twentieth century reaped international successes comparable to those that the precedent one (Picasso, Gris, Miró, etc.) had achieved before 1950, was, independently of its intrinsic value, the product of the inexhaustible activity of the cultural establishment of the first Francoism, driven by people like General Franco ministers Joaquín Ruíz Gimenez, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Alfredo Sánchez Bella and, especially, the curator of exhibitions of the Institute of Hispanic Culture Luis González Robles. If Antoni Tapies, Manolo Millares, Antonio Saura, Jorge Oteiza, Chillida, Modesto Cuixart and many others reached international fame, exhibited in the MoMA, in the Tate Gallery and other first class museums; if the international art dealers, starting with Pierre Matisse himself, exhibited and sold their work to reputable collectors; and 470 Porcel, Baltasar Joan Miró o l’equilibri fantàstic. Serra d’Or Año VII, nº 4, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1966, Cited by Juncosa Vecchierini 2011 p. 111 471 Cirlot 1949 p. 45 472 Marzo 2006 p. 119) 212 if they could, thanks to all of this, enter the first division of the market, it was only because they were promoted by the enlighted artistic establishment of the Franco regime, which wanted to show in passing that in the then reviled Spain creators produced quality art and did not care about politics. This intention coincided with that of the same purpose advocated by the United States political establishment through the great patron of arts, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and MoMA, which was always at the personal and political service of his family 473. MoMA had been founded by his mother Abigail (Abby) Aldrich and funded by his father John Davison Rockefeller Jr. Nelson came to the presidency of MoMA in 1939, when only 30 years old, and his family continued to control the museum’s destiny until well into the 70s. Even in 2016, his 101-year-old brother David Rockefeller was still honorary president, while his son David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller, wife of Nelson's brother John Davison Rockefeller IV, kept their seats in the board. When Nelson left MoMA’s presidency between 1940 and 1946 it was to assume intelligence and propaganda functions in the Roosevelt administration. He then placed John Hay (Jock) Whitney, a man from the Strategic Services Office and also closely linked to its successor the CIA as his successor. Several Rockefeller subordinates in the Office of Inter-American Affairs were later placed in MoMA, as René d'Harnoncourt, head of the art section in the OAI, appointed in 1944 vice president of the museum and five years later, in the middle of the cold war, Director of MoMA. D'Harnoncourt named as executive secretary of the museum another OSS man, Thomas W. Braden, who shortly thereafter joined the CIA as director of the Division of International Organizations, where he was also responsible for recruiting agents in the cultural and artistic milieu. D'Harnoncourt and his MoMA lieutenant, Porter A. McCray, also from OAI, were the main collaborators of the Franco administration in its efforts to promote politically neutral artists. D'Harnoncourt was in Spain in 1955, accompanying the exhibition Modern Art in the United States that was held in Barcelona in the framework of the III Biennial of Spanish American Art, between September 24, 1955 and January 6, 1956. And he pronounced on September 27 a conference in which he highlighted the freedom enjoyed by Spanish artists of the new avant-garde to decide what they wanted to represent of national identity 474. Jock Whitney Miro, whose participation in art exhibitions was managed at that time by his dealers Pierre Matisse and Aimé Maeght, did not attend most of these incessant exhibition activities, but strongly encouraged young artists to join the initiatives of the Franco government, and he also had some presence in the artistic manifestations. For example, in 1951 he 473 See Cockcroft, Eva. Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War, in Frascina, Francis (ed) Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, Harper & Row, New York, 1985, pp. 125-133 474 Ver Marzo 2006, pp. 64-66 213 participated in the official representation of Spain in the IX Milan Triennial, inaugurated on May 13. The Spanish pavilion was built by Catalan architect Josep Antoni Coderch and the curator of the Spanish exhibition was his close friend Rafael Santos i Torroella –for whose wedding the painter had been best man the previous year. The Milan exhibition was the first time that Spain exported avant-garde art after the civil war. The participation was mainly Catalan, including Josep Guinovart and Josep Llorens Artigas. This happened in 1951, the year of the great general strike in Catalonia, promoted by the CNT. According to Torroella, Miró also collaborated actively in the preparations for the Spanish pavilion at the Milan Triennale in 1952 475. And in any case he participated without doubt in the 1954 Venice Bienniale, in which he obtained the Engraving Grand Prize. Miró's participation in the official Spanish representation of the triennial of 1951 did not please Picasso, who immediately acted to prevent any Spanish artist from taking part in the great exhibition being prepared by the newly appointed education minister Joaquín Ruíz Gimenez for the fall. It was the First Hispanic-American Biennial of Art organized by the Institute of Hispanic Culture (ICH) in Madrid and inaugurated in October 1951 by General Franco, the first openness act (in the artistic sense) of the regime 476. One of the founding fathers of the initiative was Manuel Fraga Iribarne, whom Ruíz Gimenez had appointed ICH Secretary General during his time as director of the Institute. The Christian Democrat minister, well informed of Picasso's difficulties in Paris, where he was confronted with a fierce censorship by the communist establishment, which tried to force him to adopt socialist realism, said in the opening speech of the exhibition that “the education of the aesthetic sense it is one of the most important tasks of the great educational powers” and that art possesses “a legitimate sphere of autonomy as free expression of the individual soul in which the State can not, in its own interest, interfere. The authentic is always impolitic; the inauthentic of art –that is, what is not rooted in creative autonomy– reverts in the long run, whatever the adopted protectionist measures and the apparent successes, in impoverishment and impairment of one's own political work” . Dalí expressed the same provocation more directly, both in his lecture Picasso and I in Madrid, on November 11, 1951 (in which he pronounced his famous “Picasso is a communist, neither am I”) as in the telegram that on the same day, he sent the artist: "The spirituality of Spain today is the most antagonistic to Russian materialism. You know that Russia purges for political reasons even music. We believe in the absolute and catholic freedom of the human soul. Know then, that despite your current communism, we consider your anarchic genius as an inseparable heritage of our spiritual empire and your work as a glory of Spanish painting. God bless you” 477. Everything was perfectly coordinated, as shown by a photo taken that same day at the Institute of Hispanic Culture, and in which appear 475 Marzo 2006, p. 42 See Álvaro Oña, Francisco Javier La “I Bienal Hispanoamericana” de 1951. Paradigma y contradicción de la política artística franquista, dissertation to the VII Congreso da Asociación de Historia Contemporánea Santiago de Compostela-Ourense, 21-24 September 2004. 477 Reproduced in Cabañas 1996 página 506. 476 214 sitting chatting amicably the General Secretary of the Biennial Leopoldo Panero, Manuel Fraga, Salvador Dalí, general director of Fine Arts Antonio Gallego Burín and the intimate friend of Miró Rafael Santos Torroella. Fraga, Torroella et al From the moment the idea of the biennial in Madrid was launched, to which he was invited, Picasso mobilized Spanish and Latin American artists, denouncing the maneuver and urging them not to participate in it 478. The Picasso initiative, which was supported by the artists of the Spanish School of Paris (Bores, Peinado, Dominguez, Viñes, Fernandez, Palmeiro, Fores, Clavé, M.A. Ortiz, Grau Sala, Parra, Pelayo, González de la Serna, Fenosa, Lobo and García Condoy) took the form of a manifesto in which the artists point out their opposition to the project of the Institute of Hispanic Culture while warning the artists and invited countries that a participation in it would constitute a direct collaboration with the Franco regime, and they urged the holding of alternative exhibitions. The manifesto was surprisingly published in Spain in No. 34-35, November 1951, of the Madrid journal Correo Literario. Hispano-American Art and Literature, directed by the poet and top authority of the biennial Leopoldo Panero. Despite the call to boycott, most of the invited painters agreed to participate. Joan Miró would have hinted to the organizers that he would attend and his name appeared everywhere. When Correo Literario published on March 15, 1951 the call for the Biennial, it accompanied the announcement with an interview of Miró by his friend Santos i Torroella. When asked to give “some guidance for young Spanish painters”, Miró replied: “First of all, that they keep the Spanish racial sense and that they are sincere. If they need to look at a mirror, there is our great Romanesque painting” 479. In August, Correo Literario announced that Miró was going to attend, which spread throughout the press. On the eve of the exhibition, Sanchez Bella, who had replaced 478 See Fernández Martínez, Dolores Complejidad del exilio artístico en Francia, Revista Migraciones & Exilios: Cuadernos de la Asociación para el estudio de los exilios y migraciones ibéricos contemporáneos, nº 6, UNED, Madrid 2005, p.p. 23-42 479 Santos Torroella, 1951. Rowell 1992 p. 226 215 Ruíz Gimenez as director of the ICH, reiterated in an interview that Miró would attend, since “he has promised us his participation”. General Franco enjoys exhibition room of ‘revolutionary’ Catalan painters, close to Artigas But at the time of the inauguration, Miró neither showed up nor contributed works, possibly fearing the wrath of Picasso and his capacity to mobilize French intellectuals against him 480. But many painters attended the Biennale: Dalí and many others, and particularly the members of the Catalan group Dau al set (Joan Ponç, Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart and Joan-Josep Tharrats), as well as Zabaleta, Josep Guinovart, Benjamín Palencia, Ortega Muñoz, Manolo Millares, sculptors Jorge Oteiza, Josep Clará, Joan Rebull and Josep Maria Subirachs. According to Antoni Tàpies, while General Franco was observing a painting of his, together with Miró’s intimate friend Josep Llorens i Artigas, who also exhibited, the president of the Catalan Section of the Spanish Association of Art Critics, Alberto del Castillo, explained to the dictator: “Excellency, this is the room of the revolutionaries”. The tyrant's response was: "As long as you they do the revolutions like this...” 481. The anecdote was reflected in a photograph. Of the thirty-eight prizes awarded in the Francoist Biennial, eleven were awarded to Catalan "revolutionary" artists. The invitation to Miró would be repeated two years later at the II Bienal de São Paulo, for which Juan Ramón Masoliver, who would in 1986 receive the Fine Arts gold medal with Pilar Juncosa, was appointed curator. He got in touch with Miró and said that he had promised his participation and presence in the exhibition. Sanchez Bella would explain, however, seven months later that Miró could not participate because his entire production was in the hands of his dealers, which seems perfectly credible. In any case, the artists of the new avant-garde gradually cut ties with the Franco regime to the extent that they were being thrown into the limelight in museums and signing contracts with galleries around the world. But they did it only when each one, individually, could afford it, and later than they later claimed to have done so. Tapies, 480 Cabañas Bravo 1996, p. 305 Tapies, Antoni Memoria personal. Fragmento para una autobiografía, Seix Barral, Barcelona 1983 pp. 376-377 481 216 for example, said that he had already broken with the regime in 1958, but the truth is that he continued to participate in exhibitions sponsored by the Franco government, such as the exhibition "Before Picasso, after Miró" at the Guggenheim in New York in 1960 482. The catalog of the exhibition, with a preface by James Johnson Sweeney, expressed his gratitude for the "suggestions, help and generous cooperation" of, among others, “Ambassador José María de Areilza; General Director of Fine Arts Antonio Gallego Burin; General Director of Cultural Relations José Ruiz Morales; Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Fernando Chueca Goitia; the General Director of Museums of Barcelona Joan Ainaud de Lasarte; Antoni Tapies; Joan Prats, Josep Lluis Sert ... and Joan Miro” 483. That is to say, that in the sixties of last century Joan Miró and his closest friends –be them republican or not– collaborated with the artistic authorities of the regime to promote Spanish art abroad. And Tapies, Cuixart and many other artists continued to benefit from it. Even more important was the exhibition that took place in that same year of 1960 at MoMA New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, organized by Porter A. McCray, another of Rockefeller's men at the OAI, in which the same painters participated. And this exhibition continued in the United States in an itinerant way until the end of 1962 thanks to a donation from the CBS Foundation, through which William Paley, owner of Columbia Broadcasting System and member of the MoMA board since 1937, channeled cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency CIA 484. Paley himself admitted such collaboration in his memoirs 485, pointing out without embarrassment that in the early 1950s, a representative of the CIA came to see him and asked him to use his foundation. He thought it was his patriotic duty to accept. MoMA president Jock Whitney also provided 'cover' to the CIA, through the Whitney Charitable Trust. Whitney also collaborated with other CIA structures, such as Radio Free Europe or the Congress for Cultural Freedom 486. MoMA’s press release presenting this exhibition, pointed out that “The long period of Spain’s isolation, from the end of its Civil War (1936-1939) until after the close of World War II, has been followed by period of intense artistic activity. In contrast with the generation of Picasso, Miró and Gonzalez, which had lived and worked largely outside Spain, the ‘new’ Spaniards, though exposed to current art movements while studying abroad, returned to their homeland. 482 Together with Rafael Canogar, Modest Cuixart, Francisco Farreras, Luis Feito, Juana Francés, Lucio Muñoz, Manelo Millares, Juan Hernández Pijuán, Carlos Planell, Manuel Rivera, Antonio Saura, Antonio Suárez,Vicente Vela, Juan Vila Casas, Manuel Viola, and Fernando Zobel. 483 Before Picasso: After Miro, The Solomon K. Guggenheim Museum, Nueva York, 1960. Text available at http://www.guggenheim.org/component/flippingbook/book/58?tmpl=component 484 See Stonor Saunders, Frances. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The New Press, New York, 1993 pp. 220-221; Also Bernstein, Carl. The CIA and the Media: How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up, Rolling Stone, Nueva York 1977 (available at http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php 485 Paley, William S. As It Happened, Simon and Schuster, New York 1979. 486 Massey, Anne The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 19451959, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1995 p. 66 217 There, much of their time is devoted to the propagation of contemporary aesthetic ideas” 487. The exhibition of Spanish 'apolitical' artists reincorporated into Franco's Spain was then taken to Washington DC and nine cities in the United States and Canada. Antoni Tàpies with Franco propagandist Eugenio D’Ors The consecration of Miró in his native country did not happen until the 1968 great exhibition of his 75th anniversary, in a considerable effort of the Franco regime authorities, notably directed by Manuel Fraga Iribarne. Since 1962 he was Minister of Information and Tourism and had promoted as no one else the tourist development of Spain. Miró would then take over, providing the logo that Spain uses for its tourism campaigns. The design, approved by the painter shortly before his death, is based precisely on the poster he made for the August and September 1968 commercial exhibition at the Maeght Foundation. The show displayed some of the works that – increased in number and quality to constitute an authentic retrospective– would be shown in at the Hospital de la Santa Cruz in Barcelona between November 1968 and January 1969. The poster design, turned into a sun, was completed with the text 'Spain' drawn by Miró for the 1982 football world cup poster. Thanks to the work and the excellent contacts of the regime’s museum bureaucrats, such as Luis González Robles –who in that year would take over the direction of the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art– international museums provided a quantity and quality of work never seen before in Spain. For example, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm lent her 1918 The Vegetable Garden with Donkey, a forerunner of The Farm –which Hemingway's widow did not lend. The Still Life with Rabbit of 1920-21; Interior of 1922-23; the Maternity of 1924; Head of a Catalan Peasant of 1925; Dutch Interior I of 1928 and Still Life with Old Shoe also arrived in Barcelona – all six borrowed by MoMA– as well as the gouaches Woman With Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars, Awakening in the Early Morning and The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers of the Constellations series. Morning Star, which was still in Miró's hands, was also on display. Even Picasso collaborated without any sting to the success of the show promoted by Fraga Iribarne, lending the Miró paintings he had in his collection: Self-portrait of 1919 and the Portrait of a Spanish Dancer of 1921 488. 487 MoMA press release No 85 of 07.20 1960 New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, Nueva York. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/2710/releases/MOMA_196 0_0108_85.pdf?2010 488 Note that the paintings had been bought by Picasso from dealers. There were no gifts from Miró nor exchange of works between the two painters. 218 The other great support of the 1968 exhibition was Barcelona mayor José María de Porcioles, who, like Miró, had also fled Republican Catalonia in 1936 to join Franco's Spain. It was Miró's first retrospective held in his hometown and the painter had a huge illusion, making every possible effort in the preparations. The struggle of everyone involved in this exhibition was considerable, mobilizing the municipality of Barcelona in its entirety and with the unconditional support of the Provincial Council and the Madrid authorities 489. 1968 was proclaimed ‘The Year of Miró’, the painter was awarded the Gold Medal for Artistic Merit and a commemorative plaque was placed on the facade of the house where the artist was born. The great show was conceived in four parts: a retrospective constituted by works realized between 1914 and 1960, coming from the painter’s own collection, his friends of Barcelona and museums of the whole world; an exhibition 'Miró's current painting' with the 125 works that had been displayed in Maeght's commercial exhibition; a third manifestation composed of ceramics, engravings and sculptures; and finally, a space dedicated to exhibiting the more than one hundred artist books illustrated by Miró until then. All this accompanied by a graphic biography consisting of photographs contributed by the painter, family and friends and by the Historical Archive of Barcelona. An Organizing Board was constituted for the exhibition and conferences were held, one of which by Jacques Dupin, the painter's official biographer. In addition to Joan Prats, Joan Ainaud de Lasarte, director since 1948 of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia and of the Art Museums of Barcelona, played an essential role in the exhibition. And the painter’s friends Josep Llorens Artigas, Alejandro Cirici Pellicer and Sebastia Gasch also participated. All of them collaborated in a special issue of the magazine Miscellanea Barcelonesa that the city council published to promote the event. From Madrid also came the support of José Camón Aznar, who dedicated to the painter number 89 of his Goya Magazine of art, which included among others, long articles by him (The art of Miró) and by Alberto del Castillo (The great Joan Miró exhibition in Barcelona). Despite having done his utmost for the success of the exhibition, the painter slipped away at the last moment to avoid attending the inauguration by Minister Manuel Fraga. We were already almost in 1969 and the program of rewriting Miró's biography was under way, so that a photo of him together with the Franco minister was not appropriate. Shortly before the event, the painter alleged a supposed rise in temperature to cancel his attendance. But he had no objection to receiving the Barcelona medal from the hands of Falangist Porcioles. Actually, the mayor had only become a Falangist upon his arrival at Franco's headquarters in Valladolid in the spring of 1937. He had previously been head of the Lliga (the Catalan nationalist conservative party) in Balaguer, Lleida, where he was a notary. If he ran away it was because in the course of the massacres of dozens of priests, Falangists and traditionalists, he was arrested and sent to the Lérida prison. As soon as he got out of prison, he vanished and resurfaced, like many members of the Lliga, in Franco's headquarters. 489 See Gasch, Sebastián, El “año Miró”, diario ABC, 03.23.1968 219 Manuel Fraga and Porcioles inaugurate the Miró exhibition The 'collaboration' of Miró and other Spanish artists with the regime's artistic establishment should not be judged with severity, as did Eduardo Arroyo, who in his series Miró remade or the misfortunes of coexistence, denounced in 1967 the symbiosis between the artistic avant-garde and the regime, going as far as to remake The Farm into another painting called España te miró el culo (Spain looked at your ass) converting it into an extermination camp with Nazi symbols. The series was presented at the Miró rifatto exhibitions in the Galleria De Forcherari in Bologna and in the Galleria Il Fonte di Spade in Rome, taking it two years later to the Miró refait exhibition at the Galerie André Weil in Paris. In 1975, Raillard asked Miró what he tought of the accusation by Arroyo of working peacefully in Spain without giving any sign of explicit opposition to Franco, and Miró answered: “It is so banal to think that you can intervene directly in history ! It is pure naivety. It was naive, this Arroyo story, it's no use beating around the bush” 490. Actually, the heterodox figures of the museum establishment of the Franco regime came to contact even the intransigent Picasso, who according to José María Moreno Galván, later art guru of Spanish leftists, did not boast of his intransigence. The painter, who received the critic in 1956 as an envoy from the National Museum of Contemporary Art, explained “with a mixture of stubbornness and melancholy” that “certain attitudes, once taken, bind you for life” 491. The initiative to do a Picasso exhibition in Madrid on the occasion of its 75th anniversary did not bear fruit, but the painter discussed for the first time the possibility of donating some thirty works for a museum, a donation that materialized a decade later in Barcelona, after new transactions between Picasso and the Franco authorities. What is more reprehensible than the use of the means the Franco regime provided to promote not openly rebel artists, is the subsequent attempt to hide personal history or the perks that were obtained from the Franco regime. Although Miró did not owe at all his artistic success to Franco or his collaborators, he was not bothered by the regime either, and he collaborated with the artistic authorities on numerous occasions. He also received recognition from the regime. Nothing to object to here in view of historical circumstances. But the manipulation of his biography has included the concealment of essential aspects of his life to convey a personal image that is far from coinciding with reality. When Joan Miró and his clan decide that the “internal exile” must end, that he must go out and build an image that corresponds to the times that were approaching is in 1970, when the regime appears moribund and the designation of D. Juan Carlos de Borbón as successor in the Head of State as king takes place. General Franco, who was 78 years old, had Parkinson's disease in an advanced state since at least ten years before. In May 1969, General Camilo Alonso Vega visits Franco and meets a Caudillo with a very advanced disease: “he was pale, shrunken and had shaking hands”. In the course 490 See Fernández de Castro, Alex 'La masía', un Miró para Mrs. Hemingway. PUV Universidad de Valencia, 2015 491 See Tusell García 2009 220 of 1970, General de Gaulle visited Spain, and found him “aged and weak” and President Nixon observed that Franco fell asleep during the interview 492. Joan Miró is not in good shape either: he is the same age as Franco and has a very fragile health when he performs the first public act to convey his new image of 'opponent' to Franco. It was a brief visit –first denied and then vindicated– to the self confinement of intellectuals in the Montserrat Abbey on the weekend of December 12 to 14, 1970 (the Tancada), in protest against the Burgos Process against ETA terrorists authors of the first murders of the organization since 1968 –a policeman, a civil guard and a taxi driver who refused to help flee a terrorist. And in 1974, at 81, Miró will make the triptych The Hope of a Condemned Man in protest for the execution of anarchist bank robber Salvador Puig Antich, convicted of killing a policeman during his arrest on the street. In 1998, Puig Antich had become for Miró’s grandson of a “young Catalan nationalist” 493. When Professor Antonio Boix Pons addresses the biographical theme, essential for his 2010 monumental thesis “Joan Miró, the commitment of an artist” 494, he immediately realizes the fragility of the biographical data contributed by critics and the painter himself: “He, like many of the avant-garde artists who have left a detailed memory of themselves, tried to transmit three images: a good man in his private life, a responsible and free artist in his artistic vocation, and a committed personality in his public life without becoming a partisan militant. But to affirm an image of perfection entails the problem that reality is often invented rather than cultivated, transcending the boundaries between biography and art”. Boix goes on to quote George Bernard Shaw 495 : “All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies; I mean deliberate lies”. This quote reminds us of another one of Marshal Pétain, contributed by Kahnweiler’s biographer of Pierre Assouline. The French leader once told a journalist: “And why the hell do you want me to write my memoirs? I have nothing to hide”. Boix Pons makes a detailed analysis of the monumental process of rewriting Miró’s biography of that takes place since 1968 and in which an entire army of writers and critics, both Spanish and foreign (Penrose, Raillard, Dupin, Picon, Rowell, Permanyer, Catalá-Roca, etc.) participate and he gives us juicy anecdotes that show the naivety with which the painter acknowledged that he was manipulating the truth with the aim of improving his image: “I hope that people will later see that I was a honest guy”. What happened is that in 1968 the death of the dictator is expected soon and all want to be well placed for the new period that is approaching, whitewashing their biography: “Miró radically changes his vital and artistic priorities, in the sense of evolving from the private to the pre-eminence of the public. This is reflected in several 492 See Sánchez Recio, Glicerio, “El Tardofranquismo (1969-1975): el crepúsculo del dictador y el declive de la dictadura”, Hispania Nova, nº 1 Extraordinario, Madrid 2015. pp. 332-333. 493 Punyet Miró, J.& Lolivier-Rahola, 1998 p. 102 494 Text available on-line in http://www.tesisenred.net/bitstream/handle/10803/9407/tabp1de1.pdf?sequence=1, consulted on 09.25.2014) 495 Boix Pons 2010 p.88 221 facets: he 'rewrites' his biography, engages in more concrete public causes, reorients his artistic work, his aesthetic thinking evolves, and he accepts that his clan creates his myth and even uses him as an ideological banner, as an icon of the struggle in the new times.” 496 The task of rewriting Miró's biography is carried out with an admirable professionalism. They created, says Boix Pons, “a Mironian biographical corpus according to an authentic work program, on which however many contradictions will weigh. His life is 'rewritten' with an extraordinary increase in the number, length and depth of the statements and interviews he grants, all of them marked by his desire to make the coherence of his new public image as an honest, anti-Franco man, artistworker, based in Catalonia and Majorca; that is, his ambition, only confessed to his most intimate friends and family, to leave as legacy a perfect image, of surviving as an artistic ideal for future generations” 497. And the publishing production volume is impressive. Professor Boix uses as a measure the basic bibliography on Miró included as reference in the 1993 edition of Jacques Dupin's book. In the years 1960-1966 10 books appear. In the years 1967-1975 –from the preparation of the 1968 exhibitions until the death of Franco– 32 books are published. In the following eight years, between 1976 and 1983, production descends to 17 books 498. The rewriting of his biography provokes shocking situations, in which the reality of the events occurred contrasts in an extreme way with the invented story. To solve them, Miró and his biographers do not hesitate to alter the facts in such a crude way that, as Boix points out, “it will harm the full knowledge of his figure, by highlighting many gaps and contradictions in his life and in his artistic evolution”. The new Bible to interpret the biography of the painter will be the book of conversations of Miró with Georges Raillard of 1977, in which the painter –at 84 years of age– develops, specifies and fixes the new paradigm of the person that at that age he thinks he should have been his whole life. Driven by the French cultural establishment, which also seeks to improve its own image by attributing itself unjustified anti-Franco laurels, the myth of Miró’s interior resistance against Franco is assumed by the Anglo-Saxon publishing sphere, with the help of Roland Penrose –who nonetheless knew the historical reality– and the critics associated to MoMA, which had a personal and institutional interest in the establishment of the myth. The bulk of the interviews with Raillard –a French state public official– take place while Franco is on his deathbed in the fall of 1975. They had to hurry up. Before Franco died they had to make it clear that Miró was a member of the resistance (“the hatred of Franco did not leave Miró a single day of his life”499). The critic goes as far as to affirm in the preface of his book that Miró “was during fifty years (Sic) sunk like a blue, shining wedge, in the trunk of the Spain subjected to the Francoist rot. On some occasions he manifested his notorious feelings, he published his opposition. But, above all, he did not stop thinking that the work he built day by 496 Boix Pons 2010 p.132 Boix Pons 2010, p. 652 498 Boix Pons 2010, p. 200 499 Raillard 1998, p. 15 497 222 day, in a surprising frenzy of work, was a response, the most appropriate at the moment and the most fruitful in the future, to that tyranny” 500. Perhaps the best expression of this official but spurious paradigm is the painter's last major exhibition in the world: Joan Miró, The Escape Ladder, which took place at the Tate Modern in London (14.04-11.09 2011), at the Fundación Joan Miró de Barcelona (13.10.2011-25.03.2012) and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (6.05-12.08.2012), promoted by the Minister of Culture of the Generalitat, ERC’s Joan Manuel Tresserras. The financing was provided by the Institut Ramon Llull, created and governed by the Generalitat, and which at that time was directed by the ERC’s deputy Josep Bargalló i Valls. The Embassy of Spain in London, led then by Catalan Carles Casajuana i Palet and the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, headed during the preparation of the exhibition by Catalan Joan Clos i Matheu. The exhibition was accompanied by an important editorial effort, with the publication of a book in several languages and wide dissemination, a book that was presented as follows: “Picasso left Spain, vowing to never return under a fascist government. On the contrary, Miró chose internal exile, fleeing to the island of Majorca, a decision that made him look like a less political artist. This book questions that impression by focusing on the politically engaged works of Miró, from the rural anarchist tradition and strong Catalanism reflected in early works such as The Farm or Head of a Catalan Peasant until the triptych The hope of a condemned man through which he publicly declared his opposition to Franco”501. In a press release, Tate Modern –headed then by Valencian Vicent Todolí– presented the main objective of the exhibition: “to bring to light the political commitment of the artist” and reveal the “more committed side of his artistic practice”. Tate sacralizes the fiction that Miró never fled the Republican Catalonia, stating that “With his young family, he stayed in France during the Spanish Civil War” 502. Note also that in parallel to the exhibition at the foundation, the Museum of History of Catalonia –directed by ultra-nationalist Agustí Alcoberro i Pericay– organized another even more 'political' show with the title Joan Miró. Posters of a time, of a country, and in which presentation it was emphasized that Miró had expressed his desire “that Catalonia occupies a place of its own in the international scene” 503. In Spain, the press followed the slogans of the organizers of the show to the letter. For example, La Vanguardia de Barcelona published an agency dispatch the day after the inauguration, which repeated word for word the text of the press release of the Miró Foundation504. Accompanying the text, in the paper’s magazine, was an article by Joaquim Roglan, in which he quoted the director of the foundation, also turned into an anti-Franco freedom fighter: “'The time has come to show the world his political and social commitment, his indignation before wars and injustices, his Catalanness and his resistance against the dictatorship’. Malet speaks in the still empty rooms of the 500 Raillard 1998, p. 13 Gale, Matthew & Daniel, Marko 2011, back cover. 502 Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Press release dated 09.09.2010, Tate Modern, London 503 Malet, Rosa Maria & Alcoberro, Agustí Joan Miró. Carteles de un tiempo, de un país 504 Europapress, La Fundació Miró reúne 170 obras del artista, La Vanguardia, Barcelona 10. 14.2011 501 223 foundation, that the day General Franco died, did not cancel any event and inaugurated an exhibition as if nothing had happened.”505. As for the prestigious Madrid newspaper El País, it also reproduced word by word the Foundation’s statement on the same day, but it did not not attribute the text to Europapress Agency nor to the Foundation, but to its own staff writers in Barcelona 506. The next day, the newspaper published an article by the art critic of the newspaper Roberta Bosco, who also follows the slogans of the curators of the exhibition word by word and opens with the hackneyed phrase of the pochoir Aidez l'Espagne: “In the current struggle I see, on the Fascist side, obsolete forces, and on the other, the people, whose immense creative resources will give Spain an impulse that will amaze the world”. The article also highlights “the involvement that Miró maintained throughout his life in the great world events” and that the exhibition does nothing but capture “the deep political and social commitment of the artist with his native Catalonia, his environment in the broader sense and the very idea of freedom” 507. In any case, the manipulation did not convince outside of Spain. For Laura Cumming, the art critic of the icons of the left in the United Kingdom –The Observer and The Guardian– the exhibition’s postulate was bit too much for her to swallow, and points out that the exhibition “wants to make him into something he is not –a political artist responding to contemporary events with polemic and protest. One sees the nominal evidence, to be sure –the memorials to the assassinated anarchist, the titles referring to martyrdom and torture. We are to think of Miró's burned paintings as outcries, though they look like large dolls' house windows; to contemplate the parti-coloured Still Life With Old Shoe in terms of the Spanish civil war. But the expressly political works are so weak the best one can say is that Miró's sincerity is not in doubt. Enormous canvases in which a small point is writ too large, tiny sketches that offer no thoughts. The case for Miró as a modern Goya goes against the visual evidence” 508. Neither does the exhibition's postulate pass for Alastair Sooke, art critic of The Telegraph, who sees a lot of political manipulation in the exhibition: “the spin of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is that the artist was a political animal. Where others see joy in Miró’s paintings, the Tate’s curators, Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale, spy ‘anxiety’ about contemporary political events – clapping the artist in the irons of interpretation. As a result, the Miró on view at the Tate has a hint of a limp, inasmuch as it is possible to impede a giant’s gait... Perhaps the Tate’s curators downplay the impact of Surrealism on Miró because it does not suit their argument. After all, Surrealism is primarily about the inner visions of individual artists, rather than wider political events” 509. The same skepticism is shown by prestigious critic Alex Danchev, who in his chronicle for the Times Higher Education magazine, asks rhetorically if the works presented by the show justify the political interpretation of Miró. Danchev gives his 505 Roglan, Joaquim, Todo Miró en su casa, La Vanguardia, Barcelona 10. 14.2011 El Miró más completo, El País, Madrid 14.10.2011 507 Bosco, Roberta, La poética del Miró más político, El País, Madrid 10. 15.2011 508 Cumming , Laura Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape – review, The Observer/The Guardian 04.17.2011 509 Sooke, Alastair Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern, review. Tate’s Miró retrospective paints the artist as a political animal, playing down his Surrealism, finds Alastair Sooke. The Telegraph, 04.14.2011 506 224 diagnosis of Miró, and therefore of the exhibition, in the first lines of his article: “In art and life, Joan Miró (1893-1983) was an escapologist. He took everything the 20th century had to throw at him, wriggling free of all entanglements, ideological and other”. He adds that the alleged displays of political activism arrive too late in his biography, and concludes by asking about the exhibition “Do the works match the words ?” 510. Marko Daniel was rewarded in 2017 with the job of Director of the Miró Foundation Museum. When the exhibition arrives in the United States, where the MoMA has significantly declined to house it, Ken , Johnson, the art critic of The New York Times, dismantles one by one the postulates that the exhibition tries to pass, pointing out that “On its face, his oeuvre appears remarkably apolitical, especially considering that he lived through two world wars and a murderous civil war in his homeland, Spain”, adding that “evidence of worldly political engagement is hard to find”. According to Johnson, the attempt of the curators of the exhibition to politicize the painter throws a balance of “a muddled effort”, no matter how much the organizers of the exhibition “contend that at certain crucial times in his life Miró did express passionately held political concerns”. For the critic, the pretension of seing “Catalonian nationalism in his early proto-magic realist landscapes and in his more abstract images of the Catalan peasanthunter” it is not supported by the evidence that constitute the works. And the bond that art historian Robert S. Lubar establishes in the catalog of the exhibition between those surprising landscapes and “his vision of an essential Catalonia with the promise of an emergent nation that hoped to participate on the world stage as an equal partner” 511 is not acceptable for Johnson. Besides, he states, “romancing rural life is standard fare in art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne and countless others contributed to that tradition”. For the critic, the fact that “this Edenlike scene (The Farm) happens to be in Catalonia rather than, say, Normandy, is incidental”. And the critic even ends up saying that “Making a political case for Miró’s later work is a harder sell yet” 512. Roland Flamini, the prestigious correspondent for Time magazine in Europe, did not let himself be fooled either and wrote in the Washington Times that “The exhibit’s portrayal of an artist passionately responsive to his era’s political convulsions represents something of a change from the conventional scholarly emphasis on Miró”, adding that “The case for the more politically engaged Miro appears circumstantial at best”. And Flamini noes not fail to remind his readers that while “Picasso shunned his homeland throughout the long reign of the dictator. Miro went home to Spain in 1939 and within two months had resumed work. He remained based there throughout the fascist regime, apparently without interference... He signed no manifestos and joined no public protests” 513. 510 Danchev, Alex Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape THE (Times Higher Education), London 04. 21.2011 511 Lubar, Robert S., Miro’s Commitment, in Gale, Matthew & Daniel, Marko 2011, p. 37 512 Johnson, Ken Filtering Miró’s Work Through a Political Sieve, The New York Times, 08.02.2012 513 Flamini, Roland ‘Ladder of Escape’ celebrates the range of Joan Miro, The Washington Times, 05.03.2012 225 The recreation of his biography, the invention of a story of imagined resistance –the work of his clan and the Catalan political establishment, but to which he lends himself without limits–is not something exclusive to Miró. If we are to believe writer Javier Cercas, “The Transition was in part a great imposture. There were many people who invented their own biography; at the end of the Franco regime it turned out that the whole world had been anti-Franco. A big lie: real anti-Francoists were very few, and that's why Franco lasted what he lasted. This is the truth” 514. Giving your personality to those who build a myth has its drawbacks, and Miró experienced them in the form of appropriation of his image by Catalan nationalism. The then president of the Generalitat Jordi Pujol, today investigated for massive theft of public funds, declared after the painter's death: “not only was he a great Catalan, but he was also always a Catalan nationalist” 515. As Shlomo Ben Ami, Israel's former foreign minister, commented, “A nation has often been a group of people who lie collectively about their distant past, a past often –too often– rewritten to fit the needs of the present” 516. But, as Antonio Boix recalls, the painter was in his later years “more distant from these efforts to pigeonhole him as Catalan, because the flattery he liked the most was that he would be called universal Catalan, and he saw the previous attempts as rejectable 'nationalizations' in which historians and art critics were obedient instruments of political power”517. In fact, when he had to vote in the first free elections of 1977, he refrained from showing any sign of support for Catalanist parties (the PDPC of Jordi Pujol, the UDCIDCC of Antón Cañellas, the EC-FED of Heribert Barrera or the Lliga) or close to them (PSUC, PSC). He personally voted for the Spanish Popular Socialist Party of Madrilenian Enrique Tierno Galván. His grandson, Emili Fernández Miró, affirmed: “I can tell you, if it is of any interest, that the only time I saw his ballot, he voted for Tierno Galván, when he was still leading the PSP” 518. And that was precisely the only time in which the painter was able to go to the polls in the Spanish democracy: disease ended up knocking him down in 1979, suffering a heart attack 519 and a stroke from which he will never recover, cataracts that will leave him almost blind, and a deep depression that accompanied him until his death four years later. Miró in 1978 with Vicente Molina Foix We can not forget either that his Catalanist pronouncements of the seventies of last century are also closely linked to his need for municipal and Catalan government support for his museum-foundation project, which the Catalanists would turn into a 514 Cercas, Javier La memoria histórica se ha vuelto una industria, Babelia, El País 11.15.2014 515 Boix Pons 2010, p. 1157 516 Ben Ami, Shlomo El espejismo posnacional, El País, Madrid 05.12. 2014 517 Boix Pons 2010 tomo I, p. 175 518 Cited by Boix Pons 2010 p. 186. Sources: Capellà, L. Interview of Emili Fernández Miró. “Última Hora”, Brisas, 299 (10-I-1993) 20-23. Miro’s grandson confirmed the information in Entrevista a Emili Fernández Miró. “El Periódico”, Barcelona 04.03.1993. 519 Boix Pons 2010 p. 1131 226 fundamental element of the entire scaffolding of the Miró myth as a national painter of Catalonia. Although it has been said that the idea of the Miró Foundation dates back to 1967, attributed to Joan Prats, the reality is that, as pointed out by Dupin 520, it really emerges from the 1968 exhibition promoted by Franco minister Manuel Fraga and Falangist mayor Porcioles. Initially, the idea was to build a museum that would rival the Picasso one that existed in Barcelona since 1963, thanks to the initiative of Jaime Sabartés, with the support of the painter himself and the collaboration of Porcioles. Precisely in 1968, the painter made his museum a gift of 59 paintings and promised even more. Miró could not be less than Picasso in his hometown. From the first moment, Prats had a solid group to launch the idea, starting with Joaquím Gomis, critic María Luisa Borràs, her partner and PSUC member Francesc Vicens –the Foundation's first director–, notary Ramón Noguera, and the men of the Francoist Porcioles administration that had made possible the Picasso Museum: José Luis Sicart Quert –responsible for culture–, José Blajot –for whom Sert would build a home– and Joan Ainaud de Lasarte, director of Museums of the city. The Francoist city council offered to cede, as it had done with Picasso, a small palace in Moncada street. But in an initiative that would later take its toll, architect Sert objected, stating that a larger space was needed and that he was willing to build it. In addition, the immediate proximity of the Picasso museum would have placed Miró in the shadow of his fellow Spaniard 521. The move away from the Picasso museum and the entry into play of Sert transformed the idea of the Miró center, turning it into what it later claimed to be: a living center of creation and encounter of the arts. The town hall then offered land on the Montjuic mountain. But the project provoked criticism: painter and illustrator Julián Grau Santos –son of painter Emilio Grau Sala and nephew of Rafael Santos Torroella– expressed his opposition to its construction and even said in an article that “Miró's work is an absolute lie, lacking the most elementary pictorial value ... and in no way comparable to the work of a Picasso or a Klee –two great and authentic creators– ... Miró seems to me an incoherent sum of null values”522. The Foundation was finally inaugurated in June 1975 with an exhibition of drawings donated by Miró. But the institution did not start well. The legal and economic complications were very large and it involved too many actors: Joan Prats as owner of the main canvases that were going to be exhibited; Miró and his heirs, who would immediately cede a collection of his complete graphic work, but nothing more; Maeght and his partners and heirs, who wanted to preserve the privileges granted to the Saint-Paul de Vence Foundation; Sert, Gomis and other members of the Miró clan; the City Council, the provincial administration, the Generalitat and the central state. Right after the inauguration, the painter declared to Georges Raillard in relation to the difficulties that it had to surpass: “It is a miracle, a miracle ... (His chin is twitched, the eyes remain fixed, a silence). I have donated all my graphic work, but things are still 520 Dupin 2012 p. 343 Boix Pons 2010 p. 303 522 Grau Santos, Miró y la agonía de los museos, Tele-Expres, Barcelona 01.04.1969. Cited by Boix Pons 2010 p. 307 521 227 difficult...” 523. Miró's hope was focused on the politicians of the democracy that was being prepared: “now, after the elections, conditions may perhaps change”524. But the new museum did not meet the expectations that had been placed on it. The number of visitors never came close to what was expected and did not correspond to the huge investment and maintenance expenses that it represented. According to the Foundation itself, despite the novelty effect, in 1975 only 42,000 visitors were counted, rose to 134,000 in 1978, and fell down again to 75,000 in 1983. Only a fraction of the number of paid visitors received by the Picasso Museum. And some said that in its statistics the FJM counted not only those who entered the museum, but “all attendees to cultural events, including those free of charge, as well as children's educational visits” 525. In any case, the solution to this problem was a greater investment from Barcelona: more identification of Miró as the “national painter of Catalonia”, more exhibitions and cultural events. For this, Miró needed a greater dedication from the Catalan cultural and political establishment, especially from Barcelona. It was therefore imperative to highlight his commitment to the task of nationalist construction. But at the same time identify himself in some way to leftist forces, since in the first municipal elections of democracy, held on April 3, 1979, the left won a resounding victory in Barcelona. Between the PSC and the PSUC they obtained 53% of the votes. This left could also be described as Catalanist, because it disputed the leadership of this current to the conservatives. When in October 1979 Miró was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Barcelona, the ceremony was interrupted by a group of young secessionists and the old painter subscribed a short speech in Catalan with the title “Introductory lesson on the civic conception of the artist”. Given Miró’s physical disability, the text was read by Santiago Alcolea. His speech could not be more Catalanist, and said "that when an artist speaks from a country like ours, cruelly marginalized by an adverse history, it is necessary for him to make his voice heard throughout the world, to affirm, against all ignorance, all the misunderstandings and all the bad faith, that Catalonia exists, that it is original and that it is alive”526. And he marks his support, his commitment to be present alongside all those who strive to serve “men in general and particularly their people and the full realization of its history.” It was in perfect harmony with the result of the first Catalan regional elections, held five months later, won by Catalanist CIU, whose candidate Jordi Pujol was inaugurated president of the Generalitat with the votes of ERC and the centrists of Anton Cañellas. But the speech, which was intended to constitute a political-artistic legacy, comes forty years late. Critic Alex Danchev can only applaud the words of the painter: “I understand the artist to be someone who, amidst the silence of others, uses his voice to say something... For the fact of being able to say something, when the majority of people do not have the option of expressing themselves, obliges this voice in some way to be prophetic”. But Danchev can not but remind us that this 'courageous' 523 Raillard 1998, p. 234 Raillard 1998, p. 233 525 Boix Pons 2010 p. 963 526 Speech reproduced in Boix Pons 2010 pp. 961-962 524 228 discourse takes place "in 1979, four years after the death of the dictator and the liberation of Spain from the dictatorship”527. The massive support and financing of the municipal and regional authorities managed to get the Miró Foundation out of the hole, but it has not succeeded in placing it at the level of other similar establishments in Catalonia or the rest of Spain. In 2013, for example, when according to the official statistics of the Barcelona City Council the city received seven and a half million tourists, plus a further 2,599,000 cruise passengers 528, the Foundation hosted only 497,719 visitors, thus becoming the 12th receiver of visits in the city, with six times less than the Sagrada Familia, three times less than the F.C. Barcelona or half of the Picasso Museums 529. It also lost its arm wrestling with Miró’s eternal rival Dalí, whose Museum in Figueras received 1,333,430 visitors that same year –not including the 136,744 of the Gala Dalí Castle in Púbol and the 110,343 people who visited the Salvador Dalí House in Portlligat. It did manage, however, to get six and a half times more visitors than the museum Foundation of the other great 'national painter' of Catalonia, Antoni Tàpies (76,344 visitors). Although he defended the use of Catalan, Miró must be seen as an internationalist. His life, saving the parenthesis of his old age, is far from nationalism and is closer to Stephen Dedalus's answer to Cranly in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning”530. And feeling Catalan did not make him distance himself from Spain or from Spanish language –which was his home’s language of his last three decades of life– but to the contrary. For him “Spanishness was a link of connection between Catalanness and universality, so it was not possible to renounce the former” 531. Miró distanced himself clearly from separatism, affirming precisely in the final paragraph of his conversations with Raillard in May 1977: “Now I see the Great Hope of the new Spain, with its creative force. I am not in favor of separatism. I am for Spanish unity, European unity, world unity. The closed world is somewhat obsolete. They have already messed enough with borders. The closed world is the bourgeois world” 532. Miró's much-vindicated contribution to the renaissance of Catalan nationalism, which has been using him as a 'national painter', can be summed up in reality to very few things, or, to put it another way, to a handful of posters, all made after the death of 527 Danchev, Alex Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape THE (Times Higher Education), 04. 21.2011 528 Estadísticas del turismo en Barcelona de 2010 a 2014, Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, 2015 pp.374-376 529 Evolución visitantes en lugares de interés de Barcelona. 2011-2013, Ayuntamiento de Barcelona. 530 Joyce , James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (5.3.112) 531 Boix Pons 2010 p. 188 532 Raillard 1998, pp. 237-238. Cited in Amón, Santiago, Joan Miró: "Ahora veo la gran esperanza de la nueva España", El País, Madrid 04.20.1978 and in Boix Pons 2010, p. 188 229 Franco and the restoration of democracy 533. Although already in the key year of 1968 had made the announcing poster of the Diccionari Català de Salvat; in 1971 the one of the II Catalan Juridical Congress; in 1974 the 75th anniversary of the F.C. Barcelona; and in 1976, the centenary of the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya and another one welcoming the Avui newspaper. In 1977, Miró made the poster project for the campaign "Volem l'Estatut" (We want the Statute of Autonomy) of the Assembly of Catalonia, organization of the democratic parties that asked for the statute of autonomy and that was dissolved once this was obtained, giving the Spanish region more autonomy than any other one in Europe. The poster was not printed. In any case, the painter did not offer the sketch to Catalonia: he took it out of Spain. The gouache ended in the hands of Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, daughter of Daniel Lelong. In 2010, the Ministry of Culture of the tripartite nationalist-socialist government bought this small sketch on paper of 75x56 cm from its owner for the considerable sum of € 110,000, transferring it to the Museum of History of Catalonia. In a display of imagination, the ineffable counselor Joan Manuel Tresserras (ERC) pretended in the presentation of the poster project in Barcelona that what Miró had written on the poster was Volem l'Estat (We want the State), and that was why he had deviated the writing of the last two letters "UT", a pleasantry that spread among the nationalist media 534. But Miró made the same operation hundreds of times, such as in lithographs for his friend LLORENS ARTI-GAS (Mourlot 835), or JOSEP LLUIS SER-T (Mourlot 1168); CONG-RES on his poster for the II Congrés de Pediatres de Llengua Catalana (Mourlot 1228) or the 60 VOL-TA (Mourlot 1229). Filmmaker Pere Portabella was more understanding with Miró, before a 'lapsus' of the painter, whom he had asked to make a poster for his film Umbracle of 1972. Portabella recalls the anecdote: “'You need money, right ? Well I will make the poster and with the Gaspar Gallery we will make a limited edition, half signed by me. The gallery will keep a few and pay you the value of the rest '... Some time passed and one day Miquel Gaspar called me telling me he had the poster. When I saw it I realized that the 'A' of Umbracle was missing. Gaspar did not know how to tell Miró. I had it clear, if he has done it this way you can not change anything. I made a joke that he was old enough to know what he was doing. And so it remained ! Later I realized that that "A" is duplicated, as if it had slid up”535. Indeed, Miró had written in one line "UMB" and in another under "RCLE". And above UMB appeared a clearly identifiable "A" and another one that was less visible. Artist licenses. Despite the political and historiographical manipulation, Boix Pons recognizes that despite the effort deployed, the version that survives in most of the public opinion is 533 See Minguet Batllori, Joan M. Joan Miró: l'artista i el seu entorn cultural, 1918-1983, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Monstserrat, Barcelona 2000. pp. 29-31 534 See Europa Press wire dated 09.09.2010 La obra de Miró 'Volem l'Estatut' se incorpora al Museu d'Història de Catalunya. Also the press release by the Generalitat dated 9.09.2010 La Generalitat cedeix l'obra de Miró "Volem l'Estatut" al Museu d'Història de Catalunya 535 Martí Rom, Josep Miquel, Pere Portabella y Joan Miró, Centre Miró, Eglessia Vella, Mont-roig 2008 230 the sweetened and friendly: “The children’s Miró” or the “Miró that paints like a child” 536. 536 Boix Pons 2010, p. 27 231 Bibliography: Assouline, Pierre, L’homme de l’art, D.H. Kahnweiler 1884-1979, Éditions Balland, París, 1988 Aubert, Joan Fageda, Lacasa, Pablo J. 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See Fuller, Elizabeth 'Bobsy' Chevigné, Pierre de, 181 Chillida, Eduardo, 224, 225 Chrysler Jr., Walter P., 133, 161 Chueca Goitia, Fernando, 230 Cirici, Alejandro, 67, 72, 232, 246 Cirlot, Juan Eduardo, 55, 66, 67, 73, 75, 101, 116, 223, 225, 246, 247 Cisneros Rendiles, Gustavo A., 147 Cisneros, Diego, 147 D Dalí, Gala, 173, 243 Dalí, Salvador, 22, 27, 37, 48, 61, 63, 82, 98, 117, 123, 194, 223, 227, 228, 229, 242, 243, 248, 252 Dalla Costa, Murilo José Farias, 84, 87, 247 Dalmau, Josep, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Danchev, Alex, 2, 238, 242 Daniel, Marko, 11, 38, 44, 238, 247 Dato, Duchess of, 11, 16 Dato, Eduardo, 11 de Carreras, Francesc, 224 de Gaulle, Charles, 178, 181, 234 Deery, Kathleen, 147 Deffontaines, Pierre, 177, 179 del Castillo, Alberto, 67, 229, 232 240 Ferratges y Domínguez, Álvaro, Marquis of Montroig, 8 Flamini, Roland, 239 Florsheim, Harold, 145 Fontana Tarrats, José María, 66 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel, 225, 228, 231, Delaunay, Robert, 10, 176 Delaunay, Sonia, 10, 176 Derain, André, 9, 24, 27, 169 Desnos, Robert, 15, 16 d'Harnoncour, René, 156, 226 Diaghilev, Serge, 10, 17, 211 Domínguez, Oscar, 69, 228 Dorival, Bernard, 180, 192 D'Ors, Eugenio, 37, 64, 224 Doucet, Jacques, 16 Dreier, Katherine S., 23 Duarte, Paulo Alfeu Junqueira de Monteiro, 86, 87, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 232, 240 Franco, Francisco, 6, 31, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 49, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 79, 180, 181, 182, 193, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 243 Freixas, Laura, 66, 250 Frélaut, Jacques, 207, 220, 221 Fremon, Jean, 206 Frey, Alice, 28, 31 Fry, Varian, 61, 62 Fuller, Elizabeth 'Bobsy', 28, 119, 168, 169 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 131, 134, 175, 179, 185, 250 Dubuffet, Jean, 15, 139, 142, 147, 152 Duchamp, Marcel, 10, 23, 149, 169, 202 Dudensing, Valentine, 24, 104, 105, 154, 167, 173 Dufy, Raoul, 24, 176 Dupin, Jacques, 33, 44, 49, 57, 67, 68, 79, 80, 86, 117, 128, 136, 192, 203, 204, 206, 209, 213, 214, 221, 232, 235, 240, 247 Duthuit, Georges, 53, 83, 186, 250 G Gaffé, René, 17, 18, 161 Gale, Matthew, 11, 38, 39, 44, 236, 247 Galí, Francesc, 9 Gallatin, Albert Eugene, 23, 39, 40, 133 Gallego Burin, Antonio, 230 Gallego Burín, Antonio, 228 Galobart, Jaume, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 71, 93, 251 García Condoy, Honorio, 228 García Lorca, Federico, 70 Gardies, Jacques, 201 Gargallo, Pablo, 15 Gasch, Sebastián, 63, 66, 67, 69, 223, 232, 251 Gascoyne, David, 48, 50 Gaspar, Miguel, 244 Gassol, Bonaventura, 47, 50, 51 Gates Lloyd III, Horatio, 151, 152 Gates Lloyd, Jr., Horatio, 151 Gaya Nuño, Juan Antonio, 223 Gelman, Jacques, 142, 162 Gelman, Natasha See Zahalkaha, Natasha Getty, Paul, 157 Gilot, Françoise, 22, 199, 247 Girardin, Maurice, 13, 14 E Einstein, Albert, 61 Eisenhower, Dwight, 215 Elies i Bracons, Feliu, 11 Elléouët, Aube, 164, 216 Éluard, Paul, 15, 16, 18, 27, 52, 60, 61, 116, 124 Erben, Walter, 33, 34, 43, 247 Ernst, Max, 15, 16, 17, 36, 61, 62, 123, 142, 187 Estelrich i Artigues, Joan, 66 F Feigen, Richard L., 145, 148, 167 Fenosa, Apeles, 228 Fequet, Marthe, 216, 221 Fernández Miró, Emili, 240 Fernández, Luis, 48, 63, 228 Ferrà Oromi, Dolores, 8, 21 Ferrà, Josep, 21 241 Gleizes, Albert, 10 Goetz, Henri, 69 Gomis, Joaquín, 27, 63, 93, 95, 97, 99, Hobbins, Ellin, 119, 147 Hudson, Irene, 119, 140 Hugnet, Georges, 60, 182 Hugnet, Germaine, 182 Hunter, Sam, 74, 247 Huxley, Aldous, 66 101, 107, 175, 180, 193, 197, 223, 240, 241 González de la Serna, 228 González Robles, Luis, 225, 231 González, Julio, 55, 211 González-Ruano, César, 72 Goodspeed, Charles Barnett "Barney", 168 Goodwin, James Junius, 120 Goodwin, Philip Lippincott, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 126, 133, 134, 149, 213 Goodyear, Anson Conger, 25, 105, 121, 124, 125, 170 Gottesman, Miriam, 197 Gottesman, Samuel, 197 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco, 237 Grau Sala, Emilio, 72, 228, 241 Greeley, Robin Adèle, 37, 38, 50, 56, 247 Greenberg, Clement, 122, 123, 124, 146, 186, 247, 251 Gris, Juan, 10, 176, 225 Grund, Helen, 23 Guderian, Heinz, 68 Gudiol i Cunill, Josep, 92 Gudiol Ricart, José María, 47, 48, 51, 92, 93, 94, 95, 246 Guggenheim, Peggy, 62, 133, 159, 187 Guggenheim, Solomon R., 187 Guinovart, Josep, 227, 229 Gusmão, Adriano de, 86, 99, 100, 101, 105 I Iglesias Oromi, Enriqueta, 21 J Jacob, Max, 13, 16 Jacomet, Daniel, 115, 154, 173, 207, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221 Joblau, Caroline, 186 Johnson, Ken, 238, 239 Jouhandeau, Marcel, 15 Juncosa Iglesias, Lluís, 71, 86, 129, 251 Juncosa Iglesias, Pilar, 5, 21, 44, 48, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 100, 119, 144, 216, 220, 225, 229, 246, 251 Juncosa Massip, Lamberto, 21, 71, 72 Juncosa Vecchierini, Elena, 46, 49, 225, 248 Juncosa, Alberto, 72 Junoy, Josep María, 37 K Kahlo, Frida, 142 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 13, 15, 21, 22, 23, 26, 28, 116, 127, 130, 169, 188, 198, 199, 205, 211, 221, 235, 246, 248, 251 Kandinsky, Vasili, 122, 139, 211 Kemper Riley, Maude, 129 Khokhlova, Olga, 16 Klee, Paul, 21, 122, 211, 241 Klimt, Gustav, 139 Kober, Jacques, 201 Kochno, Boris, 17 Kootz, Samuel, 130, 167, 187, 188, 198 H Helm Jr., George Washington, 147 Helm, Michael Hardin Voir Helm, Mrs. Georges W. See Ault, Hildegard Von Steinwehr Hemingway, Ernst, 15, 28, 146, 231 Hérold, Jacques, 69 Hessel, Franz, 23 Hessel, Stéphane, 23 Hirshfield, Morris, 124 Hitler, Adolf, 38, 60, 88, 89 L Lacasa, Luis, 55 Lacourière, Roger, 60, 214, 221 242 208, 209, 211, 214, 219, 221, 223, 224, 226, 232, 241 Maeght, Marguerite, 200, 205 Malet, Rosa María, 33, 44, 78, 86, 113, 237, 248 Malraux, André, 206 Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), 16, 23, 36, 40, 123, 144, 174, 248 Mañach, Pere, 198 Mann, Thomas, 62 Maragall, Pascual, 224 March, Juan, 72 Marchand, André, 201 Margulies, Martin Z., 149 Martí Rom, Josep Miquel, 46, 251 Martín Artajo, Alberto, 181 Martín Martín, Fernando, 32, 35, 36, 57, 58, 248 Marzo, Jorge Luis, 66, 248 Masoliver, Juan Ramón, 229 Massine, Léonide, 10, 26 Masson, André, 15, 16, 22, 23, 26, 27, 53, 61, 110, 251 Matarasso, Henri, 207 Matet, Maurice, 179 Matisse Amélie, 186 Matisse, Alexina 'Teeny' Sattler, 58, 89, 113, 140, 148, 149, 162, 194, 195 Matisse, Henri, 9, 23, 24, 27, 53, 60, 74, 105, 106, 122, 127, 144, 147, 152, 157, 158, 170, 185, 186, 187, 191, 198, 200, 201, 203, 210, 211, 218 Matisse, Marguerite, 185, 186, 191, 192 Matisse, Patricia Kane Matta, 119, 135, 140, 148, 162 Matta, Roberto Sebastián, 61, 106, 127, 148, 152, 162 May, Saidie A., 133 McCray, Porter A., 226, 230 McEntire, Vera Roberta, 119, 143, 144 McEntire, Walter Francis, 144 McKim, Mrs. William See Bevans, Charlotte McKim, William (Bill) Lee, 119, 167 Melo Neto, Joao Cabral de, 86, 99 Metcalf, Elizabeth See Paine, Elizabeth Mason Lamba, Jacqueline, 62, 164 Lanchner, Carolyn, 134, 248, 249 Lansdowne, Helen Bayleff, 119, 165, 166, 174 Larrea, Juan, 55 Laughlin, James Laurence, 166 Laughlin, Thomas, 133 Laugier, Dr. Henri, 98, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181 Laurencin, Marie, 10, 24, 139, 150 Laurens, Henri, 53, 176, 211 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 182 Léger, Fernand, 10, 53, 61, 142, 159, 174, 176 Leiris, Louise, 23, 28, 198 Leiris, Michel, 15, 16, 22, 23, 52, 60, 73, 247 Lelong, Daniel, 205, 206, 221, 243 Lelong-Mainaud, Ariane, 243 Lenars, Arthur, 90, 91 Lerroux, Alejandro, 31, 72 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 62 Lévy, Dominique, 158 Lewisohn, Samuel A., 25 Libbey, Edward Drummond, 174 Lieberman, William (Bill), 209, 215 Lifar, Serge, 17 Lilly, Evan Frost, 139 Limbour, Georges, 16 Lippincott, Josephine Sarah, 120 List, Herbert, 202 Llorens Artigas, Josep, 12, 67, 100, 103, 105, 111, 126, 131, 207, 227, 229, 232 Lloyd Kreeger, David, 148 Lobo, Baltasar, 228 Loeb, Pierre, 17, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 61, 85, 88, 89, 97, 115, 116, 127, 180, 181, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 198, 203, 204, 205 Lolivier-Rahola, Gloria, 249 Lozoya, Marquis of, 95, 99 Lubar, Robert S., 238, 250 M Macià, Francesc, 31 Maeght, Aimé, 22, 33, 57, 132, 190, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 243 P Metcalf, Thomas Newell, 173 Milans del Bosch, Joaquín, 12 Millares, Manolo, 225, 229 Miller, Dorothy C., 139 Miller, Henry, 15 Miravitlles i Navarra, Jaume, 48, 49, 50, Paepcke, Mrs. Walter P. See Nitze, Elizabech 'Pussy' Paepcke, Walter, 174 Paine the 2nd, Robert Treat, 172 Paine, Elizabeth Mason, 119, 172, 173 Paine, Robert Treat, 172 Palau i Fabre, Josep, 248 Palencia, Benjamín, 229 51, 54, 246 Miró i Ferrà, Maria Dolors, 8, 41, 64, 71, 92, 96 Miró Juncosa, María Dolors, 48, 67, 69 Miró, Miguel, 8, 9 Misson, Mary-Katherine, 156, 157 Mitchell, Jan, 146, 147 Mitterrand, François, 164 Mnuchin, Robert, 158 Molina Foix, Vicente, 40, 72 Mondrian, Piet, 61, 151, 152 Monleón, Manuel, 55 Moreno Galván, José María, 233 Morris Jr., H. Cameron, 150 Morris, George Lovett Kingsland, 39, Paley, William S., 230 Palmeiro, José, 228 Panero, Leopoldo, 228 Parra, Ginés, 228 Payne Card, Elizabeth L. See Paine, Elizabeth Mason Peinado, Joaquín, 228 Pelayo, Orlando, 228 Penrose, Roland, 32, 34, 43, 44, 48, 50, 51, 67, 68, 77, 80, 81, 86, 235, 236, 248 Péret, Benjamin, 15, 16, 45, 46, 52, 56, 62, 69, 98 Pérez Jorba, Joan, 14 Perin Smith, Dorothy, 146 Perls, Frank, 150 Perls, Klaus, 150 Permanyer, Lluis, 44, 46, 86, 99, 119, 192, 205, 235, 248, 251 Perucho, Joan, 72 Pesquero Ramón, Saturnino, 84, 249 Peyrissac, Jean, 201 Phelps de Cisneros, Patricia 'Patty'', 119, 147 Phelps, Jr, William H., 147 Picabia, Francis, 10, 21 Picasso, Pablo Ruíz, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 27, 37, 54, 55, 60, 70, 74, 76, 79, 82, 98, 103, 104, 116, 122, 123, 124, 130, 138, 140, 154, 158, 159, 169, 171, 173, 181, 182, 187, 188, 189, 198, 201, 203, 211, 214, 218, 221, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 236, 239, 240, 241 Pierpont Morgan Jr., John, 120 Pla, Josep, 12, 37 Planell, Carlos, 230 Pleven, René, 178 Ponç, Joan, 229 251 Morris, Herbert Cameron, 150 Morris, Mrs. Herbert C. See Sober, Willavene Motherwell, Robert, 152 Moulin, Jean, 200 Mourlot, Fernand, 127, 188, 198, 201, 202, 209, 214, 218, 219, 221, 247, 248 Muse, Nancy Lee, 161 N Naville, Pierre, 15 Nelson, Paul, 69 Nitze, Elizabeth 'Pussy', 119, 169, 173, 174 Nitze, Paul, 173 Nixon, Richard, 234 Noguera, Ramón, 240 O O'Neill, Eugene, 159 Oromi, Josefa, 21 Orozco, Miguel, 20, 116, 124, 199, 218, 248 Ortiz, Manuel Ángeles, 228 Oteiza, Jorge, 224, 225, 229 244 Ricart, Enric C., 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 46, 83, Porcel, Baltasar, 225 Porcioles, José María de, 232, 240 Portabella, Pere, 244, 251 Prats, Joan, 8, 9, 27, 32, 38, 47, 49, 50, 185, 223 Richier, Germaine, 201 Ridruejo, Dionisio, 64 Riley, Peggy See Rosenbaum, Rosamond Rimbaud, Arthur, 19, 77, 100 Ripley, Harry Dwight Dillon, 119, 135, 51, 52, 54, 58, 64, 71, 73, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 120, 175, 179, 181, 182, 184, 186, 197, 223, 230, 232, 240, 241 Prévert, Jacques, 15 Puig Antich, Salvador, 234 Puigferrat i Oliva, Carles, 40, 43, 251 Pujol, Jordi, 239, 242 Punyet Miró, Joan, 34, 35, 36, 72, 249 Puyol, Ramón, 55 137, 138, 143, 213 Rius, Robert, 69 Rivera, Diego, 142 Rivet, Paul, 98 Roberts, Helene E., 150 Robson, Anne Deirdre, 133, 135, 249, 251 Roché, Henri-Pierre, 23, 24 Rockefeller IV, John Davison, 226 Rockefeller Jr., John Davison, 121, 226 Rockefeller, Abby See Aldrich, Abigail Q Quinn Sullivan, Mary, 121, 170 Quinn, John, 24, 144 Quintanes i Vilarrúbia, Carme, 41 Greene 'Abby' Rockefeller, David, 169, 226 Rockefeller, Jr., David, 226 Rockefeller, Nelson Aldrich, 30, 98, R 105, 106, 226, 230 Rafols, Josep Francesc, 9, 223 Raillard, Georges, 44, 62, 63, 67, 70, 71, Rockefeller, Sharon Percy, 226 Roglan, Joaquim, 237 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 61 Roosevelt, Teddy, 155 Rosenberg, Alexandre, 208 Rosenberg, Leonce, 15, 140 Rosenberg, Paul, 13, 23, 28, 61, 67, 130, 140, 173, 187, 188, 198, 208, 211 Rothko, Mark, 152 Rothschild (family), 61 Rouault, Georges, 127, 133, 150 Rousseau le Douanier, 24 Rowell, Margit, 34, 49, 54, 55, 59, 76, 77, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 115, 116, 180, 190, 228, 235, 249 Ruíz Gimenez, Joaquín, 225, 227, 229 Ruiz Morales, José, 230 Russell, John, 29, 87, 130, 138, 249 73, 155, 214, 223, 233, 235, 236, 241, 243, 246, 249, 251 Rajaratnam, Sukanya, 158 Rebeyrol, Philippe, 116, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 192 Rebull, Joan, 229 Reis, Bernard, 113 Renau, Josep, 55, 249 Repin, Ilya, 123 Resor, Ann, 165 Resor, Helen, 166 Resor, Mrs. Stanley See Lansdowne, Helen Bayleff Resor, Stanley Burnet, 165 Reus Morro, Jaume, 59, 62, 69, 71, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 128, 131, 175, 177, 180, 184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 207, 249 Reverdy, Pierre, 13, 15 Ribot Martín, Domènec, 26, 34, 36, 249 S Saavedra Arias, Rebeca, 51, 252 Sabartés, Jaime, 116, 240 Sachs, Paul Joseph, 121, 122, 123, 252 Sage, Kay, 62, 208 245 Subirachs, Josep Maria, 229 Suñol i Garriga, Josep, 40, 41, 42 Sunyer, Ramón, 134 Sweeney, James Johnson, 23, 28, 39, 40, Salacrou, Armand, 22 Salas, Xavier de, 66, 108 San Juan de la Cruz, 83 Sánchez Bella, Alfredo, 225, 228, 229 Sánchez, Alberto, 55 Santa Teresa de Jesús, 83 Santos Torroella, Rafael, 67, 223, 224, 63, 76, 79, 80, 82, 106, 113, 117, 126, 134, 151, 152, 230, 249, 252 T 228, 241, 252 Sanz Miralles, 55 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 60 Satie, Erik, 10 Saura, Antonio, 230 Scherer, Helen, 119, 139, 140 Schildkraut, Joseph J., 81, 249, 252 Schoeller, André, 201 Schuman, Robert, 181 Seeger, Helen Buchanan, 157 Seeger, Stanley, 5, 119, 157 Seligmann, Kurt, 62 Sentís, Carlos, 37 Sert, Francisco, 92 Sert, José Luis, 27, 38, 55, 62, 63, 64, 65, 92, 96, 97, 99, 113, 195, 196, 204, 206, 230, 240, 241 Sert, Josep María, 65 Sert, Moncha, 96 Shapiro, Joseph Randall, 208 Shervashidze, Prince Aleksandr, 26 Sicart Quert, José Luis, 240 Signovert, Jean, 201 Skira, Albert, 27 Smith, David, 152 Sober, Edward K., 150 Sober, Willavene, 119, 150 Soby, James Thrall, 36, 37, 106, 117, 118, 120, 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 135, 156, 209, 214, 215, 249, 252 Soler Elías, Gloria, 41 Solley, Thomas T., 139, 174 Sooke, Alastair, 237 Sorlier, Charles, 202, 249 Soulié, Eugène, 198 Sousa Mendes, Aristides, 61 Stalin, Josef, 60, 88 Stein, Gertrude, 169 Stern, Louis E., 140, 141, 208 Stravinsky, Igor, 157 Talmey, George Nathan, 158 Talmey, Irene Georgia, 119, 158, 159, 160, 161 Tanguy, Yves, 15, 61, 62, 123, 127, 147, 208, 212 Tàpies, Antoni, 73, 229, 243 Tarradellas, Josep, 48 Taueber-Arp, Sophie, 39 Tei, Maria Pilar, 20, 21 Tériade, Efstathios (Stratis) Eleftheriades (Ευσταθιος Στρατης Ελευθεριαδης), 26, 27, 81, 82, 210, 252 Tharrats, Joan-Josep, 229 Tierno Galván, Enrique, 240 Tjeder, Mrs. Rolf See Ault, Hildegard Von Steinwehr Todolí, Vicent, 236 Togores, José de, 12, 21, 205 Toklas, Alice B, 169 Tone, Lilian, 85, 86, 87, 118, 119, 128, 130, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 212, 252 Trabal, Francesc, 31 Tresserras, Joan Manuel, 236, 244 Truman, Harry, 181 Tusquets, Esther, 65, 252 Tzara, Christophe, 69 Tzara, Tristan, 13, 69, 202 U Umland, Anne, 59, 69, 70, 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 97, 104, 107, 108, 184, 185 Utrillo, Maurice, 25 V Vairel, Edmond, 210 246 Valland, Rosa Antonia, 60 Van Velde , Geer, 201 Van Velde, Bram, 201 Vanderpoel Hun, Susan, 156 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 74 Varo, Remedios, 69 Vicens, Francesc, 240 Vidal de Llobatera, Xavier, 223 Vidal y Barraquer, Francisco, 47 Vidiella, Rafael, 43 Villeri, Jean, 201 Viñes, Hernando, 228 Viot, Jacques, 15, 16, 17 Vollard, Ambroise, 10, 21, 198 Wiener, Paul Lester, 63 Wildenstein, Georges, 173, 198 Wingate Lloyd, Mary, 151 Y Ylla i Cassany, Lluís G., 49, 64, 71, 93, 96 Z Zabaleta, Rafael, 229 Zadkine, Ossip, 61 Zahalkaha, Natasha, 119, 135, 141, 142, 162 Zeisler, Claire See Block, Claire Zeisler, Ernest Bloomfield, 145 Zeisler, Richard S., 145 Zervos, Christian (Χρήστος Ζερβός), W Wallach, Ira David, 197 Wallingford III, Buckner Ashby, 147 Watson, Peter, 63, 252 Weill, Berthe, 198 Wheeler, Monroe Lathrop, 104, 124 White, Samuel Stockton III, 144 27, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 60, 73, 90, 116, 159, 176, 180, 181, 191, 193, 200, 203, 252 Zervos, Yvonne, 50, 90, 115, 176 Zweig, Stefan, 66 Whitney, John Hay 'Jock', 226, 230 247 

The true story of Joan Miró and his Constellations Miguel Orozco 1 The true story of Joan Miró and his Constellations Miguel Orozco The true story of Joan Miró and his Constellations is an abridged English language version of the book La Odisea de4 Miró y sus Constelaciones: El pintor y sus marchantes (WorldCat No. 967285228, ISBN 9788498956757), published in 2016 by Visor, Madrid. The author’s purpose in rewriting in English his text is to facilitate access to non Spanish-speaking readers. He apologizes, however for the language errors it may contain. Texts can be used and reproduced by citing the source © For Picasso images: Succession Picasso, Paris Cover illustration: Portrait by Enric Cristòfol Ricart of Joan Miró as a soldier in the Spanish Army that put down the 1917 Revolution in Barcelona. Joan Miró Foundation Museum 2 To my grandchildren María, Mateo, Miguel, Elisabeth and Alicia 3 “In art and life, Joan Miró (1893-1983) was an escapologist. He took everything the 20th century had to throw at him, wriggling free of all entanglements, ideological and other” Alex Danchev 4 Introduction 5 1st Part: THE ESCAPES OF MIRÓ 1. From Catalonia to the mecca of culture (1920) 8 2. The flight from revolutionary Catalonia (1936) 30 3. The return to Franco’s Spain (1940) 60 2nd PART: THE CONSTELLATIONS AND THE FIGHT FOR APPROPRIATE REMUNERATION 4. The Constellations or how to tame monsters (1940-41) 75 5. Skipping his dealer: the failed exhibition at MoMA (1941-1945) 85 6. Little paintings for women: The contempt of dealers, collectors and MoMA 117 7. The journey of the Constellations since 1945 136 8. Forcing Matisse: the chimera of the exhibition in Paris (1945-1948) 175 3rd PART: ECONOMIC SUCCESS AT SIXTY 9. Ultimatum to his dealers (1945) 184 10. The third man (Maeght) or late life opulence (1948-) 200 11. Breton jumps on board as the Constellations are reborn (1958) 207 12. Octogenarian Militantism (1970-1983) 223 Bibliography 246 Names Index 253 5 Introduction The Constellations series by Joan Miró is one of the most popular works of art of the twentieth century and is constantly reproduced in books and posters. It is also the best known work of the painter, who asked for the only one he kept to be placed on his headboard two days before his death on Christmas Day 1983. The celebrity of the 23 gouaches that compose it is such that only a few have changed owners in the last 30 years –the last sale we have documented is Femme et oiseaux, sold in June 2017 for 24,571,250 GBP (over $30 million)– and only a few Museums in the world have a copy. The previous auction sale of a constellation was in 2001 from the Stanley Seeger collection when Nocturne sold for $5.6m. Miró’s own country Spain –a land of museums– only has one gouache: The Morning Star, which Miró offered to his wife Pilar Juncosa, who gave it to the Miró Foundation in Barcelona. The rest of the originals are found in their vast majority in museums and collections in the United States. And this masterpiece of world painting was conceived and painted in the hardest period of the painter's life: his only income at almost 50 years of age was the monthly stipend of less than fifteen hundred dollars of today, corrected for inflation, that he received from his dealer Pierre Matisse, who kept on exchange for this payment almost all his artistic production. In reality, if his gallerist 'did as if he paid him', Miró reciprocated 'pretending to send him his canvases'. But for what Miró kept he had no buyer because he was totally ignored in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the rest of Spain. He was thus forced to live with his wife and daughter at their parents home – first at his wife’s parents' house in Palma de Majorca and then in at his own parents’ home in Barcelona. His precariousness was such that he had to stop painting oils on canvas, since the material to make them was out of reach for him. The Constellations series has been extolled since 1945 and it has been said ad nauseam that the gouaches were sold 'as donuts', constituting the proof of the brilliant success of the painter. But the reality was very different: the series did not reach the market until more than three years after being painted; Miró was going through a period of conflict with his only dealer; he tried without success to get round him by selling the gouasches through the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which rejected the idea; his gallerist took over the gouaches but did not sell them so well and Miró received practically no remuneration for the series, to the point that it has been said that the only payment he received for the twenty-three paintings was 'a fridge'. In fact, and against what has been said for more than half a century, the series was underestimated by the MoMA, which refused to exhibit or sell it, by critics and also by his dealer, who only promoted it to his clients as small works, suitable minors to give to a lady. And the affront to Miró did not stay in the United States, the painter suffered the same disdain on the part of the French museum establishment, this time also –as in the case of MoMA– mainly because of the amateurism of his advisors, who chose inadequate intercolutores, procedures and attitudes to interest the museums. 6 The series was also ignored by the main American art collectors. Some of these had bought Miró canvases in the past, but when the Constellations were exhibited in the Pierre Matisse gallery they refused to acquire any of the gouaches, which were saved from oblivion thanks to a series of art-loving women, whose good taste and intuition built a legend around the series that elevated it to the top as a masterpiece of modern painting. The data and sources that allow to sustain this thesis so in contradiction with the paradigm that has dominated the Miró studies since 1945 did not begin to come to light until, following the death of Pierre Matisse and the closure of his gallery in 1989, his archives were deposited at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where they began to be made available to researchers. In the first decade of this century, the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, which had been collecting all the correspondence of Miró –a process in which the author of these lines contributed copies of numerous letters from the painter– launched an ambitious project of compilation of all his correspondence, including also his enormous private correspondence, which provides a counterpoint to the documents of the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery and to the epistolary exchanges between painter and gallerist. However, the new available elements have not changed the texts that continue to be published about Miró, which are all still based on the historiography prior to the opening of the archives, written mainly in the 70s of last century, and whi8ch created the Miró myth, a mainly fictional construction to which the painter collaborated with enthusiasm. He tried to transmit to the world an image of a more political artist,' progressive 'and even anti-Franco freedom fighter. In the process of rewriting the biography of the painter known crucial facts were ignored, other facts of fundamental nature were concealed and the exercise turned to give interpretations of his work that hardly match the historical reality, as in our understanding occurs with the so-called savage paintings, which in light of the facts that we reveal in this book, deserve a radically different reinterpretation. The deforming effort continues even today, as shown by the exhibition The Escape Ladder of 2011. Even the voluminous catalog and study published by MoMA on the occasion of the great Centennial exhibition in 1993, which were prepared having access to the archives of Pierre Matisse, repeated bulk errors, avoided changing its analysis on the basis of what was found and gave very unconvincing explanations, particularly as regards the museum's attitude towards the Constellations. It is these contradictions between the main essays about Miró and the reality of the events that has prompted the author of these line to embark on this adventure. Fortunately for all art lovers of Joan Miró, the celebrity that was acquiring the series since 1945, along with the pursuit of profit of gallerist Pierre Matisse, pushed him to bring it back to the market in 1959, this time in the form of a portfolio with 22 of the 23 gouaches –we will explain later why one was missing– exquisitely reproduced in hand-painted pochoirs of a very slightly different size to distinguish them from the originals. In this unique initiative which intricacies we reveal in this book, the new Constellations were made with such care and attention that even for a museum curator it was difficult to differentiate them from the original gouaches that Miró had painted. This limited edition, which is valued today in the art market in six-figure dollar 7 amounts, is what has allowed millions of admirers around the world to enjoy the painter's art, perhaps at his most inspired moment. In fact, the 23 gouaches were only exhibited together once: in the mentioned MoMA exhibition of 1993. The closest record was de April 2017 exhibition at Acquavella Galleries in New York, which managed to reunite 22 of the 23. 8 1st PART: THE ESCAPES OF MIRÓ 1. From Catalonia to the mecca of culture (1920) Joan Miró i Ferrà was born in 1893 in Barcelona under the zodiac sign of Taurus. His father, Miguel Miró, was the son of a modest blacksmith from the Tarragona village of Cornudella. After learning the trade of watchmaker and goldsmith in Reus, Miguel settled in Barcelona in 1880. His jewelry The Acuárium, near the Plaza Real, is soon successful and Miguel, who possessed a keen sense of social status, thus managed to become a part of the middle class. Although in the rewriting of Miró’s biography in the 70s the painter will pretend that his father, for whom he never showed any devotion, was not a jeweler, but a simple 'watch repairer'. In 1891, at 32 years of age and already with a good social position, Miguel married Dolores Ferrà, daughter of a successful a Majorcan cabinetmaker. Of the four children they had only two survived: Joan and Dolors, born in 1897 and to whom the painter will always feel very close. As befits his class, Joan will attend a private establishment, the San Antonio school, but with poor academic results. In the midst of the conflictive social situation in Barcelona, where in 1902 there was a revolutionary general strike supported by ultraconservative and Catalanist Carlists 1 that caused 12 deaths, Miró finished his primary studies in 1905. His results in secondary school will still be very bad, and the child only showed interest in drawing. Two years later, Joan is forced to drop out of high school because of bad grades. His father then decided that he had to learn a trade and enrolls him in the Barcelona School of Commerce to become an accountant. His idea is that once his studies finished, Joan will go to London as a meritorious to his maternal uncle. But Joan only accepts the plan if his parents agree to his going in the afternoon to La Llotja School of Fine Arts, where he will coincide with his neighbor Joan Prats, son of a prestigious hatter. The social climate in Barcelona is becoming increasingly tense. Catalanists, Carlists and revolutionaries are grouped in 1906 in Solidaritat Catalana and in 1909 an insurrection erupts that gives rise to the Tragic Week, which leaves a balance of 78 dead and 112 buildings burned, of which 80 belonging to the Catholic Church, many of them near Miró’s home. But at the same time, the family continues to prosper and goes one step higher in status. The painter's parents acquired in 1910 from the Marquis of Montroig, an agricultural property with its Manor house in the center, the Mas Ferratges, near Miguel's hometown. The property, relatively large, converted into the Mas Miró, will be immortalized in the painting The Farm (1921-22 National Gallery Notes 1. From Catalonia to the mecca of culture (1920) 1 Carlism is a traditionalist reactionary political movement seeking the establishment of a separate line of the Bourbon dynasty on the Spanish throne 9 of Art, Washington, DC.). Although in a deceptive way, since what Miró painted was not the manor itself, but the part dedicated to the residence of the masoveros 2 and the farmyard, thus concealing the true building of the manor: a unique, stately, outstanding building at both historical and architectural level. The colonial style building –the grandfather of the Marquis had made his fortune in Cuba– with its elegant cars path, two floors and central tower, as well as adjoining buildings, gave an aristocratic image. The hacienda acquired a prominent social role in the village. Concerts are held and the owners and peasants of the neighborhood go every Sunday to the mass celebrated in its great Neo-Gothic chapel, and sometimes the altar has to be taken out due to excessive attendance. Miró completed his studies in that same year of 1910, at 16 years of age. His father immediately placed him in the Can Dalmau i Oliveres drugstore on Las Ramblas. His job is to make notes, add the figures and pass them to the accounting books in a dark back room. And all this for a teenager who had proven allergic to arithmetics. He will only endure the job for a few months, because after communicating to his parents his decision to quit and devote himself completely to painting, and to their refusal, the young man fell into a state of depression that, combined with typhoid fevers, had him prostrate for several months. In view of the state of their son, Miguel and Dolors accept that he dedicates himself to painting, although he is recommended that in order to earn a living he either becomes a priest or enters the army. In fact, his father will do more than recommend him to become a soldier: when he is called up, he did not pay a total exemption as the men of his class did, so Joan will have to join the ranks and will appreciate what a military career, even as a simple soldier, could contribute in the sense of achieving economic stability. In 1912, when José Canalejas, president of the Spanish government, was assassinated by an anarchist, Miró entered the Francesc Galí Art School, where he learned more than at the previous one and coincided with Joan Prats, Enric Ricart and Josep Rafols. There he developed his first personal and characteristic pictorial style, very close to the Fauvism that Matisse, Derain and Braque had developed in France since 1905. 2 Tenant farmers 10 Having obtained the right to devote himself to painting, the young Miró faces what will be his main difficulty over the next four decades: to live of his art and well enough to access a social status at least similar to that of his parents, thus showing his strict father that his choice had not been wrong. To achieve his goals he needed to work tirelessly and establish relationships with dealers who could sell his work. His first step was to join the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc in 1912, where he participated in his first collective exhibitions. Two years later he will rent his first studio, shared with his friend Ricart. Miró will leave the group in 1918, when after the insurrection of the previous year, its members distance themselves from the conservatism and religiosity of the painter. Although he does not obtain results at the level of sales of paintings, Miró maintains in those years an unshakeable confidence in himself. The phenomenal economic bonanza enjoyed by Catalonia during the First World War feeds his optimism. In 1914, the outbreak of hostilities produced a positive impact for the city: a considerable economic bubble was fattened and Catalan manufactures exported non-stop to the belligerent countries. The war and the economic boom push dozens of Catalan artists who had settled in Paris to return to the city. Art dealers such as Ambroise Vollard, and painters such as Albert Gleizes, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia. also arrive to the enriched Barcelona. Catalan dealer Josep Dalmau, who had already exhibited Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger in 1912, turns his establishment into a meeting point for these artists. Dalmau adopted Miró in 1916 and a year later introduced him to Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Also in 1917, Vollard organizes in the Catalan capital a large exhibition of French painters –Manet, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Bonnard– to gain access to the Catalan bourgeoisie that had been enriched by the war. And also in that 'glorious' year of 1917, the Russian ballets of Diaghilev visit the city, where Miró can admire Parade, fruit of the collaboration of Picasso, Erik Satie, Léonide Massine and Jean Cocteau. But the economic bonanza has brought with it a very high inflation that affects mainly the working classes, who take to the streets led by anarchists and socialists in the revolutionary general strike of the summer of 1917. In Barcelona the Catalanists join the rebels, provoking a revolt that will leave a deep impression: the insurrection left 37 dead in Catalonia, more than half of the total number of victims in Spain. Miró, who served at that time in the Spanish army, lived the events very closely. In a letter to Enric C. Ricart of August 26, 1917, just when the insurrection that began in June is over, Miró does not have a word of identification with the rebels. His concern focuses 11 on possible casualties in the army of which he was a part and is relieved when the latter uses the artillery to end the insurrection: “Fortunately nothing has hasppened; during the first days of the revolt my battalion was in Barcelona, in charge of the surveillance of the capital, while the second battalion was in Sabadell, confronting the people there with harshness. The company of that battalion that entered into combat had eight wounded and two dead; fortunately the artillery arrived in time to help them, otherwise there would have been many casualties. Afterwards, my company was ordered to go to relieve the force that was in Sabadell, and there we went. When we arrived everything was over and we did not have to shoot. Not even with the rifles, we only suffered the inconvenience that campaigning represents”. Years later, in Paris, Miró became a regular at the residence of the Duchess of Dato, widow of the Spanish Prime Minister Eduardo Dato, who had ordered the intervention of the army and was assassinated in 1921 by three Catalan anarchists. In 2011, London Tate Modern's curators Matthew Gale and Marko Daniel will pretend instead that this military experience would explain the leftist 'radicalism' of Miró 3. What Miró has retained from all the events of 1917, what he highlighs in his letter to Ricart, is the financial aspect: “A memorable thing for me and worth knowing for you: While I have been a soldier, these days of state of war , I have earned 0.40 pesetas a day in addition to the meals. In all, I've earned a living, so I can get married. When will you earn 0.40 pesetas painting dolls? To be a soldier is better than being a painter". The political and social situation in Catalonia continues to disturb Miró, who begins to contemplate leaving the country. This intention is only confirmed the following year, when Dalmau offers his first individual exhibition, with more than sixty paintings and drawings, from February 16 to March 3, 1918. The exhibition constitutes a resounding failure. Very few visitors, the critics are negative and there is a huge scandal. Prestigious painter and critic Feliu Elies publishes a ruthless criticism and promotes an open letter from a group of 'congested visitors' inviting to revolt against Miró. The exhibition was vandalized and some exhibited works were destroyed by an angry public. The fiasco had a clear impact on the painter, who closed his 'fauve' period and started a more classic period. He also took the firm decision to leave Catalonia, which had humiliated him before his father. In September 1919 he wrote to his friend Enric Ricart: "I do not give a damn about tomorrow, what interests me is today. In addition, I would prefer a 3 Gale, Matthew and Daniel, Marko 2011. p. 22. 12 thousand times –and I say this with all sincerity– to totally and absolutely fail in Paris rather than continue suffering in these dirty and stinking waters of Barcelona.” 4 The decision by the conservative and religious Miró to flee from the revolutionary atmosphere he breaths in Catalonia becomes definitive with the new general strike of 1919 put down by Catalan general Joaquín Milans del Bosch and the beginning of the gun law in which employers and workers resort to terrorism. The painter, determined to leave, prepares his escape in detail. He is perfectly aware of how much the stay in Paris will cost him: "for a study... you have to count from 1,500 to 2,000 francs per year... unassuming lodging 20 francs a day ... I am completely determined to go to Paris this winter." 5 Miró tries to sell his paintings in collective exhibitions at the City Hall of Barcelona, the Layetanas Galleries and the Courbet Association. But he can not collect even a fraction of the funds he needs to settle in Paris. From his parents, Miró obtains some money for the trip and to pay the hotel for a few days. It is not enough and the 26-year-old man resorts to selling to gallerist Josep Dalmau, for the amount of one thousand pesetas (about $ 2,300 in 2016), all the works painted until then. The dealer also commits himserf, and this is important for Miró, to organize an individual exhibition in Paris. Although he has bulk sold his canvases, Miró already has a first reserve to undertake his plan. But, prudently, he limits his ambition to spending a few months in the French capital, returning to the economic security of his parents the rest of the year. At the end of February 1920, a few weeks after turning 27, the painter arrived in Paris, landing in a cheap hotel where his friends Artigas, Ricart and Josep Pla were staying. Together with Ricart, Miró visits Picasso, with the pretext of handing him a bun that the painter’s mother has prepared for him in Barcelona. Pablo receives Joan with great cordiality, gives him advice and Miró is seduced. In a letter from Montroig of July 25 to Josep Françesc Ràfols he says: "Josep de Togores and Pablo Picasso are the only two with whom I speak and I see now in Paris, which is life. Picasso, at first, naturally, reserved with me. Now lately, after knowing my work, very effusive; hours of talk in his study, very often. In Catalonia, we need passion and heroism, because art is this. Believe me, if you want to be a painter, do not move from Paris. I completely agree” 6. Miró spends his first months in Paris establishing contacts and practicing drawing at the La Grande Chaumière Academy. In June he returns to Barcelona and Montroig, where he spends the summer. The social climate in Catalonia continues to deteriorate, with the bloody confrontation between the thugs of the so-called 'free union' created by the employers with the support of Milans del Bosch on one hand and the anarchist militants of the CNT and other radical organizations on the other, leaves 200 dead in the streets of Barcelona in the year 1920 alone. After having been in Paris, Miró finds Barcelona unbearable. In a letter to Picasso dated June 27, 1920 in Montroig, Miró shows his contempt for Catalan intellectuals: "I spent a few days in Barcelona. Very overwhelming effect, after having lived in Paris. The intelligentsia lives with 50 years of retard and the artists give the impression of 4 Letter from Miró to Enric C. Ricart 14.09.1919. Reproduced in Epistolari 2009, pp. 141-142 Letter to Enric C. Ricart 14.09.1919, Reproduced in Epistolari, p. 141-142 6 Epistolari 2009, p. 193 5 13 amateurs. Lack of temperament and many pretensions! I think I've become stupid here ... a dream stuns all those wretches who spend their lives here. I agree with you, in order to be a painter you have to stay in Paris. They may call us here bad patriots, Europe and the countryside ! Two stimulants for our sensibility and brain. Acting abroad is more patriotic than those who act at home, without a view to the world” 7. Three weeks later he writes to Enric Ricart, also from Montroig, in very similar terms, affirming that before reaching the town he had spent twelve days of terrible torment in Barcelona. "Nothing but savages and peasants, with 50 years of retard in intellectual life. Definitely, never more Barcelona. Paris and the countryside, and this till death. I do not know what is it that makes those who lose contact with the brain of the world fall asleep and mummify” 8. Convinced of not wanting to stay in Catalonia and that artistic success can only be achieved through deepening and expanding his contacts in Paris, Miró returns to France in February 1921. Picasso visits him at his hotel and agrees to send his dealers Paul Rosenberg and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,, who actually do visit him, but to no avail. Miró suffered from his installation in Paris the disdain of the main art dealer of the time: in 1922, Kahnweiler visits the studio of Miró at number 45 Blomet street. The painter was then 28 years old. But the dealer, after looking carefully at all the works he shows him, left the studio without saying a word. It is a resounding 'no' and without appeal, the same that will continue in force throughout his life, without ever making the effort to understand Miró’s painting. The humiliation will continue in later years. But if he did not have no luck with dealers, the network of contacts and friends of Miró in Paris is expanding, meeting and becoming intimate with poets Max Jacob, Tristan Tzara and Pierre Reverdy, very influential in the Parisian intellectual and journalistic media. Dalmau's promise to organize an individual exhibition in Paris is quickly fulfilled: on April 29, 1921, the exhibition was inaugurated in the La Licorne gallery, founded the previous year by collector and dentist Maurice Girardin. Despite getting good reviews from his friends, the exhibition constitutes a new fiasco for the painter: there are hardly any visitors and, as happened in Barcelona, not a single sale. For more misfortune, Dalmau does not have money to pay the gallerist the expenses of organizing the exhibit, the result being that Miró's paintings are retained by Girardin. The painter is even inflicted an additional humiliation: the Catalan gallerist will finally choose not to pay and leave in La Licorne all the early work of Miró. We have found a set of unpublished letters from Miró to Dr. Girardin, between June and September of that year of 19219 that give us a very close idea of Miró’s thorough preparation for the stay in Paris, his efforts and his state of mind. And at the same time they offer us a complete vision of one of his first unsuccessful episode of relationship with a dealer, in this case Girardin himself. In the first of the letters, written from Hotel Namur in Paris, and probably dated on Thursday, June 2, he announces to the person he considers his new dealer that he has 7 Epistolari 2009, p. 187 Epistolari 2009, p. 192 9 Sold by Tajan, París in Sale Manuscrits et Livres, 17 November 2015. Lots 78-81 8 14 finished a series of canvases and invites him to come and see them at his studio, since they are not yet dry and he cannot take them to La Licorne. In the second letter, dated in Montroig on July 5, Miró tells Girardin that he plans to install his studio permanently in Paris and gives notice of the preparation of two paintings. One of them we have identified clearly as 'The Farm', in which he worked for nine months, first in Montroig and then in Paris. “I have started two landscapes that I think will occupy me all the season, given my determination to finish my canvases well. I'm very encouraged and I hope to manage.” He also indicates that he has passed through Barcelona and has broken with Dalmau: “He has not finally clarified the haze that has always surrounded him. He wanted to get all my work for two years. I can not accept that, because I do not want to be chained, and on the other hand I prefer to establish direct relations in Paris. I act thus encouraged by the excellent reception I have found among dealers and art critics and by your kindness.” Miró asks Girardin to go to his bank to pay the balance of his debt with the painter: “I think that will be more comfortable and will allow me to have cash in Paris, in order to cover the expenses of the studio that I have commissioned friends to look for me, because on my next trip I must find myself installed in Paris.” And the painter asks his gallerist if he has plans for his canvas Glove and Newspaper, which he had just painted and had left deposited in La Licorne. The next letter, also dated in Montroig a month and a half later, on August 21, indicates that the gallerist did not respond to the previous one nor did he deposit money in the bank. Miró tells Girardin that he is still busy with the two 'landscapes', in which he continues to work with the aim of “finishing them well and explaining them well”, adding that they will have him busy for a long time. “I am very encouraged and I would be happy to show them to you. My slow work has prevented me from accepting your kind invitation to send you some canvases for the Autumn Salon.” But he adds that he will send paintings: “In my opinion, it would be convenient, both for you and me, to make a very important shipment”. Next, Miró deals with money issues, begging Girardin to go to the Spanish Bank of the Rio de la Plata, on the Avenue de l'Opera in Paris, to check the balance of his account “and add the amount of the Glove and Newspaper if he is interested”. He also tells him that he has already warned a bank employee (Mr. Pérez Jorba) of his visit. This is writer, critic and correspondent Joan Pérez-Jorba (1878-1928), who had written a laudatory chronicle of Miró in the newspaper El Día Gráfico in Barcelona10 and who also worked at the bank. But Girardin continues to ignore his letters and request for payment, and on September 10, 1921 Miró wrote again from Montroig complaining about the lack of response to his letters and asking him to pay the amount of 450 francs owed to him. He adds that if the canvas of the glove and the newspaper does not interest him, he should hand it to his "agent" Pérez Jorba or else add to the total owed to Miró another 300 francs for the painting. In short, after his first great failure in Paris and the lack of response from the only gallerist he has access to at that time, Miró offers him a large canvas of 116.8 x 10 Pérez-Jorba, Joan Crónica de París: Joan Miró y su pintura en El Unicornio, El Día Gráfico, Barcelona 6.05.1921 15 89.5 cm (MoMA Still Life - Glove and Newspaper Catalog No. 18.1955 ), for an amount that equals –taking inflation into account– $ 325 in 2016. An overwhelmed Miró is back in Barcelona with his head down. Once again he has not achieved the success he wanted to show his father. But he does not despair, he continues to paint and although he has not been able to rent a new studio, he returns to Paris in April 1922, to the study that sculptor Pablo Gargallo had let him at number 45 of rue Blomet, where he establishes friendship with André Masson, the Surrealist protegé of Kahnweiler, Ives Tanguy and writers such as Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Jean Dubuffet –who will not start painting until two decades later–, Michel Leiris, Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert and Marcel Jouhandeau. Return to Montroig in the summer and return to Paris in March 1923 where he continues to paint and expand his circle of friends to Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Benjamin Péret and Robert Desnos. He obtains some income through direct sales or on deposit at L'Effort Moderne Gallery owned Leonce Rosenberg, or with his brother and also Picasso dealer Paul. But the bulk of his livelihood continues to come his family, despite the fact that the painter is already 30 years old. The year 1924 also passes without the painter obtaining the success he craves for, and he only exhibits in the Madrid collective show of the Society of Iberian Artists, which he joins. But in that year there is an event that will change the fortune of Miró: on December 1st, the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste is launched, an initiative of Benjamin Péret and Pierre Naville. The first issue contains texts by Éluard, Desnos, Péret, Aragon and Reverdy, as well as illustrations by Masson, Picasso, De Chirico and Max Ernst and the announcement of the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto written by André Breton. André Masson writes immediately to Miró in Barcelona, who sees in the new movement the opportunity he has been looking for for years. The painter does not wait till spring to make his annual pilgrimage to Paris. He is there at the beginning of January 1925 and takes with him dozens of works painted in Montroig. In March Masson introduces him to André Breton, supreme leader of the surrealists, who immediately adopts the young painter, acquires two of his works (Le Chasseur and Le Gentleman) and sponsors him. Masson also introduces him to Éluard, Aragon and Naville and Miró unwittingly joins the group, with whose support he gets in April his first contract: dealer Jacques Viot, manager of the Galerie Pierre, offers him and Max Ernst 1,500 francs a month for all their production. Although he had said three years before that he did not want to be bound, Miró does not hesitate a second: he immediately accepted the proposal, although decades later he complained that it was very little money, “barely enough to survive and buy canvases”. One thousand five hundred francs of 1925 correspond to about $ 1,540 of 2016 in purchasing power. 16 In any case, this contract does not make him independent from his parents. Miró considers that he has taken the first step to consecrate himself and can now live as a bourgeois and prove to his father that, in spite of still needing financial support, he has managed to establish himself among the French artistic and economic elite, which implies consequential spending in public relations. We can not forget that we are in the Golden Twenties and that when Miró arrives in Paris and meets Picasso, the Malaga painter has been married to Olga Khokhlova for two years and lives through his most bourgeois period, which Max Jacob called the Duchess era. And Miró's aspiration is to be able to live like Picasso, to be able to spend like him. Salvador Dali says in his memoirs that when he arrived in the city of light, Miró's first concern was for him to get a tuxedo, and when he had it, Miró took him for lunch at the Duchess of Dato’s: “Miró, imprisoned with a pumped-up shirt as rigid as a breastplate, kept silent, but watching everything and thinking. After lunch we went to drink a bottle of champagne at the Bateau Ivre. Miró paid the bill with an easyness that I envied and then we walked back home.” 11 Although Viot paid relatively little, he fulfilled his main function: exhibiting Miró. With the support of the surrealist leaders, he organized an individual exhibition at Galerie Pierre from June 12 to 27, 1925. The preface to the catalog of the exhibition was signed by poet Benjamin Péret. Attending the inauguration at midnight on June 12 were the signatories of the invitation, that is, those who summon the public to attend the exhibition, among whom Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, André Breton, René Crével, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, André Masson and Benjamin Péret. And this time, the exhibition is a great success of critics and public and sales actually happen, including some from major fashion designer and collector Jacques Doucet, who had just bought Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Miró is beside himself with joy. He could not have imagined such a resounding triumph. But there is still more: in November of that year, Miró is also included in the collective exhibition La peinture surréaliste at Galerie Pierre. And here accompany Miró his admired Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, André Masson, Man Ray and Pierre Roy. New critic and public success. He also 11 Altamira, Luis E. La estrategia parisina de Miró http://diarioalfil.com.ar/2013/04/22/laestrategia-parisina-de-miro/ 17 participates again in Madrid in another collective exhibition of the Society of Iberian Artists. In that year he also paints some of his best surrealist works, such as The Harlequin's Carnival. It is the definitive consecration, Miró thinks. And he takes advantage of the acquired fame to try to make some cash, selling work directly to collectors like the Belgians Camille Goemans and René Gaffé. He can do it because his ruined Parisian dealer Jacques Viot flees abroad in July 1926, and until he signs a new contract with Viot's partner, Pierre Loeb, he will have the possibility of selling the paintings he has in his possession Those already in the gallery warehouse are –once again– sequestered by justice, since the gallery was formally in the name of Viot and not of Loeb. Miró offers his acquaitances to perform any work. The first of these side jobs leads him to his first clash with the Surrealist group. Thanks to Picasso, who sent to Miró's studio librettist Boris Kochno and dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar – Serge Diaghilev’s lovers– the businessman orders from Miró and Max Ernst the sets for the Romeo & Juliet piece of his Ballets Russes. It’s only 3,000 francs for the two (about $ 2,850 in 2016) and involve a lot of preparation work, design and assembly supervision. But it includes travel expenses and it is good money for two painters in need. The modest remuneration does not prevent the revolutionary surrealist dogmatists from accusing them of selling themselves to capital and expelling them from the group. Breton and Aragon publish in number 7 of the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste, the article Protest in which, not daring to charge against bourgeois but powerful Picasso, they try to demolish Ernst and Miró, denouncing as inadmissible “that intellect be at the service of money. There is no year, however, that does reveal the submission of a man we believed irreducible to the powers he opposed until then”. For the surrealists, the action of the two painters is equivalent to accepting “the domestication of dreams and the revolts of physical and intellectual hunger for the benefit of the international aristocracy.” 12 On May 18, the play is performed at the 12 Aragon, L y Breton, A. Protestation, La Révolution Surréaliste nº 7, Paris 18 June 1926, p. 31. Text: “Il n'est pas admissible que la pensée soit aux ordres de l'argent. Il n'est pourtant pas d'année qui n'apporte la soumission d'un homme qu'on croyait irréductible aux puissances auxquelles il s'opposait jusqu'alors. Peu importent les individus qui se résignent à ce point à en passer par les conditions sociales, l'idée de laquelle ils se réclamaient avant une telle abdication subsiste en dehors d'eux. C'est en ce sens que la participation des peintres Max Ernst et Joan Miró au prochain spectacle des Ballets russes ne saurait impliquer avec le leur le déclassement de l'idée surréaliste. Idée essentiellement subversive, qui ne peut 18 Sarah Bernhardt theater in Paris. The surrealists try to sabotage the representation by throwing leaflets with the text of the article into the stalls. The attack from the two surrealist bosses will not do much damage to Miró, because it gives him great publicity, which is precisely what he needs, and allows him to make himself known beyond Parisian circles. And as soon as the scandal breaks out, he sells several paintings to René Gaffé. Breton will soon realize that his attempt to punish Miró, whom he knows does not share the revolutionary ideology of the group, has done nothing but benefit the painter. After the intervention of Paul Éluard, he readmits Miró to the group without demanding from then on that he adheres to its postulates or manifestos. But the dissensions within the surrealist group will continue to grow and Miró will keep distancing himself from them. The first victims of the disagreements will be, as always happens, publications, such as La Révolution surréaliste, Le Grand Jeu, La Lutte de classes, Distances, and L'Esprit. To save what he could, Breton and Aragon on February 12, 1929, when they had already joined the Communist Party, sent a questionnaire to Surrealists and fellow travelers, asking them about their position regarding collective action13. The letter is sent to seventy-four composer avec de semblables entreprises, dont le but a toujours été de domestiquer au profit de l'aristocratie internationale les rêves et les révoltes de la famine physique et intellectuelle. Il a pu sembler à Ernst et à Miró que leur collaboration avec M. de Diaghilew, légitimée par l'exemple de Picasso, ne tirait pas à si grave conséquence. Elle nous met pourtant dans l'obligation, nous qui avons avant tout souci de maintenir hors de portée des négriers de toutes sortes les positions avancées de l'esprit, elle nous met dans l'obligation de dénoncer, sans considération de personnes, une attitude qui donne des armes aux pires partisans de l'équivoque morale. On sait que nous ne faisons qu'un cas très relatif de nos affinités artistiques avec tel ou tel. Qu'on nous fasse l'honneur de croire qu'en mai 1926 nous sommes plus que jamais incapables d'y sacrifier le sens que nous avons de la réalité révolutionnaire. Louis Aragon, André Breton. 18 mai 1926”. 13 Monsieur, Vous ne vous désintéressez pas absolument, autant que l'on sache, des possibilités d'action commune entre un certain nombre d'hommes que vous appréciez plus ou moins, les ayant plus ou moins connus, ayant eu plus ou moins l'occasion de les juger sur tel ou tel acte privé ou public, et désespérant ou espérant, à tort ou à raison, plus ou moins d'eux. Peut-être jugerez-vous opportun de procéder à une confrontation générale entre les différents points de vue qui sont les leurs et qui, peut-être, aujourd'hui les opposent diversement. Les questions personnelles, dont il a toujours été admis que chacun faisait bon marché, peuventelles ou doivent-elles prévaloir contre les raisons que ces hommes auraient d'agir ensemble, si l'on considère l'importance et l'efficacité d'un accord susceptible de s'établir à nouveau entre eux, ou une partie d'entre eux ? Y a-t-il antinomie foncière entre ce qu'ils pensent ? Nous nous permettons d'attirer votre attention sur ce fait : il ne paraît presque plus rien qui nous 19 intellectuals and artists. Miró did not hesitate, he was closer to Rimbaud, who seeks to 'change his life' through poetry, than to revolutionary surrealists or communists, who want to 'transform the world'. In order not to hurt susceptibilities, Miró does not deauthorize politicians, but he excludes himself in his response: “There is no doubt that when action is carried out, it is always the result of a collective effort. However, I am convinced that individuals whose personalities are strong or excessive ... these people will never be able to yield to the military discipline that community action necessarily demands”. Aragon and Breton will also bother Picasso, but he has sufficient resources to ignore the wriggles of the writers. No. 2 of La Révolution Surréaliste, dated January 1925, published part of the drawings contained in the Carnet de Juan-les-Pins of 1925, which constitute in some way an advance of Miró’s Constellations. It is a series of 24 pages of designs, a part of which are composed of lines joined by dots that outline to the extreme different topics. The linear drawings of the carnet give rise to various interpretations, especially by his Surrealist friends. But Picasso is quick to cut them clean, taking advantage of a tasty text in which he tries to disprove the theories of critics who seek to explain Cubism through scientific or ideological considerations. It is the 'Letter on Art' that begins with his famous boutade "I do not look for. I find ", published in Moscow on May 16, 1926 in the magazine Огонёк (read Ogoniok, The intéresse, les uns ou les autres. On annonce bien une revue marxiste, une revue d'opposition communiste, une revue de psychologie concrète, etc., mais il semble que ces publications éprouvent des difficultés à paraître, et en revanche La Lutte de Classes, Le Grand Jeu, Distances, L'Esprit, La Révolution surréaliste, etc., ne paraissent plus. Devrons-nous permettre qu'on en tire des conclusions et que nos ennemis communs tablent de plus en plus sur l'impossibilité où nous sommes de concerter, sur quelque base que ce soit, une action commune ou renoncer à nous compter autour d'un certain nombre d'idées, positives ou négatives, après tout assez bien déterminées, et dont la portée seule est sujette à discussion ? Un certain nombre d'entre nous se refusent de croire à la nécessité, à la fatalité de l'éparpillement de nos efforts et à la spécialisation outrancière qui en résulte. C'est pourquoi vous êtes prié de répondre par écrit aux questions suivantes : 1. - Estimez-vous que, tout compte fait (importance croissante des questions de personnes, manque réel de déterminations extérieures, passivité remarquable et impuissance à s'organiser des éléments les plus jeunes, insuffisance de tout appoint nouveau, et par suite accentuation de la répression intellectuelle dans tous les domaines), votre activité doit ou non se restreindre, définitivement ou non, à une forme individuelle ? 2. - a) Si oui, voulez-vous faire à ce qui a pu réunir la plupart d'entre nous le sacrifice d'un court exposé de vos motifs ? Définissez votre position. b) Si non, dans quelle mesure considérez-vous qu'une activité commune peut être continuée ou reprise ; de quelle nature serait-elle ; avec qui désireriez-vous, ou consentiriez-vous, à la mener ? Les réponses devront être adressées, avant le 25 février 1929, à Raymond Queneau, 18, rue Caulaincourt, Paris ; elles fourniront les bases d'un débat, pour lequel des convocations seront ultérieurement adressées à tous ceux qui, indépendamment de ce qui peut les engager déjà dans des sens différents, auront pris la peine de répondre au questionnaire précédent, signifiant par là qu'utopique ou non, l'entreprise actuelle, qui a priori les comprend, nécessite de leur part un aveu ou un désaveu actif. 20 Light) 14. Picasso ridicules the surrealists who "found with surprise in his album sketches and ink drawings in which there were only points and lines" and gives a totally simple explanation for these designs: "The fact is that I admire astronomy charts a lot. They seem beautiful to me, regardless of their ideological significance. Therefore, one day I started to draw a group of points, joined by lines and spots that seemed suspended in the sky. My idea was to use them later, introducing them as a purely graphic element in my compositions. But those clever surrealists have discovered that these drawings responded exactly to their abstract ideas." Picasso will use these graphic elements in the creation of a whole new arbitrary aesthetic as from 1948, designed precisely to get rid of the pressure of the communist party, which wanted him to stick to the rules of socialist realism. His two main achievements in this regard will be the lithographs of the artist's book Le Chant des Morts in March and the oil on canvas La Cuisine, in its two versions, both from November 1948 15. Unfortunately for Miró, in 1927 the economic bonanza that France had been experiencing since 1924 reached its end. The country developed a very high inflation (30% per year) that implied less purchase power for the remittances the painter continues to receive from his family. On the other hand, his father died and the family's income is severely affected. Besides, Miró is engaged with young Maria Pilar Tei and needs a minimum of financial stability to settle with his future wife in Paris. 14 Translated into French by the art review Formes in its Nº 2, February 1930 pp. 2 - 5). http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6101980w.image (Consulted 05.21.2013) 15 See chapters 8 & 9 (El Chant des Morts y su estética and La cocina de todas las salsas) in Orozco 2015. 21 The dissociation between the painter and the surrealist group affects his pocket. With the support of the surrealist bunch he had obtained the two 1925 exhibitions and had Pierre Loeb hire him for 2,000 francs a month for his entire production (about $ 1,900 in 2016). It was very little in comparison, for example, with Marc Chagall, who in 1926 sells each gouache –from a series of 120– to Ambroise Vollard at one thousand or two thousand francs. But Miró does not receive his stipend for long. After his estrangement from Breton, Loeb does not organize Miró’s next solo exhibition until 1927 and another one in May 1928, at the Galerie Georges Bernheim. Loeb's payments are becoming more and more erratic, and Miró must cancel his marriage with María Pilar Tei a few days before the expected date of the wedding. The reason given is that the young woman is too modern for the conservative Miró. But the painter, who is now 36 years old, is determined to find a wife, and with the help of his conservative family he finds her in Pilar Juncosa, a 25-year-old daughter of a prosperous furniture merchant. She is demure, religious and traditionalist like him. Pilar was a close relative of Miró, because her mother Enriqueta Iglesias Oromi was first cousin of Miró's maternal grandmother, Josefa Oromi. In fact the kinship 'sense' was even closer, because the grandmother of the painter raised Pilar’s mother of as a daughter when she became an orphan. Miró’s mother thus considered Enriqueta, Pilar's mother, as her own sister, and therefore Joan Miró saw in Pilar a first cousin. Enriqueta had also married 'in the family' Lamberto Juncosa Massip, an employee of Miró’s grandfather Josep Ferrà, who later built the first furniture factory in Majorca. They will marry on October 12, 1929, a few days before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that marked the beginning of the Great Depression. But the Mirós have not yet realized the importance of the event and settle in a rented apartment in Paris. The painter responds to Loeb's defaults by not giving him all his work and trying to sell to other dealers. But attempts to place his paintings with other gallerists in Paris are unsuccessful, particularly because the main one, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, persists in ignoring him. In 1929, the dealer speaks contemptuously of Miró as 'smallfry'in a letter of June 15 to the painter José de Togores. For Kahnweiler, “Miró demonstrates a surprising lack of inventiveness. He has been spinning for years without advancing. To believe, according to a widespread idea, that Miró imitates Paul Klee is to give him more credit than he deserves, because in reality he is inspired by Francis Picabia, to the detriment of his own rather naturalistic original style” 16. The year after he wrote such hard words, in 1930, the dealer visited an exhibition at the Pierre Colle gallery, and he just commented that the works of Miró exposed seem very 'pretty' but that he has the impression that the painter turns around in a vicious 16 Galerie Louise Leiris Archives. Cited in Assouline 1988, p.319 22 circle, that 'perfects' an oeuvre whose only value should be its spontaneity 17. The argument would be developed later by Picasso, who in 1948 told Françoise Gilot: “Miró has been for a long time running behind a hoop, dressed like a child” 18. Which does not mean that Picasso did not appreciate his painting. In fact he acquired for his personal collection early works by Miró, among others the famous Self-portrait of 1919 (Picasso Museum in Paris). The andalusian would never get to see The Constellations, starting point of the period that did not convince Picasso. He was not in New York when the exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1945, nor in Paris when they were exhibited in the Berggruen Gallery between January and March 1959. In these days Picasso did not leave the French Riviera at any time, producing non-stop drawings , lithographs, linocuts, oil paintings and sculptures. The andalusian had a new opportunity to see the gouaches in 1968, this time next to home, when the Maeght Foundation exhibited in Saint Paul de Vence –26 km from Mougins– some of the Constellations between July 23 and 30. But he did not make the trip to the home of his unappreciated Maeght, staying all that time in his residence of Notre Dame de Vie, where he was executing dozens of his prints of the 347 Series. Kahnweiler gets even more rude with Miró. While describing Dalí as “always the same, applied, manic and for me very School of Fine Arts”, the judgment on his colleague is much harder: “Miró, very Catalan, that is to say quite vulgar, but in the usual spirit. The objects also completely idiotic”19. Kahnweiler, despite representing André Masson, will always be antipathetic to surrealism in painting and, as Pierre Assouline recalls, he will make the phrase of Maurice de Vlaminck his own: “the surrealists are people who have a telephone installed and who immediately cut the cable” 20. Despite his rejection and ignoring the recommendation of Michel Leiris and Masson to invite Miró to work with him, Kahnweiler will give him the illusion three years later that he could exhibit in his Galerie Simon, but this was within a purely financial operation. It was the Artistic Mutual AidUnion, an 'invention' of the art dealer to get round the economic crisis. But the offer to Miró is not firm nor does it lead to anything. The gallerist writes to the painter on April 16, 1935 and asks him without any reason: “What is your situation from the point of view of business? Are you free or have commitments?” 21 He tells Miró that he has plans for him, but does not give him more details and demands the most absolute secrecy on the matter. A few weeks later, in a letter dated May 9, to Armand Salacrou, a journalist for the L'Humanité Communist Party newspaper and a member of the shopping club, the gallerist says: “I will see Miró at the end of the month and I will try to make him enter the art purchasing group. I think it would be excellent to have Miró so that we can truly group all the important painters of the young generation” 22. But six months before the letter to Salacrou Kahnweiler had reiterated the contemptuous opinion he 17 Assouline 1988, p.267 Gilot & Lake 1998, p. 262 19 Letter to G. L. Roux on 17.12.1932 Cited in Assouline 1988, p.319 20 Assouline 1988, p.267. 21 Assouline 1988, p.318 22 Assouline 1988, p.318 18 23 has of him. In a letter to British critic and collector Douglas Cooper dated November 6, 1934, he says that he still thinks that Miró is “a little figurative Catalan painter who does not lack talent but owes having become surrealist to Masson... A capable little painter, but one who ignores his limits and throws himself into adventures that far exceed his strength” 23. The result is that despite having aroused the painter's hopes, every time Miró shows up at 29 bis on Rue Astorg, where the gallery is based, to ask what’s new about his work, the dealer responds in such a dry way that the painter must leave empty-handed. Kahnweiler's contempt for Miró was maintained in later years. When, after the end of World War II, the dealer settles down to live with his stepdaughter Louise and her husband, the poet Michel Leiris, one of the painter's best friends, the only source of friction with his hosts is a large painting by Miró, La Baigneuse from 1924, which Leiris had bought from Pierre Loeb. Every time he passes, Kahnweiler unhungs it, until Leiris puts it back in its place, and then it's back to square one. Miró realized then that he had exploited the French market to the limit and that he needed an alternative outside the country that generated the income he could not get in Paris. As in Germany and the United Kingdom the market was also controlled by the Jewish dealers based in Paris (Rosenberg, Kahnweiler, Loeb, etc.) and in Spain he could not sell even a single painting, the interest of the painter turned to the other side of the Atlantic. The United States had become, since the end of the First World War, the great emerging power, great fortunes had been formed there, and the art market had risen like foam. It was there you had to go. His first foray into the North American market will be to participate in the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York organized between November 1926 and January 1927 by the Societe Anonyme. The group had been founded in 1920 by Katherine S. Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and was along with the Gallery of Living Art of millionaire Albert Eugene Gallatin, the main promoter of European art in the United States in the 1920s. In 1927, Miró met young critic James Johnson Sweeney, who will be named eight years later curator in MoMA. And in the spring of 1930, Miró, newly installed in Paris, also meets the man who catapulted him to fame and took his work to the main museums of the world: Pierre Matisse. He was the son of Henri Matisse and had lefts France in 1925 for the United States with the firm determination to become a gallerist and with him the painter will work for more than five decades. Pierre was born in 1900, in one of the least economically buoyant times for his father, and although the son painted from a young age, spent a lot of time making copies in the Louvre and came to exhibit at the Salon des Independants in Paris, his father wanted that he learned to play the violin to avoid precariousness. At 23, and after dreaming of becoming a diplomat and traveling the world, Pierre is placed in the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, where he was fortunate to meet writer Henri-Pierre Roché, the author of the novel Jules et Jim that narrates the amorous triangle that he formed with model Helen Grund and German Jewish writer Franz Hessel –the parents of Stéphane Hessel, author of 'Time for Outrage!'. Roché,, who in the first decade of 23 Assouline 1988, p.319 24 the century had been a member of the Picasso band, spent part of the 14-18 war in the United States, as a member of a French military mission, and when the conflict ended he settled in New York as art dealer, working mainly for John Quinn, the first great modern American collector who convinced Congress to abolish the '1909 Tariff Law' that imposed tariffs on the importation of works of art of less than twenty years of age. Roché, thinks that Pierre Matisse will be a gateway to his father, with whose paintings Parisian dealers speculated in the happy twenties leaving their price beyond the reach of American gallerists. Pierre, on the other hand, learned from Roché, and other Americans who visited the Barbazanges gallery that the real art business was on the other side of the Atlantic, especially if one had direct access to the artists and one or two intermediaries could be avoided. So in December 1924 the young Matisse disembarked in New York, without a canvas to sell under his arm, but with a portfolio of works on paper and the determination to make a niche in the American art market. His first exhibition in New York was of lithographs and drawings by his father in the modest bookshop of Eberhard Weyhe at 794 of Lexington Avenue in March-April 1925. It was a small first success, with reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker, but works were sold from $ 25 each (about $ 340 today counting inflation). American dealers thought that Pierre would give them access to his father's œuvre, but Henri was from 1909 under contract with the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which took all his works except eight a year kept by the artist. And Matisse needed the ones he kept to have a stock in 1926, when expiured his contract, which he did not intend to renew. Pierre's path as a gallerist will begin by establishing a friendship with Valentine Dudensing, son of the owner of the Dudensing Gallery. Valentine allowed him to start organizing small exhibitions in the gallery, always with the title “Pierre Matisse presents ...”. In November 1925, guessing that Pierre is going to give him the keys to success, Valentine decides to emancipate himself from his father and open a new gallery in New York, the Valentine Gallery. And in January 1926, John Quinn's collection was sold after his death, at an auction in which Pierre Matisse began to play hard by buying a still life from Henri Matisse and an oil painting by Rousseau le Douanier for a total of $ 22,400. the guarantees being provided by collectors. In this brief and successful operation, Pierre charged a commission of almost ten percent (some $ 30,000 in 2016). The association with his friend in the Valentine Gallery of 43 East 57th Street in New York gave more than satisfactory results for both, selling for example in 1929 more than $ 300,000 in works of art (more than four million dollars of 2016). But the division of labor they had established gave all the visibility and contacts with customers to Valentine. Pierre's job was to spend half a year in France acquiring paintings in small galleries or directly from the painters, while his friend was responsible for organizing the exhibitions and selling. And if Pierre wanted to be an important dealer one day, the essential thing was not to get work, but to organize exhibitions and build a portfolio of clients. This reason, together with the fact that the owner of the gallery was Valentine, who made him understand who was the boss on occasion, pushed Pierre to create his own establishment in 1931. The initial capital to launch it was his share of the stock of paintings of the Valentine Gallery, composed of works by Matisse, Braque, De Chirico, Derain, Dufy, Laurencin, Modigliani, Picasso 25 and Utrillo, valued at $ 39,000 (about $ 610,000 in 2016) and with a sale price of more or less double that amount. But the moment of the separation –decided by Pierre to match the opening of his gallery with a large Henri Matisse retrospective organized by Alfred H. Barr. at MoMA– could not have been more ill-timed. Two years had lapsed since the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the economic situation, even for rich collectors, did not stop deteriorating. And on the other hand, a movement begun before the Great Depression had produced the rejection of European painting and called for support for American modernism. Pierre was not discouraged and decided to persevere, while opening a new line of work. The problem with working with confirmed painters was that he depended on other gallerists in Europe to provide him with works, which raised the cost of acquisition during his summer stays in France. To deal with this problem, Pierre decided to use the thrust provided by Barr .and his new museum, inaugurated two years earlier, to promote among his best clients –among which were A. Conger Goodyear, Stephen Clark, Samuel A. Lewisohn and Albert C. Barnes himself, the patron of the arts... and antiseptics– new painters whose work he could acquire directly at infinitely lower prices than those practiced by the Parisian art dealers. As we will see, the elevation of new painters to the top of the artistic scene –thus multiplying the value of the acquisitions by the museum's patrons– had been the founding motive of MoMA, and Pierre Matisse was one of the dealers who best knew how to take advantage of the new vein of the market. Photo: Pierre Matisse with Picasso and Sabartés at the Brasserie Lipp, Paris 1939 Joan Miró was the archetype of the painter with whom Pierre Matisse sought to build his new prosperity. He was 38 years old in 1931, while the most sought-after painters all combed gray hair. Miró was also part of the group of surrealists who pushed hard in Europe and Barr. defended; and he enjoyed a certain prestige in Europe and the United States, having participated in several group exhibitions in 1926, 1927, 1929, 1930 (two at MoMA) and 1931, in addition to exhibitions at the Valentine Gallery in 1930 and 1931. But what made Miró especially attractive to Pierre is that he knew that the Spanish painter obtained little economic benefit from Pierre Loeb and was much more ambitious for his work than his dealer, an old acquaintance of Matisse. Miró was under contract with Loeb since 1926. But in 1934, 14 years after settling in the art capital, what Miró obtained from his dealer was only 2,000 Francs a month (about $ 1,560 26 today) in exchange for the totality of his work. It was not much, if we take into account that Kahnweiler paid André Masson since 1923 3,000 Francs per month 24 and that even in 1938, when the art market was completely sunk, he still paid 2,500 Francs to Masson and Francisco Bores 25. In addition, Loeb had great difficulty in maintaining the contract with Miró in force due to lack of customers. The Depression had made its mark on the French art market, and the painter does not have enough with his mother's remittances to live with his wife and daughter in Paris. They were thus forced in 1932 to return to Barcelona, settling at the address of Miró's mother. Mironian historiography tends to hide this episode. Domènec Ribot Martín points out for example that if he returned to Barcelona it was because his new contract “with Pierre Matisse freed him from staying in Paris” 26 . The precarious financial situation, a constant in his life until 1949 or 1950, will make the painter cry out in 1978: “If people knew that I painted all these canvases when I was half starved !”27. From Spain, Miró tries to maintain ties, at least epistolary, with his French friends and contacts, among other reasons because through them he could get all kinds of orders that may allow him to earn some cash. We have found, for example, an unpublished letter of 1933 to Prince Aleksandr Shervashidze, set designer for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo with whom he had collaborated a year earlier in the ballet Jeux d'enfants, with music by Georges Bizet and choreography by Léonide Massine. Miró asks him directly for any news he can give him about work and the future plans of the company, no doubt to remind him that he is available to make costumes and sets 28. We have also found another unpublished letter from the artist dated August 2, 1933 to Greek publisher Efstathios (Stratis) Eleftheriades (Ευσταθιος Στρατης Ελευθεριαδης), better known by the pseudonym Tériade, who had been between 1926 and 1931 in charge of modern painting at Cahiers d 'art, the review owned 24 Levaillant 2012 p. 5 Assouline 1988, p.343 26 Ribot Martín, 2010, p. 116. 27 Amón, 1978. 28 Letter to Prince Aleksandr Shervashidze of Abkhazia del 03. 21.1933 25 27 by his compatriot Christian Zervos. After separating from Zervos, Tériade joined Sephardic Jew Albert Skira, who had just launched Minotaure magazine. Miró tells him in this letter that he has taken the trouble to find a point of sale for the magazine in Barcelona, suggesting that he does not entrust it to a bookseller, but to the ADLAN group that his friends Joan Prats, Josep Lluís Sert and Joaquim Gomis had just founded in the city. Miró was very interested in keeping contact with Skira and Tériade, because they had published Les métamorphoses d’Ovide two years before, illustrated with thirty original etchings by Picasso. The following year, 1932, they had repeated with the publication of Poésies by Stéphane Mallarmé, illustrated with twenty-nine etchings by Henri Matisse. Miró knew that Skira had plenty of funds and wanted to be the third illustrator. He thus indicated in his letter that “For the illustration of the book that we have talked about with Mr. Skira, I would prefer that you tell me the writers you want to edit and you think I can illustrate. The work would be more exciting for me because it would create a new problem that would excite my imagination even more than if I had to think of a writer before.” The wealthy Skira had started his career by showing up before Picasso offering him to illustrate a book about Napoleon. The andalusian did not pay any attention to him, but at the insistence of the young publisher, he agreed to illustrate a book, demanding that it be a mythological subject. Miró will not achieve his purpose of obtaining the publishing contract, and the third book by Albert Skira Editeur in 1934 will be illustrated by Salvador Dalí with forty-two etchings (Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont). Miró also refers in the August 1933 letter to his collaboration with Minotaure, stating that "I also intend to make some drawings for your magazine and a cover this summer. I will keep you informed of all this and also of the studies I will do for the etching, as I promised." Actually, Tériade belittled Miró, whose presence in Minotaure was limited to the cover illustration of No. 7, dated June 1935 and some drawings, while other painters, such as Picasso, Matisse, Masson or Derain occupied much more space in the magazine. And this despite the fact that the painter had helped to finance it in an exercise of disinterested crowdfunding, precisely with the engraving referred to in the letter, entitled Daphnis et Chloé (Dupin 9), published in 1933 with a print run of 110 numbered copies signed by the painter. Nor was Miró more fortunate with the following project of Tériade, the Verve magazine, launched in 1937 that, with funding from Hearst Corporation, William Randolph Hearst ‘s conglomerate, associated the strongest artistic and literary movements of the time, using the most advanced printing techniques of the moment. Artists like Matisse, Braque, Chagall, Borés, Masson, Picasso and many others were directly involved in the success of the Verve adventure. But in the 23 years of publication of the magazine –26 issues in total– Tériade did not dedicate one single issue to Miró. He simply used three lithographs by the artist, among them the wonderful The Dog Barking at the Moon published in No 27-28 of 1952. His surrealist companions also abandon Miró in these difficult times. Miró writes on Christmas Eve 1932 to André Breton, after apologizing for not having paid a visit to him before leaving for Spain, to inform him that Paul “Éluard has just written to me to say that it is impossible for him to write an article about my exhibition in the Colle Gallery, as I had requested, for Cahiers d'Art (number that will appear in February) “. 28 He then asks if Breton could write it in his place. Finally, he adds: !If you were too busy, do you think you could ask Peret or Crével?” 29 There will be no review of the exhibition with a prestigious signature in Cahiers d'Art. The troubled Miró, who after confirming that “the world has changed a lot” encourages Belgian painter Alice Frey in a letter of November 2 to “continue to advance bravely, especially at this time, in which, no matter the cost, you have to stay on your feet, without batting an eye” then tries to get Paul Rosenberg take over Loeb's contract, without results. And after an exhibition organized by Loeb at the Georges Bernheim Gallery in Paris in November 1933 (The last works of Joan Miró) in which nothing was sold, Miró wrote to Pierre Matisse from Hotel Recamier in Paris asking him to exhibit those same paintings in New York and insinuating him to take charge of his career in the United States 30. The gallerist wants to get hold of Miró and does not waste time. A month and a half later, the Joan Miró exhibition opens at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, with a catalog with texts by Ernest Hemingway and James Johnson Sweeney, obtaining numerous favorable reviews. But on January 18, 1934 the exhibition closes and not a single sale has been produced. The dealer does not recoil, and takes the same exhibition (Paintings by Joan Miró, March 16-30) to the Arts Club of Chicago, founded by Elizabeth 'Bobsy' Fuller, who later would acquire a Constellation. At the same time, Matisse proposes Loeb to take over 50% of Miró's production, freeing the Frenchman of the obligation to pay 1,000 Francs a month to the painter ($ 780 of 2016), with an option for another 25% and with exclusivity of sales throughout the Americas and especially to American customers, wherever they were. The proud Loeb wants to get rid of the burden, but he does not want Matisse to become an equal, thus he proposes that Miró be shared among four dealers, each paying 500 francs to the painter in exchange for 25% of his production. And he contacts Kahnweiler, who reacts late and will propose to Pierre Matisse, in a letter dated June 24, 1935 to join him to handle the 'Miró affair' 31. The letter –a copy of which is kept in the Archives of the Louise Leiris Gallery– does not even appear registered in those of the Pierre Matisse Gallery conserved in The Morgan Library & Museum of New York. Matisse does not accept in any case to deal with Kahnweiler nor the 25% that Loeb proposes, and insists on sticking to the proposed 50% of the production, with an option for another 25% more. Meanwhile, the painter, who saw the European market sinking and had great difficulty in collecting Loeb's stipend, accepted the 50% proposal, not without noting in a letter dated April 29, 1934 to Pierre Matisse that he had accepted such modest conditions “given the difficulty of these present times and the sacrifices that we shall all have to make, each in his own way, until success comes our way” 32. Pierre Loeb, who was 29 André Breton Archives. Référence 7035000 Letter to Pierre Matisse 11.5.1933, Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives. MA 5020: Box 18, Folder 19 (Correspondence, 1930–1935). Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, The Morgan Library & Museum. New York, N.Y. Hereinafter, documents from this Archive will be quoted giving its initials plus box and folder numbers, i.e., PMGA 18.19 31 Assouline 1988, p.319 32 PMGA. 18.19. Reproduced in Russell 1999, p.114 30 29 also unable to afford the thousand francs that corresponded to him, finally offered to give Matisse three quarters of Miró's production. Another great advantage that Miró represented for Matisse was his iron discipline, his availability, his reliability and his flexibility to satisfy the needs of his dealer and the market. John Russell recalls how any request from the gallerist was immediately satisfied by the artist: “If Pierre had a client who wanted a painting by Miró with a dog barking at a kite in the sky, Miró was happy to go along” 33. The painter handed over to his dealer the work produced in Matisse’s annual trips to Paris, and in April 1936 spells out all he will carry to their annual meeting: a total of 156 works, adding that he expected to finish another 25 paintings during the summer. 33 Russell 1999, p.119 30 2. The flight from revolutionary Catalonia (1936) In the nineteen thirties, Miró’s work underwent a profound transformation that according to the New York Museum of Modern Art “included a partial return to illusionism and the pursuit of what he called ‘aggressiveness’ through color”34. After the series of Dutch interiors and imaginary portraits from 1928-29, the painter had made a group of more than twenty large collages that constitute for him the counterpoint to the previous series. Then he executed between January and May 1930 a series of large paintings with white backgrounds. As from the summer of 1930 he will give his œuvre a new turn, turning to make until 1932 wooden objects combined with painted figures, and that he refused to call sculptures. The sinuous shapes of some of the figures are reminiscent of those of his friend and studio neighbor Jean Arp. In 1933, a year after his forced return to Spain due to lack of resources to live in Paris, the painter began a series of eighteen pairs of collages with geometric figures cut out of magazines and newspapers and paintings based on them in which those figures transform into abstract or biometric shapes painted with a palette absolutely typical of Miró. Then, between August 1933 and June 1934, the painter made another series, this time of collages of kitsch character taken from postcards glued on surreal drawings made on papers of different texture and color. At the beginning of 1934 that series is transformed into pure collages, even adding aluminum foil that produces a mirror effect in part of the work. At the same time he paints large oil paintings on canvas whose style resembles the Constellations gouaches of 1940-41, such as Hirondelle, amour (199 by 247 cm) that Nelson A. Rockefeller acquired in Matisse's gallery and then gave it to MoMA. 34 MoMA press release Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937. New York. Nov. 2, 2008 31 But his style and themes are going to change radically that same year of 1934. Miró is not calm, he has been uneasy due to the atmosphere reigning in republican Catalonia, and the threats he perceived for his tranquility and that of his people, as well as for the continuity of his main economic sustenance. For Miró, the Montroig estate is not only a sure source of income, but the land on which he has unfolded his roots and which serves as inspiration for its artistic imaginary. In 1928 he had declared to Francesc Trabal: “All my work is conceived in Montroig, everything I have done in Paris is conceived in Montroig”35. The estate and farm represented everything for the painter. On April 14, 1931, Francesc Macià, leader of Esquerra Republicana de Cataluña (ERC, Catalan Republican Left), had proclaimed the Catalan State in Barcelona, a move he withdrew a few days later after an agreement with the Republicans of the rest of Spain. Miró, forced for economic reasons to reside in Spain, is completely disinterested in the events that occur in Catalonia, but they do worry him. In the aforementioned letter to his friend, Belgian painter Alice Frey, dated February 11, 1933, he says: “As for my work, I produce non-stop, with faith, and I often make trips to Paris. It goes without saying that Paris is my point of attack, Spain does not count for me anymore and I am not here to do anything other than work”. On the death of Macià in December 1933, Lluís Companys, the founder of the Unió de Rabassaires farm tenants union, went on to lead the party and to preside the Generalitat. On Monday April 14, 1934 Companys promulgates the Law of Cultivation Contracts, which facilitated access to the property for land tenants, bypassing the regime that limited the duration of land rental contracts, thereby weakening the power of the landlords. As we have seen, two weeks later, on Tuesday, April 29, Miró writes to Pierre Matisse asking him to take charge of his work, with the hope of having a secure source of income outside of Spain. But the lobby of the farm landowners was determined to prevent the application of the law, and with the support of the conservative Regionalist League, challenged it before the Spanish Court of Constitutional Guarantees. The court annulled it and this created a confrontation between the republican government in Madrid and ERC, which withdrew its deputies to the Spanish parliament and fomented an insurrection. The Catalan parliament voted again the same law text and on September 30, 1934, the official gazette of the Generalitat published the implementing regulations. On October 5, the Socialists had proclaimed the revolutionary general strike throughout Spain in order to overthrow the government of the republic, composed after de 1933 elections of the monarchist right (CEDA) and the republican center-right (the Republican Radical Party). The Workers' Alliance of Catalonia joined the uprising. The next day, Companys proclaimed once again the Catalan State and asked army units stationed in Catalonia to place themselves at his orders. The captain general of the region, General Domingo Batet, a republican Catalan who in 1936 would be shot for opposing the Franco uprising, refused to obey the order of the Generalitat, and after consulting with the president of the Republican government of Madrid, Barcelona deputy Alejandro Lerroux, proclaimed the state of war. The insurgents deployed their 35 Trabal, Francesc, Una conversa amb Joan Miró, La Publicitat, Barcelona, July 14,1928. Cited in Minguet Batllori 2000, p. 25 32 forces and built barricades in the center of Barcelona, but in just a few hours Batet obtained their surrender after some fighting. The violence started when a group of shop assistants began firing at an infantry company and a battery of the artillery regiment while army officers read the state of war proclamation on the Rambla de Santa Mónica, a short walk from Miró's house, resulting in the death of one sergeant and the wounding of seven other soldiers. In total, there were forty-six deaths in Barcelona, of which thirty-eight were civilians and eight were military, almost all within a perimeter of a few hundred meters from Miró's home (Via Layetana, Plaza de San Jaime, Ramblas). The painter had planned to come to the city to attend the inauguration on October 7th of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia, but the disturbances kept him in Montroig. But in the rest of Spain, especially in Asturias, the attempted socialist coup was much more bloody: between 1500 and 2000 dead, of which about 320 were members of the police or army and about 35 priests. Once the rebel Generalitat was dissolved, the republican authorities annulled the Law of Cultivation Contracts of ERC and almost three thousand eviction lawsuits of 'rabassaires' and sharecroppers were processed 36. The impact of these events, increased by the presentation of them in the press, which treats the rebels of “beasts, monsters and infra-men” 37 leaves a fulminating impact in the work of the conservative, religious and moderate republican that was Miró. As Professor Martín Martín points out, “As the days go by and the crisis situation becomes more and more tangible, Miró feels how his optimism is breaking, and new and homunculous characters are born under the sign of the grotesque” 38. Suddenly, the collages with kitsch images, the hats in homage to Joan Prats and the oil paintings full of poetry give way in Miró's work to the aggressiveness that MoMA speaks of, to the monsters. They are the paper pastels that initiate the so-called savage paintings of 1934-36. For Roland Penrose, they “suddendly spoke of new and terrirying experiences... The biomorphic shapes in pure colour, which had moved in a rhythmic dance in the compositions of 1933, now became solidified into fierce emboduiments of female monsters seen in brilliant colour”. According to the British surrealist and radical, “It becomes obvious from these pastels alone that Miró had been deeply affected by political events over which he had no control and about which he was compelled to unburden his disquiet”39. And the monsters with big heads and sharp fangs appear exactly after the revolutionary general strike and the proclamation of the Calalan State in October 1934. For the right-wing press that Miró read, the revolutionaries were vermin, and even the liberal daily El Sol called for the death penalty “for beasts capable of monstrous events that not even a degenerate is capable of imagining”, a request that was echoed by La Vanguardia in Barcelona40. 36 Cárdaba Carrascal, 2001. pp. 43-44 García Fernández 2003. 38 Martín Martín 1982; p.175 39 Penrose 1992 p.p. 77-79 40 La Vanguardia, October 19, 1934, p. 20 37 33 These savage paintings have been the part of his œuvre that Miró least wanted to talk about. When at the end of the 50s the painter –pushed by Maeght– invited German critic Walter Erben to Majorca, to write a monograph about him like the one he had just published on Chagall, the professor ignores this period, and even goes so far as to say in his 1959 book: “The style of this fresco (The Reaper of 1937) presages the savage paintings to which Miró will consecrate much later” 41. A monumental error. Later, and now incapable of burying the 1934 date anymore, historiography has tried to hide the direct link between these paintings and the October revolution. Rosa María Malet, for example, points out when speaking of the savage paintings that “their first manifestation is a series of fifteen large pastels executed in the summer of 1934” 42, that is, between June and September, which excludes any relationship between the proclamation of the Catalan State and the Miró terror. The Miró Foundation is even more imprecise, dating the pastels simply in 1934 43. Even Jacques Dupin, in the 2012 edition of his monumental monograph on Miró insists on dating the pastels in the “summer of 1934” 44. What the members of the Miró clan cannot hide is that, as MoMA pointed out in the 2008 exhibition, Miró himself inscribed on the back of all these pastels a date: "October 1934" and that, this date “makes a direct connection to a particular historical moment... October was a traumatic month for Spain that year. General labor strikes erupted throughout the country, a state of war was declared, and the army was authorized to violently suppress the rebellion... The engorged, luridly colored, and illusionistically modeled anatomies of what he later described as his ‘savage’ pastels signal a rupture with the past that is proportional to the highly charged political situation”45. We can be even more precise than MoMA, noting that the pastels were painted precisely during the days of the revolutionary general strike and the proclamation of the Catalan State and the brief repression that followed. The proof is that just after finishing the paintings, on October 12, Miró writes to Pierre Matisse, who had already confirmed that he would be his exclusive dealer, to announce his 41 Erben 1960. p. 138 Malet 1983, p. 15 43 http://www.fmirobcn.org/col-leccio/catalogo-obras/21690/personaje (Consulted 9.8.2015) 44 Dupin 2012 p. 185 45 MoMA presents the first major museum exhibition to focus on the transformative decade of joan miró’s work between 1927 and 1937, MoMA Department of Communication, New York, October 27, 2008 Press release announcing the exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937 42 34 sending of the paintings 46. The pastels, dated in Montroig, were therefore painted precisely in the days preceding Friday, October 12. Once the operation of rewriting Miró's biography and creating his myth has been launched, the tale that will explain these paintings will be based not on the events experienced by Miró and Spain in October 1934, but on their 'prophetic character', premonitory of the civil war, implying that they do not reflect the impact of the 1934 revolution on the painter, but his intuition of what was to come. Penrose, who received all the explanations of an already revisionist Miró in 1969, says in his 1970 biography that the savage paintings were “a prophecy of the crescendo of horror that was to begin with the Spanish Civil War two years later” 47. For Joan Punyet Miró, writing in 1993, his grandfather projects in the savage paintings “visionary images of suffering and death, those of the 1936 civil war” 48. Erben himself will correct his 1959 blunder and will register himself, with the help of the painter, as an adept of the prophetic paradigm when quoting Miró in 1989: “I had a subconscious feeling of disaster threat ... It was more a bodily sensation than an intellectual perception. I sensed a catastrophe, which would happen soon, but I did not know which one: it was the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War...” 49. Domènec Ribot points out in 2010 that from 1934 “his œuvre testifies of a human drama that was to come”. He adds that “his human figures express a certain drama, as if he foreshadowed the terrible misfortunes of the war that was coming” 50. Ribot recalls that in the savage paintings, Miró “creates an atmosphere of anguish” in which “the monsters appear everywhere”, thus reflecting “a terrified world” 51. Professor Boix Pons points out that the savage paintings reflect his profound rejection of the political and social crisis... premonitory of the terrible disasters of the wars that will soon come 52. But the painter himself had previously confirmed the link between the events of the time and the savage paintings, affirming in 1962, before his biography was rewritten, that these paintings “mark the beginning of the cruel and difficult years that the world lived through. They swarm with oppositions, conflicts, contrasts. I call them my ‘savage paintings’. Thinking abour death led me to create monsters that both attracted and repelled me” 53. Miró will also comment in 1978, referring this time to his Still-life with old shoe: “I was conscious of painting something terribly grave ... The composition is realistic because this atmosphere of terror had paralyzed me and I could not paint almost anything” 54. And the death fear of the painter's leads him to paint the whole series of 46 PMGA 18.19, reproduced inRowell 1992 p. 124 Penrose 1992, p. 77 48 Punyet Miró.& Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p. 55 49 Erben 1989 p. 80 50 Ribot Martín 2010. p. 126 51 Ribot Martín 2010. p. 128 52 Boix Pons, 2010. p. 128 53 Chevalier, Denys Miró, Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture, Paris, November 1962. Reproduced in Rowell 1992, pp. 262-271 54 Rowell 1992 pp. 290-295 47 35 savage paintings, which for Professor Martín, define a common note: “their monstrous appearance and the certainly wild aggression that his persons present... Iconographic characteristics that reflect the inner tension and the anguished state of the author in that bitter period of his life” 55. The question to be elucidated is what produces the terror in Miró, who are the monsters, who the painter fears, and the answer of the historiography has been that what Miró tried in the period 1934-36, and also in the works of 1937-38 in which the same terrifying persons reappear, is simply to denounce the oppression of the peasantry and the rise of fascism. The monsters are therefore the fascists. For Miró's biographers since 1970, the savage paintings are evidence of the painter's antifascist commitment. According to Punyet Miró, before the outbreak of the war, Miró, already “shut away in his farm, joins in thought the republicans and fights with the weapon that is still his: art” 56. Thus, when Miró painted on January 2, 1935 Head of a Man, an oil on cardboard of 104 by 74 cm in which he represents an extremely deformed face, and which is a continuation of the pastels of October 1934, his grandson claims that it is “the direct impression felt by the artist in the face of the hunger and fear of the peasants ... a man shouting his anger, as a prelude to the fear and despair that will mark the coming years” 57. As late as 2008, Jacques Dupìn still adhered to the premonition theory. Writing about Miró’s works from late March to early April 1936: “The premonition, the foreshadowing of the Spanish civil war, as well as the horrors of the Nazis and Franco drastically changed his manner of painting and drawing. Fear and cruelty took over his forms and colors. Deformations were pronounced to the point of metamorphosis. Monstrous beings unfurled and blossomed in an exacerbated eroticism […].Miró’s monsters did not come from elsewhere, they were not taken from some distant or legendary mythology, but rather were transmuted excerpts from the close at hand and familiar”58. Terror will continue to dominate the work of Miró in the following two years, in which the differences between right and left are sharpening in Spain and Catalonia and 55 Martín Martín 1982. p.175 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, p. 57 57 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, pp. 55-56 58 Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Drawings, Paris, 2008, vol. I, p. 11, no. 598 56 36 positions are being radicalized until the conflict erupts. The bipolarization that had produced the October revolution had no turning back. The monsters are repeated in his paintings on cardboard of 1935, as Person in the Presence of Nature, of February 1, 1935; Rope and People I, dated March 27; or the monstrous Two Women, of April 13, 1935, all filled with violence and terror. For Professor Martín, these works “are part of a naughty universe where ferocity, deformation and strong chromatic contrasts reign” 59 . But in an example of reinterpretation, his grandson Punyet Miró claims that in Rope and People I, “the symbolism of the painting illustrates both physical and political struggle. The peasant's rope, glued in the middle of the canvas, is like an image of coercion and lack of freedom. Oppression, captivity and repression of ideals....” 60. It seems to us, however, that the rope represents the feeling of oppression Miró felt himself in Catalonia in 1935. That reminded him of an anecdote two years before that Man Ray will later describe: “We were many visiting Max Ernst's studio. Miró was very taciturn; it was hard to make him talk. A violent discussion arose and we asked Miró to give his opinion. But he was stubbornly silent. Max took a rope, passed it over a wooden beam, made a slipknot and put the rope around Miró's neck, while others tied his hands. Max threatened to hang him if he did not speak. Miró did not resist and continued with his mouth closed. He was delighted to be the subject of so much attention. When he came to pose for me, in an act of perfidy I hung a rope behind him, as an accessory. He did not comment, but the theme of the rope was included in the paintings he painted thereafter.” 61 The chimeras are still present in the following series by Miró, that of small paintings on masonite, made from October 1935. On February 16 and 23, 1936, the last general elections of the Second Spanish Republic were held, won by the Popular Front. In Catalonia, Esquerra Republicana obtained most seats. Unlike in 1933, this time the winners are the revolutionaries. Precisely between the 15th and the 29th, Miró painted –with the colors of the Republican flag– his phantasmagorical Personages Attracted by the Forms of a Mountain, with their monstrously fantastic figures that, no matter how hard James Thrall Soby insists, do not sustain his affirmation that “Miro's mood seems to have been especially joyful at this moment” 62. The series will close at the end of May with the disturbing painting on massonite Personages and Mountains. As Domènec Ribot 59 Martín Martín 1982. p. 176 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, p. 56 61 Man Ray 1964, p. 224 62 Soby 1959 p. 80 60 37 points out, “if the image of the monstrous had appeared a short time ago, it was now evident in reality itself” 63. The figure of Joan Miró in relation to the Spanish civil war and the Franco dictatorship has been forever engraved in public opinion through the pochoir Aidez l'Espagne and the mural The reaper that decorated the Spanish republic pavilion in The Universal Exhibition of Paris 1937. Miró would have been a Republican militant and a victim of Franco that was forced to exile in Paris by the civil war. James Thrall Soby, even granting that “Among his friends Miro is known for his almost total lack of interest in political matters”, points out that “At the same time, he cannot have failed to have been outraged by the atrocities of General Franco’s Fascist and Nazi allies. 64. The ‘republican’ interpretation, now spelled in catalan nationalist terms, reaches its exasperation in a book by U.S. art historian Robin Adèle Greeley, from the Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies of the University of Connecticut and specialized in marxism, ‘post-colonialism’ and Mexican muralists who, after spending some time in Catalonia, funded by the Miró Foundation, published in 2006 ‘Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War’. Greeley presents in this work the contrast between a fascist Dalí, a communist Picasso and a Catalanist Miró immersed in the revolutionary anarchist and Trotskyist currents of Catalonia in the first third of the 20th century. In order to get there, she departs from an assumption: the alleged state of subjugation of the region, “that had become a sort of vice-royalty in which the action of the military authorities went unchecked” 65. Her main source is none other than the historian of Catalan nationalism Albert Balcells, director of the Història dels Països Catalans. The historian insinuates that if Miró left for Paris in 1920, it is not because he wanted to flee the stinking waters of Barcelona, but as a protest against the rejection by Madrid of the statute of the Catalan Commonwealth of 1919. Next, Greeley pretends that the 1921-22 painting The Farm and the surrealist and lyrical Head of a Catalan Peasant series from 1924-25 constitute Miró's attempt to claim the Catalan identity and promote nationalism in the face of 'Spanish repression'. To back her assertion, Greeley cites as alleged source articles by Josep Carner i Puigoriol, “prince of Catalan poets” and Spanish diplomat in La Veu de Catalunya. This was the newspaper of the conservative Regionalist League, in which wrote, among others Francesc Cambó, Josep María Junoy, Eugenio d'Ors, Josep Pla, Carlos Sentís or Ignasi Agustí, all Catalanists 63 Ribot Martín 2010. p. 131 Soby 1959 p.80 65 Greeley 2006, p. 22 64 38 who, at the time of the war, passed in block to the Francoist side. For Greeley, Miró uses his 1920-25 work to materialize the political meaning of his assassination of painting project by incorporating politicized symbols of Catalan identity, particularly representations of the Catalan peasant, whether the object of the painting has to do with Catalonia or if not. The Catalanist sentiment and support for nationalist political movements thus become important parts of Miró's production in the period 66. According to the scholar, during the October Revolution and the riots that followed the proclamation of the Catalan State in 1934 –pompted according to her by the CEDA “extreme right” party’s intention to follow Hitler and Mussolini– Miró, who “like most Spaniards” could barely be informed of the “brutal repression” of the Madrid government, reacted to the imprisonment of “30,000 to 40,000 political prisoners” by collaborating from Paris (Sic) with the Catalan nationalists in a special issue –made by J. Lluis Sert and Joan Prats– of the magazine D'Aci i d'Allà, sending an original gouache, Personnages Devant la Mer (Figures by the Sea) that would by reproduced in pochoir 67, and reproductions of other works of his from the peintures sauvages series. For the author, and despite the fact that, according to her, censorship prevented any direct reference to the issue of Catalan nationalism, there is no doubt that, as “leftist critic” Magì A. Cassanyes wrote, Miró deals in this series of works with “Catalanism and the specific historical moment of crisis that threatened his home country” 68. Actually, D'Aci i d'Allà was a snobby magazine of the Catalan bourgeoisie that tried to imitate Vanity Fair and Vogue; the special issue of the magazine was simply dedicated to Modern Art; Cassanyes was a right-wing critic who, like other friends of Miró, joined the Franco National Movement; and nothing that can support Greeley's thesis appears in this whole issue of the magazine 69. For the historian, Miró's aesthetic reaction to the October revolution (the savage paintings) must be read as “a negative criticism of the Republican government's swing to the right, and to its extreme measures of repression” 70. The singular interpretation by Greeley will not fall on deaf ears, and will be part of the great exhibition of 2011-2012, whose curators, Matthew Gale and Marko Daniel will claim that “the small farmers and tenants of Mont-roig were among the burgeoning classes. Locally inclined towards autonomy, some were politically motivated toward separatism and some, even, towards the communalism and anarchism that had swept through Spain”, adding that in 1917 Miró's portraits “announced a more generic revolutionary allegiance to the manual worker”. They also emphasize that his 'Catalan' 66 Greeley 2006, pp.22-27 Sert will keep the original gouache and will donate in 1964 to the Fogg Art Museum (Object Number: 1964.58) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the museums of Harvard University where he worked between 1953 and 1969. 68 Greeley 2006, pp. 33-37 69 D’Aci i d’Allà, número extraordinario Vol. 22, Núm. 179, December 1934. Available online at: http://mdc2.cbuc.cat/cdm/compoundobject/collection/DacidAlla/id/9251/rec/179 (consulted on 04.22.2015) 70 Greeley 2006, p. 43 67 39 paintings from 1923-25 are politically significant in explaining Miró's 'radicalism', given that they repeat “the peasant's red hat, the barretina, associated with liberty”. 71 When the civil war breaks out, the monsters disappear. Miró, who is trapped in the Republican zone, does not dare to paint more scarecrows, perhaps to avoid being singled out. The new masonite paintings he creates between July and October in Montroig and Barcelona are abstract compositions whose stillness contrasts with the tension of the previous ones. Miró himself will explain it this way: “When we observe the 'painting' on agglomerate of the summer of 1936, we notice that I was already in an extremely dangerous impasse, and from which I saw no possible way out. The war of July 1936 ensued, which led me to interrupt my work and concentrate on my spirit”72. But for his grandson, the 27 paintings on masonite will constitute his first protest against the uprising of Franco “echo of the struggle of the Spanish people. Miró chooses this construction material because it is that of the peasants ... It is a violent and exacerbated reaction against the rise of fascism”, from which he insinuates Miró has fled, just like “all the politicians, writers and persecuted painters (who) have found in Paris not only a refuge, but a true headquarters to combat fascism” 73. But the paintings that accompany this description in Miro’s grandson book are not the abstract ones of summer, but the savage ones on masonite and copper from February to May, possibly in reaction to the victory of the popular front of which we spoke earlier. The only explanation given at the time of the departure from Spain and the exile in France of the painter appears in an article entitled "Miró and the Spanish Civil War" published in the magazine Partisan Review of February 1938 74. The magazine, of leftist ideology, was edited by James Johnson Sweeney and was a publication of limited print run but of wide impact in the North American and even European literary and artistic circles. At the end of the Second World War it was widely financed by the CIA through the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, within a campaign to which we will refer later. The article is of artistic and not political content, but it is commented therein how the painter has been forced to go into exile in France, adding as a complement of information that “we have learned that Miro's brother-in-law has been shot by a fascist firing squad”75. The author of the article was abstract painter George Lovett Kingsland Morris, who often traveled between Paris and the United States. He had also founded the English/French bilingual magazine Plastique in 1937, together with American collector and painter Albert Eugene Gallatin, Jean Arp and Sophie TaueberArp. The information about Miró’s reason to flee Catalonia was not used much more, but the fact is that someone in the painter's circle –or Miró himself– had to provide it. What is more important, it confirmed the painter's 'anti-fascist commitment', while explaining his exile in France in a way that could not but satisfy the intellectual circles which Miró frequented in Paris and also the Americans. In fact, we believe that the source of the information was the painter himself because we have proof that, just after 71 Gale, Matthew & Daniel, Marko 2011, p. 22 Cuadernos F.J.M. 4398-4437 1941 73 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, pp. 57-58 74 Morris 1938 p. 32-33 75 Morris 1938, p. 32 72 40 arriving in Paris, Miró went to see the editor of the magazine, Sweeney, an interview he reported in a letter dated November 12 to JV Foix76. Miró also saw in those days Douglas Cooper, who on November 28, 1936 dedicated one of the photos that Man Ray had made, and Albert Eugene Gallatin, who photographed him with the 'savage' masonites of February-May. What happens is that the information of the Partisan Review was false, Miró's brotherin-law was not killed by the Francoists, but by Republican militiamen, as we have learned from a recent study. Miró did not flee from Franco either, but from the horrors suffered in Republican Catalonia, in the firm belief that his life in his beloved Montroig was in danger precisely because of the uprising of peasants, communists and anarchists. The political environment, especially in Catalonia, had considerably deteriorated in 1936. In February, the Front Català d'Esquerres, a Catalan version of the Popular Front composed, among others, by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the Unió de Rabassaires and the Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista, is constituted. And Miró, who fears that family income from the Montroig estate are in danger and is still allowed to go abroad, makes a discreet trip to Paris to prepare the getaway. On February 16 and 23 the general elections are held, which give victory to the Popular Front, which launches a first wave of revolutionary actions, including, of course, the restoration of the controversial land use law –Llei de contractes de conreu– (on March 2), the annulment of the evictions of peasants who had not paid the agricultural rents (March 14) and the principle of review of the rents (April 25). Meanwhile, Miró is still preparing the flight. In June he travels back to Paris to take the maximum possible of finished works, whose commercialization could allow him to survive when he succeeds in getting his family out. At the end of the month, after going to London for a surrealist exhibition, he returns to Barcelona, where the atmosphere continues to worsen. On July 12th and 13th a republican lieutenant, José Castillo, and the leader of the conservative opposition José Calvo Sotelo are assassinated. This will precipitate the outbreak of the war. Miró and his immediate family take refuge in the Montroig property just as his sister and her husband take refuge in their estate in Vic. As Marciano Cárdaba points out, the outbreak of the revolution –on July 19– led to the reapplication of the law of cultivation contracts. It was thus possible to “put an end to the social and economic privileges of the great landowners. Sometimes they also put an end to their lives”77. Miró's sister and brother-in-law will then be involved in a dramatic episode, of the many that were lived in Spain during the 1936-1939 civil war. The incident was taken out of oblivion thanks to a study by Tona historian Carles Puigferrat78. Even in 2016 an omertà about the incident still reigns in the region in which it occurred. On July 21, a detachment of members of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias that Lluís Companys had just formed, armed with rifles, invade their property. The group leader was sugar industry magnate Josep Suñol i Garriga, who was also ERC deputy to 76 Epistolari 2009, p. 565 Cárdaba 2001 p. 45 78 Puigferrat i Oliva 2009 p. 265-296. (Text availableon-line in http://www.centremiro.com/planes/textCartes.php?idioma=es-es (consulted on 10. 14.2014) 77 41 Cortes in Madrid and president of FC Barcelona. They forced entry into rhe manor of Riambau, near Tona, ten kilometers south of Vic, in the Osona region. In that magnificent property had taken refuge landowner Jaume Galobart Sanmartí, his wife Dolores Miró, the painter's only sister, and some servants. Suñol, owner of the newspaper La Rambla in Barcelona, married to a woman from Tona, Gloria Soler Elías, was there at the time of the outbreak of the war. Galobart was possibly Suñol’s main local enemy, not only for political reasons, but most likely for land disputes and also by a lawsuit that came from well back. In 1922, on the death of his first wife Carme Quintanes i Vilarrúbia, Galobart had remained as plenipotentiary administrator of her enormous properties, that would pass to the heir he could have in a future marriage. In the absence of a heir, the inheritance would pass to the Church and beneficence. Galobart wanted to ingratiate himself with the Church and built the first soccer field in the area adjacent to the parish. But once married to María Dolors Miró, the landowner, who then hopes to have offspring, thinks better, closes the soccer field and returned the land to agricultural use 79. Businessman and Catalan soccer patron Josep Suñol and his armed escort communicate to Galobart and his wife that their house has been seized and they are expelled from it, authorizing them to take only some clothes and personal belongings in an improvised bundle made with a bed sheet. Immediately the expropriation of all their properties takes place for the befefit of the union of tenants, decided by the Antifascist Committee of Tona, composed of representatives of the PSUC, UGT, CNT, and Unió de Rabassaires. Galobart was indeed a great landowner, including the manors in Riambau, Vila and Bassas in Tona and Quintanes in Masies de Voltregà. The representative of the tenants' union would later confirm that the origin of the expropriation was the arrival on Monday July 20 of Suñol, who personally requested the intervention of the Committee to arrest Miró's brother-in-law. The armed force finds in the farmhouse shotguns and some other weapon –something perfectly normal at the time– and decides to arrest him and impose bail, which Galobart refuses to pay. The republican militiamen then decide the confiscation of all their assets, including land, houses and cars, letting the victims of the expropriation settle in Tona at the home of José Buixaderas, married to a sister of Galobart ('Pepeta') and who worked for him. The family was under house arrest for more than 20 days, although they were without doubt in contact with the Miró family in Montroig. Although Galobart and Buixaderas were warned that it was better for them to escape because their lives were in danger, they did not and stayed in the house, subject to the exactions of the Republicans, which according to Miró's sister included the obligation to pay them 5,000 pesetas in cash and the theft of many valuables from the Riambau manor, including a painting by Joan Miró. Josep Suñol did not have much luck. While Galobart and Buixaderas were still being held in Tona, he was on the 6th of August on a visit to the Guadarrama front in Madrid when his driver passed the militia outposts on the slope of the Puerto de los Leones. In spite of the warnings of the last republican positions, the car continued until crossing into territory controlled by the Franco army, where the vehicle was intercepted. Suñol 79 Garcés i Estalló 2002 pp. 214-215 42 was immediately identified and shot along with his bodyguard lieutenant of militias and a senior official. It has also been said that he carried over 25,000 pesetas to sign players from Betis, Racing and Oviedo football teams for Barcelona and another 50,000 Ptas. For 'war care' 80. The news will take a week to reach Catalonia. On the evening of Thursday, August 13, that is, exactly when the news of the death of Suñol arrives in Tona, the members of the Antifascist Committee return to the home of José Buixaderas, taking him and Galobart under the pretext that Miró's brother-in-law had to go to another manor on his property to pay the wages of some masons. That same night the driver who was driving them returned, but without the two detainees. They had been sent to Vic, where they were joined by another prisoner, Carlist worker Josep Soldevila Griera, who had been arrested that same afternoon. The three were taken to the slope of Malla, on the road between Vic and Tona, where they are forced to get out of the cars and are riddled with bullets in the gutter. Miró's brother-in-law resists and, although wounded by a bullet in one arm, manages to escape through a dense corn field. Galobart reaches Mas Gurumbau –now a golf club– about 600 meters from the road, where the tenant lets him in and offers a mattress to rest. But the farmer sends his sons to inform the tenants of other farmhouses around that he has in his house, wounded, the great landowner of the county. Shortly afterwards, a large number of militiamen appear in the house, finding the landlord lying on the mattress. They order him to get up and leave the house, but Galobart resists. Finally he accepts to leave and runs, dropping dead three or four meters from the door, victim of the militiamen’s shots. Miró’s sister and Buixadera’s wife Pepita Galobart Sanmartí would be immediately expelled from the village by the Antifascist Militias. The murders of Tona, which take place more than three weeks after the expropriation of the Miró's brother-inlaw estates, could have constituted a revenge for the death of Josep Suñol, executed on Thursday, August 6. As 80 García Candau 2007 pp. 225-228 43 indicated by the archives of the football club, the news of the death of the deputy did not arrive in Catalonia until Thursday, August 13 81, hours before the Tona militia kidnapped and killed Galobart. 2015 was declared by the FC Barcelona Sunyol Year, multiplying in Catalonia acts of homage of that national hero of Catalonia, from which the son of the honoree ostensibly distanced himself, as he did not recognize the Catalanization of his surname. After the Events of May 1937, in which the Antifascist Militias are defeated by the government of the republic, the denunciations of relatives of many of the thousands murdered in 1936 led to the opening of some judicial processes. One of them took place in Vic. The identification of the perpetrators of the murders was not difficult, because they had boasted in public of having done so. Five people were therefore arrested quickly. The problem was that three of the defendants were members of the communist PSUC, which together with ERC had been the true winner of the May events. Another was an ERC Catalanist and president of the Tenants Union. The pressures of the two parties are soon felt, and the president of the agrarian union and a PSUC militant were released immediately. Shortly later, and after receiving a delegation from the party in Vic, the Minister of Labor and Public Works of the Generalitat Rafael Vidiella (PSUC ) declares that the last meeting of the Generalidat had agreed that judges could not admit suits “about facts of revolutionary character” nor “when they come from individuals whose flat, house or lands have been confiscated or who can be described as fascists, or who had abandoned their properties themselves”. For the member of the government of the Generalitat, judges must only admit complaints about “individuals who, instead of acting in a revolutionary way, have done so in pursuit of profit”. In any case, two of the three authors of the murders who had been imprisoned were released for good behavior and in March 1938 the Special People's Court No. 1 of Barcelona declared everyone innocent, releasing the last of the murderers of Joan Miró's brother-in-law, the CNT anarchist militant Vicenç Coma Cruells, known as the 'matador of Osona' 82. The episode of the murder of his brother-in-law and the fact of Miró's escape from revolutionary Catalonia are hidden by all the biographers of the painter. As time passes, Miró transits in his revelations to the biographers from a total denial to a partial one. In 1960 Walter Erben claims that in 1940 the painter had been living in Paris “for twenty years” 83. There is therefore no escape from Spain. Penrose argues in 1970 that 81 See biography of Josep Suñol i Garriga at Barcelona Futball Club site: http://arxiu.fcbarcelona.cat/web/castellano/club/historia/presidents/josepsunyol.html (consulted on 10. 07.2014) 82 Puigferrat i Oliva 2007 p. 213-247 83 Erben 1960, p.139-140 44 Miró had not left Paris in 1932 and that in 1936 he was still living there, so there is no escape or move: “In 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out; Miró was not to revisit Spain until 1940”84. It is not until 1977 that Raillard laconically says that in 1936 “He left Spain and settled in Paris with his family”85. And Rosa María Malet points out only in 1983 that “In the autumn of 1936 Miró returns to Paris” 86. Jacques Dupin only says, in 1993, that “Miró is back -in Paris- in November 1936”, without mentioning the reason, but implying that the lack of precision comes from the fact that Miró “has never wanted to talk about the war in Spain, as if by a kind of modesty, or rejection, of events that are both too intimate or too thorny” 87. Finally, in 2003 Lluís Permanyer recognizes the flight saying that “it is not true, as had been said until now, that he was in Paris to finish the works he had to send for the retrospective exhibition of the New York gallery”. He admits that he fled Montroig when he was warned that anarchists “of FAI want to kill you”. And ends up making an indirect reference to the event of Tona claiming that the threat surprised Miró, who explains awkwardly the reason for the persecution as well: “My sister was married to Jaume Galobart, an imbecile of the extreme right. I was at the wedding and a local newspaper had published the guest list, in which I was”. Although Permanyer then clarifies the painter's late life harshness to his brother-in-law, quoting Pilar Juncosa, who describes the person “assassinated by the FAI” (Sic) as follows: “He was a good man, very rich, he had properties and he was very devote, he had his workers pray the rosary” 88. In any case, the 2003 revelation by Permanyer will not find echo in the studies on Miró published since then, and especially in the itinerant 2011-2012 exhibition that pretended to demonstrate Miró’s political commitment for the republicans against Franco. Curators Matthew Gale and Marko Daniel hide in the essays and chronology of the voluminous catalog of the show both the episode of Tona and the fact that the painter fled republican Catalonia, limiting themselves to stating that “when the masonites were complete, he went to Paris to show them” 89. And the concealment continues in the Catalan collected letters published in 2009 by the Miró Foundation, which states that “Joan Miró had gone to Paris to present, in the Pierre Gallery, his latest works, 27 paintings on masonite, made in Montroig during the summer. On July 18 the Spanish Civil War had broken out and Joan Miró took the decision to stay in France” 90. It goes without saying that the manipulation of historical facts naturally extends to works of dissemination, be they television documentaries, books or pamphlets. Rosa María Malet laconically points out that “In the autumn of 1936 Miró returns to Paris...” 91. And in the mass circulation book Joan Miró, by Susan Hichoch, 84 Penrose 1992, p. 85 Raillard 1998, p. 275. 86 Malet 1983, p. 15 87 Dupin 2012, p. 207 88 Permanyer 2003, pp. 117-119 89 Gale, Matthew & Daniel, Marko The Tipping Point : 1934-9, in Gale & Daniel 2011, p. 85 90 Epistolari 2009, p. 565 91 Malet 1983, p. 15 85 45 the flight is again denied, the departure of his wife and daughter being attributed to the fear of Franco's armies, stating that “The military uprisings and the threat of more bloodshed throughout Spain forced his wife and daughter to move with him to Paris in 1936” 92. Still, Joan Miró was not in July 1936 in Paris, but in Spain. He is at the worst moment of his life and does not have the support or solidarity of his Surrealist friends. All without exception are on the side of the most radical elements of the republic. While he is hiding in his farmhouse in Montroig, Benjamin Péret is in Barcelona igniting the fire. In a vibrant letter to André Breton, Péret tells him on August 11, 1936: “If you saw Barcelona as it is today, adorned with barricades, decorated with burnt churches of which only the four walls remain, you would be as ecstatic as I am. It all starts with just crossing the border. The first house that is located in Spanish territory, a large mansion surrounded by a park, has been confiscated by the workers' committee of Puigcerdà. When we arrived in this city we heard a very loud noise: it was a church which the workers, not happy with having burned it, destroyed with a rage and a joy that it was a pleasure to watch. In Catalonia and along the horrible journey with the scrap bus that I took to go from Puigcerdà to Barcelona –that I thought was a fairy walk– you could only see burned churches or without bells. In Barcelona there is no police, the red guard circulates in cars requisitioned by the FAI, the POUM. and the PSUC. Great care must be taken in having everything in order as you risk going to jail where the offender is shot without any kind of process” 93. While the events of Tona happened, Miró, his wife and daughter were hiding in their Montroig property, estimating that the risk of being attacked there by anarchists or peasants was lower than that of falling victims of the chaos and violence in Barcelona Peret refers to. But at the same time Miró makes all the efforts he can to leave Spain. In reality, the revolutionary events take place in Montroig with a surprising parallelism with respect to those of Vic, distant almost 200 km: on those same days, while Miró's sister and brother-in-law are under house arrest, on July 23 a group of Montroig anarchists burned the village's old church. On the 27th the same militiamen went up to the Ermita de la Mare de Deu de la Roca and took out all the images, chairs, benches and the image of the Virgin which had escaped the looting of the French troops in 1811, and made with all a bonfire in the square. And on August 13, the same day that Galobart is killed in Vic, the militiamen murdered nine conservative people of Montroig 94. Miró is terrified. The victims of the militia’s paseo (promenade) murders in Montroig were possibly close to the Miró family, from which it is possible to deduce the feeling of fear that the painter felt. In the Baix Camp district of Tarragona, 203 people (3.6% of the population) were murdered in the first days of the war, of which 70% were clergymen, merchants, industrialists, professionals or farmers. It was precisely in Tarragona that Pope Francis promoted in October 2013 the most numerous beatification in the history of the Catholic Church, where 522 Spaniards were 92 Hichoch 2005, p. 32 Reproduced in Courtot, Claude Introduction à la lecture de Benjamin Péret. Le terrain vague, Paris 1965 pp. 27-31. (consulted on 05. 16.2014) 94 Martí Rom 2010, p. 7 The events in Montroig are described in Martí Rom 2006. p. 10. 93 46 proclaimed ‘beatos’ (blessed), officially considered “martyrs of religious persecution in the twentieth century in Spain”. Of the more than two hundred murdered in the Baix Camp county, the number of victims in Montroig was eight 95. Josep Miquel Martí Rom points out however that there are nine murdered, giving the name of each of them: the priests Ramón Artiga Aragonés and Pere Rofes Llauradó, Francesc Brú Aragonés, Joaquim González Aragonés, Laureà Jove Rai, Enric Puñet Barceló, Miquel Gassó Ferratjes and Francesc Gassó Domingo 96. The latter, 52 years old, was an landowner member of the CEDA party and founder of the Agricultural Union of Montroig (employers) 97. Miró had shown interested in the union of agricultural owners of Gassó, and in a letter of August 31, 1919 to Enric Ricart, he said: “I was hoping to send you the regulations of the Montroig Agricultural Union. As they do not have in printed form, the secretary has offered to make me an extract of the regulation. When I have it, I'll send it to you” 98. He had to send the document immediately, since two weeks later he wrote again to his friend and began the letter saying “It was easy to get a copy of the Union Regulations. We made it between my father and me. I dictated the text from the original and my father wrote it”99. The new Republican masters of Montroig installed themselves in the main buildings and set up road controls. In spite of everything that happened, an elderly Miró, but deeply immersed in his own myth, will pretend in statements to Permanyer that once the farm was occupied and he fled to France, “my mother stayed in Montroig, where she lived with the militiamen, which seemed to her original and even good-natured” 100. In Miró’s Manor there was a cohabitation between the militiamen who occupied it since August, the Miró family –his mother and sister took refuge in it after the murder of Galobart– and the ‘masoveros’ (tenants/guards), the Calaf family, who took care that the Miros did not lack food 101. The painter has only one idea in his head: to escape from revolutionary terror and go into exile with his family. The problem is that in order to do so he required permits and help, either from the revolutionaries or from the authorities of the Generalitat, the two poles of power in republican Catalonia. Among the revolutionaries he could ask Benjamin Péret, whom he sees in Barcelona without obtaining help. The gap between 95 Villarroya i Font 1988. pp. 433-434. Available on-line in http://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/handle/2445/35535 96 Martí Rom 2006. 97 Martí Rom 2010. 98 Epistolari 2009 pp. 139-140. 99 Epistolari 2009, pp. 141-142. 100 Permanyer 2003, p. 119 101 Juncosa Vecchierini 2011, pp. 44-46 47 the Surrealists and Miró had been accentuated by the Spanish Civil War and is already insurmountable. But in Barcelona all the persecuted or potential victims of the revolutionaries know that there is a Scarlet Pimpernel who helps save the lives of innocent right-wingers and provides safe-conducts for them to escape from the country. According to the government of the Generalitat in 2014, the secret campaign benefited 9,206 people, who were able to escape from republican Catalonia, including the Cardinal and Archbishop of Tarragona Francisco Vidal y Barraquer. A key piece in this antirevolutionary conspiracy is the poet Ventura Gassol, co-founder of Esquerra Republicana, who is at that time Minister of Culture of the Generalitat and number two of Lluis Companys. Gassol was native to La Selva del Campo, a town in Tarragona located 28 km from Montroig. Miró, as soon as he learns of the detention of his brother-in-law, undoubtedly establishes contact with the Minister of Culture, either directly or through Joan Prats. In fact Ventura Gassol was very well informed of the events in Vic, because on July 22 he had presided over an emergency meeting in his office, where the burning of the cathedral had been discussed. Two days later, the Generalitat decreed the seizure of all the artistic and religious heritage of Catalonia, formally to prevent its destruction and looting. One of the main promoters of the initiative, and participant in the meeting of July 22 was architect José María Gudiol i Ricart, a native of Vic, whom Miró will ask years later to help him bring the Constellations to the United States. Under the authority of Gassol,, Gudiol tries to extinguish the fire of the cathedral, but the Antifascist Committee of Vic does not accept the authority of the Minister of Culture. Gudiol leaves the cathedral in flames, concentrates in extinguishing the fire of the museum, and leaves immediately for Barcelona, where he obtains that Gassol send a detachment of militiamen. But when they arrive in Vic they joined those who were looting and burning the cathedral 102. Miró’s escape aim is difficult to achieve, because it involves not only the physical exit of several people from Spain, but the exfiltration of voluminous works of art and the transfer abroad of the maximum amount of money possible from the family assets. On September 28, Miró leaves Montroig and goes to Barcelona to finalize his escape plan, most likely through Gassol,. He uses as a pretext the need to send his paintings to his dealer in the United States, but he does not obtain the necessary permission. Things are getting difficult for Gassol, who under a dead threat himself, is forced to flee to France on October 23, 1936. The decree of Collectivizations and Workers Control of Catalonia is approved the next day, and Miró knows it will affect to the manor and estate in Montroig and possibly the building owned by the family in the Pasaje del Crédito in Barcelona. The decree required the collectivization of large agricultural properties and compulsory unionization of small farmers. A new decree of the Generalitat prohibits the payment of any rent or lease to landowners. And the members of the Union of Rabassaires in Montroig set to burn the parish and town hall registers and occupy the estate of the Miró family. On October 28, five days after the decree of collectivization was published, Miró flees to Paris, leaving hundreds of paintings in Barcelona. The flight was undoubtedly 102 Cañameras Vall 2013 p.90 48 carried out with the help of the he Propaganda Ministry of the Generalitat that head minister Josep Tarradellas had created on October 3, placing it under the command of writer and ERC leader Jaume Miravitlles Navarra, friend of Dalí and Buñuel whom Miró had undoubtedly met during the writer's exile in France between 1925 and 1930. Miravitlles had been General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Antifascist Militias and their press chief, implying a certain ascendancy over the most radical revolutionaries. The CCAM was composed of five members from CNT-FAI, three from ERC and UGT and one from PSUC, Unió de Rabassaires, POUM and Acció Catalana. Although Miravitlles always approached the subject with discretion, he did have an important role in the exfiltration of clergymen, intellectuals and other persecuted persons 103. When alluding to the reason why he helped soprano Conchita Badía to flee from republican Catalonia, Miravitlles himself explained: “She could do more for us outside than inside”104. In any case, Miravitlles could never speak of his help to the painter, because according to the official myth Miró had never fled Catalonia, but was 'already in Paris' when the war broke out. We can not forget either that in those days, the main preocupation of Miravitlles was the international concern over the excesses of the Catalan revolutionaries and the destruction and plundering of the artistic heritage of the church. In response to that concern, Miravitlles, which had organized a propaganda campaign, orchestrated in France by Christian Zervos , focused on counteracting the impact of the scandal. Within the campaign, which we will describe later, many friends of Miró visited Barcelona, among them the Zervos, Roland Penrose, David Gascoyne and Luis Fernández. The main local contacts of the Zervos group were Joan Prats and Gudiol. They no doubt interceded also on behalf of the painter before Miravitlles. As soon as he arrived in Paris, Miró continued his efforts to get his family out of Republican Catalonia, again through the Miravitlles Ministry. The government agency had its own infrastructure in Paris and began to carry out propaganda work. On Thursday, November 19, Miró has everything ready and writes to Joan Prats from Paris saying: “I would appreciate it if you tell Pilar that I insist on doing what I have asked for, which is extremely convenient, and that on Monday 23rd at exactly three thirty she must be with the girl in the Propaganda Ministry of the Generalitat of Catalonia –Diagonal 442. I will phone her from the Delegation of the Generalitat here” 105 . Miró will try later in his life to hide the intervention of the Propaganda Commissioner, arguing that if Pilar and María Dolors, “who could not obtain a passport and I could not help”, managed to escape was because “Pilar, since she knew the office where one had to ask for help at the Paseo de Gracia, decided to meet an anarchist named Corxet and explain the case to him”106. Pilar and Dolors finally got away from Catalonia with the help of Miravitlles and joined Miró in Paris on December 16th. The painter’s mother and sister, who had stayed in Spain, took refuge in the Mas Miró. And in 1938 Miró will try to take them 103 Batalla i Galimany 2010 pp. 425-431 Miravitlles, Jaume Homes i dones a la meva vida Edicions Destino, Barcelona 1982, p. 60. Cited in Batalla i Galimany 2010, p. 428. 105 Epistolari 2009 p. 567 106 Permanyer 2003, p. 119 104 49 out of republican Catalonia, entrusting the negotiations to Joan Prats. But the operation could not be carried out, both because his friend has not secured the safe conduct, and because Maria Dolors, already engaged to builder Lluís G. Ylla i Cassany and focused on recovering the fortune of her late husband, prefers not to flee, as such a move would compromise those efforts 107. For their liberation they must still wait a few months until, at the beginning of January 1939, Franco's troops enter Montroig and return the estate to its owners. The Pimpernel that helped Miró and his family escape from republican Spain will soon pass the bill, but the painter will pay in kind and this will not bother him at all, although this will give rise to some difficulties years later when he returned to Franco’s Spain. The price that Miró will have to pay will be three paintings. In Mironian historiography, including Dupin himself 108, it has always been said that the now famous pochoir Aidez l'Espagne is the second commission he receives from the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the first being The Reaper. But it is incorrect. Actually, the gouache design is Miravitlles' first order and it is placed in the wake of his family’s arrival to Paris after their exfiltration from Catalonia. In fact, on March 7, 1937, Miró writes to Pierre Matisse to tell him: “I am enclosing a photo of a design I made for a stamp that is supposed to be printed to give a little aid to poor unfortunate Spain”109. One month and a half later, on April 25, Miró again refers to the gouache in a letter: “The stamp has still not been printed”. And it is precisely this letter in which the painter informs the dealer that he has just offered to decorate the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 exhibition 110. The origin of the initiative to print the stamp Aidez l'Espagne has to be found both in the Parisian representation of the Propaganda Commission and in Christian Zervos himself, and the reason is pecuniary as well as political. As is well known, in 1936 there had been a widespread occurrence in many places in Spain, but especially in Catalonia, of the burning, destruction and looting of an important part of the artistic heritage of the Catholic Church. As will happen at the beginning of the 21st century 107 Juncosa Vecchierini 2011, p. 47 Dupin 2012 p. 458 109 PMGA 18.22. Reproduced in Rowell 1992, p. 148 110 PMGA 18.22. Reproduced in Rowell 1992, p. 157 108 50 with the destruction of works of art by Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, Mali, Iraq, Syria, etc., the events caused great consternation throughout the world in 1936, and many institutions sent delegations to Spain to assess the extent of the disaster. As we have seen, Ventura Gassol, was already mobilized since July. As a result of his action and the contacts he had in France, a Committee for the Safeguarding of the Catalan artistic heritage was set up in Paris, Christian and Yvonne Zervos immediately taking control of it. It is through this initiative that painter Luis Fernández, very close to Zervos , stays in Catalonia between August and December. The Generalitat realized the potentially disastrous consequences that the information circulating in Europe could have for the prestige of the Republican and Catalanist causes, and as soon as Jaume Miravitlles took over as Commissioner for propaganda, he launched with Joan Prats’s help a campaign that will bring various personalities to Barcelona, especially from the artistic world, to try and show the world that the Generalitat was not responsible for the excesses, but was in fact doing everything it could to save the artistic heritage. Miravitlles decided to pull the boat out and announces to Christian Zervos that there is no budget limit. The editor rubs his hands, because his finances had been dry for years: in 1934 he had been forced to sell his art collection at an auction to avoid the bankruptcy of his publishing house Cahiers d'Art. Zervos sets off and prepares a large exhibition in Paris with works taken from the churches and transported to France with the help of Joan Prats, an initiative that will cost Prats a few months in jail once the war was over. This exhibition would then move to London. The industrious Zervos also offers to publish, at the expense of the Generalitat, books in several languages defending the action of the Catalan government and denying veracity to all the information that had circulated. And he also suggests that funds can be collected through initiatives such as Miró's stamp. Miravitlles is responsible for bringing to Catalonia people like David Gascoyne and Roland Penrose –accompanied by his wife Valentine Boué– providing them with travel, accommodation, safe conduct and all the support they need. The mission of Penrose is clearly explained in a letter of presentation that is delivered to him in Barcelona, dated on October 28, 1936 and signed “Jaume Miravitlles, Propaganda Commissioner, Generalitat de Catalunya”: “whose mission is to make a graphic record of the social and economic reality in factories, workshops, etc. so as to carry out propaganda actions in our favor through an upcoming exhibition in London ... and to emphasize the noble constructive spirit of our revolution”111. It was about inverting the equation and presenting the Generalitat not as guilty of the destruction of the artistic heritage but as its defender against the “fascist enemy of culture”. Despite the fact that the destruction and pillage came from the revolutionary side, Professor Robin Adèle Greeley states that “Exhibitions of Catalan medieval art held outside Spain were advertised as upholding art against the fascist threat to destroy all culture” 112. Christian Zervos gets down to work. During his trip to Catalonia, paid for by the Propaganda Commission, and of which 111 The Roland Penrose Papers, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Escocia. Reproduced in press release for exhibition Lee Miller, Picasso in Private, organized by the Instituto de Cultura del Ayuntamiento de Barcelona (June 1st to a 16th September 2007), pp. 31-32. 112 Greeley 2006, p. 42 51 photographic testimonies are available113, and with the help of Joan Prats, prepares the expedition of antiquities to France, ostensibly to organize an exhibition that will coordinate Ventura Gassol, and will take place in the Jeu de Paume museum in March-April 1937 with the title L'art catalan à Paris. Zervos will publicize the event with an article published in the latest issue of Cahiers d'Art of 1936 114. The exhibition was then taken to the Château de Maisons-Lafitte, on the outskirts of Paris. Zervos meets in Barcelona Gudiol, who hands him the manuscript of a short book on the evolution of Catalan art. Zervos then offers Miravitlles to publish several editions of this text, illustrated with photos by him and accompanied by a preface also by him and statements defending the attitude and results obtained by the Generalitat by intellectuals who were part of the mission115. It was said at the end of the war that Miravitlles paid Zervos for the book the amount of 300,000 francs (more than $ 270,000 of 2018) 116. Three editions of the profusely illustrated book were published: the first in french 117 with a big print run and propaganda statements by Zervos and Penrose; another one in English with the same content and a larger print run as it was destined to the British and U.S. markets 118 and a third one in German, this one without propaganda texts, since it was to be distributed in Nazi Germany. Only 2.000 copies of this last edition were printed. 119 While this propaganda offensive was developing, the smuggling of works of art stolen from the churches was flourishing. The pieces reached collectors from all over Europe, and especially from the United States. As Rebeca Saavedra points out, “during the Spanish Civil War there was a considerable increase in the illegal traffic of works of art and antiquities ... the plundering of ecclesiastical buildings and the uncontrolled seizure of property was a constant that allowed many individuals and, fundamentally, 113 In some, one can see Yvonne Zervos and Joan Prats removing the Tapiz de la Creación from Gerona cathedral. 114 Zervos 1937, pp. 213-256 115 Cañameras 2013, p. 202 116 Utrillo Vidal, Miguel. «Fantasmones rojos. Un falso gotiesta: Josep Gudiol». Solidaridad Nacional 8 de novembre de 1939. 117 L’art de la Catalogne de la seconde moitié du neuvième siècle à la fin du quinzième siècle Editions "Cahiers d'Art", Paris, 1937 118 Catalan Art from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Centuries, William Heinemann Ltd, London & Toronto, 1937 119 Die Kunst Kataloniens Baukunst - Plastik - Malerei vom 10. bis zum 15. Jahrhunder, Schroll, Viena 1937 52 the workers' committees and militias to take control of a great amount of artistic objects that out of all regulated control ended up in the black market” 120. This contraband for the global black market, similar to that at the beginning of the 21st century with works stolen in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, had its epicenter in Catalonia, not only because of the border with France, but also because it was in this Spanish region where there were more assaults on churches and because the committees and militias that led the plunder were precisely those in charge of public order. And in August 1936, a delegation of three senior officials from the Fourth International arrived in Catalonia, led by Benjamin Péret, who ends one of his letters to French surrealist patron André Breton with a request to seek ways to place stolen goods. “On the other hand, could you take care of selling old church objects of precious metals (obviously for the benefit of the revolution!) and give me an answer by answering urgently yes or no ?” In that same letter he had informed Breton of his frustration at the 'gentrification' of Communists, anarchists and Trotskyists 121. This plundering attitude was not shared by all the members of the Surrealist group, which even supporting the republican forces in Spain, starts to split in those years between those who are aligned with the more radical movements like Benjamin Péret, André Breton and Georges Bataille and the most pragmatic ones, like Paul Éluard and Michel Leiris who get closer to the communist party. The Miró devotee of Romanesque art can not but accept to participate in a project led by the man that has just exfiltrated him and his family from the revolution in Catalonia and that is coordinated by his friend Prats. Miró also sees with sympathy the initiative to recover the goods stolen by the militias that murdered his brother-in-law and forced him into exile. He thus accepted the invitation of Zervos to make a drawing that would be reproduced in a stamp of 1 Franc to benefit the campaign of recovery of the plundered goods. Finally, the seal was not made and Zervos converted the gouache that Miró had made and that represented a Catalan militiaman with a barretina hat that raises his arm with his fist held high, into a small pochoir printed on the right side of an insert of 31 by 49 cm in Cahiers d’Art. To serve the purpose of propaganda sought by the Generalitat, which financed the entire operation, Miró had to transcribe in his own handwriting at the base of the drawing the text: “In the current struggle I see, on the Fascist side, obsolete forces, and on the other, the people, whose immense creative resources will give Spain an impulse that will amaze the world”. The text was inspired by the proclamation that Louis Aragon had just published in the magazine Europe, in which he asked French intellectuals to mobilize in favor of the Spanish Republic 122. But, as much as Miró said in a letter to Joan Prats that the pochoir was accompanied by “some statements that I wrote to the margin and that seem very strong to me”123, we believe that the text could have been written by Zervos instead of Miró and that the 120 Saavedra Arias 2012.p. 29. and Álvarez Lopera 1984 pp. 533-593. Letter to André Breton dated 09.05.1936 Availableble on-line http://www.fundanin.org/peret2.htm (consulted on 05. 19.2014) 122 Aragon, Louis Ne rêvez plus qu’à l’Espagne ! Europe, XLII , n° 167 November 15 1936, pp. 353-361 123 Epistolari 2009, p. 584 121 53 words did not come from the painter, as they were in contradiction with his most intimate convictions. Miró had expressed his position on the conflict as soon as he arrived in Paris in an interview with art historian Georges Duthuit, (Henri Matisse's son-in-law) for the last issue of Cahiers d'Art of 1936. The critic wanted to obtain a statement from the painter in support of the republic in the Spanish civil war. But Miró, who has just deserted the republican zone, still has in his mind the horror he has suffered and does not allow himself to be pigeonholed in the republican side. The interview begins in fact with a striking statement by the painter: “Our generation lacks heroism and a deeply revolutionary spirit”. Duthuit, who supported the revolution in Catalonia like most Surrealists, then avails himself of the opportunity to tell him: “But it seems to me that in Spain, however ...” Miró does not let him finish, declaring dryly: “I limit myself exclusively to the domain of painting”. But Duthuit, does not let him slip away, pressuring him to pronounce his support for the Republican cause. Miró refuses, adding that “one must resist in all societies, even those that have not yet been born, if they try to impose their demands on us. The word freedom also has a meaning for me, and I will defend it at all costs”. The painter does not want to enlist in any of the two revolutions underway, the conservative or the proletarian, and lashes out in the interview against intellectuals, who have positioned themselves in their vast majority on the side of the revolution that has horrified the painter: “Academics are not as dangerous as intellectuals. Intellectuals are among the worst enemies of man. They should be treated as criminals and punished accordingly”. Miró does not leave politicians aside in his tirade of both sides when he adds: “Current leaders, bastard products of politics and the arts that claim to be regenerating the world, are going to poison our last sources of renewal. While they speak of nobility and tradition or, on the contrary, of the revolution and the proletarian paradise, we see how their stomachs are inflated and how the fat invades their souls”. Duthuit , presses again him, asking him “How can you be totally indifferent to the fate of your painting. How can you be so carefree and ignorant about who adopts it and what is done with it?” To which the painter replies: “You have asked yourself: Where to go? Who can you join? If historical events are strong enough, we follow them without knowing it. Joining one position or the other would be acting in a sloppy way” 124. The painter refuses to give his support to what at that time represented the Spanish Republic for the readers of Cahiers d'Art, that is the proletarian revolution. But this does not prevent those who have managed to get him out of the country to ask him for a first favor and for him to accede. The historiography has opposed to this statement Miró's response to a survey conducted three years later, also for Cahiers d'Art. The poll launched by Zervos, and to which Braque, Laurens, Léger, Masson and Miró responded, was aimed at obtaining militant statements denouncing fascism and aligning with the left. But in the case of Miró it fails again, as the painter solidly affirms that “One must not confuse the commitments proposed to the artist by professional politicians and other specialists of agitation with the deep necessity that makes him take part in social upheavals”. 124 Duthuit 1936. 54 According to Miró, “In order to discover a livable world –how much rottennes must be swept away ! If we do not attempt to discover the religious essence, the magic sense of things, we will do no more than add new sources of degradation to those already offered to the people today, which are beyond number... To offer the masses no more than material satisfactions is to annihilate our last hope, our last chance of salvation” 125 . Definitely, this is not what Zervos wanted to obtain from his survey. Miró's intention to discover the magical side of things, the religious essence, will be captured by the painter immediately afterwards in his Constellations series, which also fulfill the role of burying the monsters that had invaded his work in the previous five years, dissolving them in a magical and powerful tangle filtered by the light that crosses the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of Palma de Majorca. The pochoir Aidez l'Espagne was inserted in No 4-5 of the magazine Cahiers d'Art of the summer of 1937 dedicated –it could not be otherwise in the case of Zervos, the cataloger of Picasso– to Guernica, that the artist had painted for the international exhibition. But it seems that the always calculating Zervos also made an unspecified number of additional copies of the insert, some of which have ended up in museums and private collections signed –belatedly– by Miró. The second work that will be delivered in payment for the service provided by the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat will be a canvas to which reference will be made in a letter to Joan Prats of March 27, 1937 126 , in which he asks his friend to hand a photo of it to Jaume Miravitlles. And the third service that he will provide for the Commission was the mural for the Spanish pavilion of the "Exposition internationale des Arts et des Techniques appliqués à la Vie moderne", which would open on July 12, 1937. The work, The Reaper , is among those that best convey an image of tragedy in Miró's pictorial work. It represents as the pochoir a peasant, with the barretina hat and a sickle in his hand. He has a disproportionate head with its mouth wide open, showing fangs like knives. The rewriting of his biography and the construction of Miró’s national myth in Catalonia had at their base the images of The Reaper and the pochoir Aidez l'Espagne, turning them into the foundation of the theory of his republicanism, Catalanism and anti-Francoism. Miró could not refuse to carry out this second assignment, not only because he owed it to the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat that 125 Réponse de Miro, Cahiers d’Art nº 1-4, Paris 1939 p. 73. Reproduced in Rowell 1992 p. 166 126 Epistolari 2009, p. 571 55 took him and his family out of Catalonia. But especially because it was a commission for a large mural (5.5 by 3.65 meters) that would be, in his view, the counterpoint to Picasso's Guernica (3.5 by 7.65 meters). At last –he believed– he was going to be placed on an equal footing with the great master, at the summit of painting. Upon receiving the order, on April 25, the painter writes to Pierre Matisse: “The Spanish government has just commissioned me to decorate the Spanish pavillion at the 1937 Exposition. Only Picasso and I have been asked; he will decorate a wall 7 meters long; mine measures 6. That’s a big job! Once the Exposition is over, this painting can be taken off the wall and will belong to us”127. Miró struts or has not been well informed: in fact the commission also included Calder's Mercury fountain, a large sculpture twelve meters high by Alberto Sánchez, two more sculptures by Picasso and another by Julio González, as well as other paintings from different artists. Besides, Miró makes clear before carrying out the work that the mural will only be lent to the Propaganda Commission and that it will belong to him once the exhibition is over, while it has been said since the 70s that The Reaper had been “Donated in an impulse of generosity to the republican government”128. Poet Juan Larrea, victim of the extraordinary exaltation that the revolution in Catalonia had caused among the left-wing intellectuals of the time –precisely those Miró denounces and asks them to be treated as criminals– sees in the horrible Catalan monster/peasant of Miró an explosion of happiness: “In vain those who have eyes not to see will be taken, in front of Miró's painting, to interpret as a deficient caricature what is nothing but an access of happiness, expressed in pictorial terms, of the new dawn. Happiness, happiness...”129. Perhaps, when talking about the critics of the mural, Larrea referred to Josep Renau, general director of Fine Arts of the republic, responsible for the pavilion –together with Luis Lacasa and Sert– and author of the essay Función Social del Cartel publicitario (Social Function of the Advertising Poster) 130. Renau could not under any circumstances find satisfactory a mural in which pretending to portray a peasant in rebellion, the image was a monster of sharp fangs like the ones he drew representing the fascist enemy in the posters he made. In a work with a propagandistic purpose, the monster is the enemy, like the snake of Renau's poster “Campesino: defiende con las armas al gobierno que te dio la tierra”. These same monsters, representing the enemy, populate the works of other magnificent republican poster designers, such as Manuel Monleón (Columna Iberia, CNT Comité Nacional A.I.T., Partido Sindicalista), Sanz Miralles (Hay que dar el golpe definitivo), Pepe Bardasano (Aplasta al Fascismo), Ramón Puyol (El acaparador, El bulista), Eleuterio Bausset (Columna de Hierro, Aprieta Fuerte, compañero). And the same Miró monsters populated the propaganda posters on the national side or the Nazis during the Second World War (Strijdt met ons mede!), always to portray the enemy. As Cirlot points out, the The Reaper mural is an example 127 PMGA 18.22. Rowell 1992, p. 157 Punyet Miró y Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, p.61 129 Larrea 1937, p. 157 130 Renau 1937 128 56 of how “on occasion, the substantial violence of Miro is declared in the thematic and arises in sadistic shapes” 131. In the interpretation made by Mironian historiography since 1970 of the series of savage paintings, and especially The Reaper, we can observe a curious phenomenon. There are three factors that should be addressed in these works: their violence, brutality and monstrosity; the mood of the painter when making them; and the supposed or real political interpretation and intentionality. Of the three elements, the one that has triumphed and has imposed on the others has been the third, often undermining the analysis that should have imposed the consideration of the other two factors and always based on an assumption, that is, that Miró aims to praise, not denigrate, Catalan revolutionaries. As explained by the painter's grandson, who ignores the brutality and the mood to concentrate on settling the Catalan paradigm, The Reaper is “a Catalan peasant who rebels, with both arms raised and holding a sickle ... A sickle and not a gun. For Miró, war is a struggle for freedom and tradition, expressed here in the ties with the land” 132. Miró himself will pretend in his old age that “I chose this character, with a blue star projecting on the surface, because the peasant, with a large sickle. is a great symbol of Catalonia, a character that draws its roots deeper into the earth, materializing with her”133. Robin Adèle Greeley, whose curious theories we referred to earlier, interprets, of course, The Reaper through the prism of Catalan nationalism. For her, the leap from the aesthetic approach of nationalism (aesthetics-nationalism equation) that she claims to see in his series of the twenties, to the violence of his works made during the civil war (The Reaper, Aidez l'Espagne, etc.) is explained by Miró’s will to align himself with the anarchist and Trotskyist extreme left, repressed even by the republic. This means the alignment of Miró with the postulates defended by Benjamin Péret in the letter of September 1936. According to Greeley, to do so the painter chooses a huge image of Catalan nationalism for the Spanish pavilion of 1937. And he chooses a peasant to signal his support for the movements of the left of the republican side, precisely when the republic itself and the Generalitat, not Franco, “has banned peasant organizations, has disarmed revolutionary peasants and social policies on land reform and rural labor conditions have failed”. According to Greeley, always under the protection of historian of Catalan nationalism Albert Balcells, “The Reaper’s hands raised in defiance and holding the catalanist symbol of the sickle signal the aggresive 131 Cirlot 1949 p. 42 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, pp. 60-61 133 Martín Martín 1982; p. 173 132 57 stand of a Catalan fighter defending his land”134. In view of what he had experienced only a few months before, Miró does not seem the most suitable person to represent the demands of anarchists and sharecroppers. French art critics, under Maeght's pay, have been forced to assume –with greater or lesser emphasis– the Catalan nationalist paradigm of the Miró establishment, aided by the new leftists who proliferated in the rest of Spain in the 70s and who welcomed the celebrated Miró to the large group of alleged resistants to the Franco regime. But unlike the Catalans, they do not fail to underline that the aesthetic is violent and brutal, and they often refer to Miró's depressed mood throughout the period. Jacques Dupin, for example, reproduces the idea that has reached us today that the work represents Miró's rebellion “and his solidarity with his people in torment, The Reaper is again the Catalan peasant who rebels” 135. But he does not fail to point out that in reality, "the head is that of Miró’s monsters, with his wild eye, the double promontory in the form of a nose mallet and the barretina, his heavy prominent jaw and his three aggressive fangs” 136. Dupin can not ignore that, as Fernando Martín Martín points out, The Reaper is “the most tragic work of all that Miró has done in his copious production”137. This University of Seville professor included, in his paper on the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Exposition, one of the most detailed and complete descriptions of this work by Miró, and he had the help of the painter to decipher it. With his authorization, we will cite his work extensively: “What doing the ‘Payés catalán en rebeldía’ (Catalan farmer in rebellion, the name given to The Reaper in Catalonia) implied and signified has been revealed to us by Miró himself, with terrible words “the execution of this work was direct and brutal. A deformed and gigantic profile head capped with a barretina, emerges from the earth with extraordinary violence, brandishing in one of the hands of his outsize arms a defiant sickle. The environment is apocalyptic, a chaotic sky dominated by a fluctuating star, seems to serve as a counterpoint to a firmament in decomposition...”138. "Another very characteristic feature is the disproportionate and deformed head of The Reaper, whose cry of protest makes us appreciate some incisors teeth similar to dagger points. This aggressive symbol has many examples. Iconographically there is a precedent whose resemblance to 'The Reaper' is very cose, not only in the detail of the teeth, ... 'Two Personages' 1935 139 ... The head, like that of the peasant, is seen in profile, the chin is dislocated, the mouth open and dangerous, being 134 Greeley 2006, p. 41 Dupin 2012, p. 214 136 Dupin 2012, p. 216 137 Martín Martín 1982. p.175 138 Martín Martín 1982. p. 177 139 Oil, enamel, nails, ball bearings, cheesecloth, string, and sand on cardboard, The Kreeger Museum, Washington DC 135 58 topped by a prominent nose in the shape of a horizontal trunk. " "The first common note that 'The Reaper' has with his 'savage companions' is that extreme aggression in attitudes. Some of these characters are characterized by being in excitement, as if they were prisoners of a frantic diabolic dance that infuriates them and at the same time confronts them. For example The Two Philosophers or Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement. The Reaper in his irascible gesture raises his arms, long, filiform, like enveloping seaweed. This same gesticulation of arms in a clamoring attitude we appreciate in works like 'Head of a woman' or in the main figure of Decoration of a Nursery”140. Interesting observation this one, because it includes in the analysis a hardly known painting of Miró and that usually is not included among his savage paintings. Perhaps because of difficulties of identification, since the canvas has been known by different names: Decoration of a Nursery, simply Nursery or Woman Haunted by the Passage of the Bird-Dragonfly Omen of Bad News. The painting was a gift from the painter to the children of Pierre and Teeny Matisse: Paul, Jacqueline and Peter. And one can not help but wonder how could Miró think of painting, precisely for the children's room a scene made of three terrifying figures. The only explanation we found is the painter's mental state in 1938, still influenced by his escape from Spain and the horrors of war. As Martín Martín reminds us, his paintings of this period “communicate to us in a higher degree his depression and pessimism”. Perhaps the sketch that Miró used for the overwhelming drawing of the Catalan peasant was lithograph No. VII of his Barcelona series, made with the report papers that Georges Braque recommended him to buy in Varengeville and that he took with him on his return to Spain in 1940, in our understanding already drawn. The series would be printed in 1944 in the city of Barcelona with money from Joan Prats. The Catalan historiography of the last 40 years pretends that lithographs are something else. For Miró’s grandson, the painter expresses in the series “once again his aversion to the Franco regime. Through these monstrous figures, he strongly denounces the horrors of the dictatorship and the ugliness of its authors” 141. Many other lithographs from the Barcelona series, for example those numbered XVI, XVII and XXI show the same monstrous character of The Reaper, of which Miró will say in 1977 –two years after the death of the dictator– that it represented General Franco: “I start a character without 140 141 Martín Martín 1982. p. 178 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola, 1998, p. 73 59 thinking about Franco and when I finish it I can say: this is Franco” 142. For Miró, the Catalan peasant who rises in arms, terrorizes him and forces his exile and the general who destroys the republic would be the two sides of the same monster. The mural will disappear after the exhibition, without Miró ever showing regret for the loss. In view of what Miró lived, of his way of being and his personal circumstances, the interpretation that has been given so far, both to his savage paintings of the 30s and later works including the Constellations, in the sense that the barbarism he paints, the horror he denounces, are the product of the Francoist uprising and fascism, becomes highly controversial. The revolutionary terror lived by Miró in the first decades of the century –that impelled him to flee from pestilent Barcelona–; the one he suffered in the same city during the revolution of 1934 and the one suffered later by his family and that prompted him to go into exile in 1936 was not that of the conservative reaction, but that of the communist, anarchist and catalanist revolutionaries. It seems therefore unconvincing that in reaction to the revolutionary violence he sould set out to denounce with his painting fascist barbarism, which he had not personally experienced. The crimes committed by the republican militias, regrouped by the leader of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and president of the Generalitat Lluís Companys in the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMAA) are those that have plunged Miró into one of his depressions and caused the hallucinations that are reflected in all that work. The CCMAA is attributed some 8,500 murders in the course of the war, most of which in the first four months of it, when they executed the painter's brother-in-law. But Miró is not a political man, he will not join or support any of the sides in conflict. His concern is the horror he has lived in Republican Catalonia. In a letter to Pierre Matisse dated January 12, 1937, Miró tells him: “We are living through a terrible drama, everything happening is Spain is terryfying in a way you could never imagine ... We are living through a hideous drama that will leave deep marks in our mind ”143. 142 143 Raillard 1998 p. 221 Rowell 1992 p. 146, Umland 1993 p. 333 & Reus 2004, pp. 709-712. 60 3. The return to Franco’s Spain (1940) The German invasion of France inexplicably caught Miró, like many others, by surprise. France was at war with Germany since September 3, 1939 and a German attack was imminent for the entire duration of the drôle de guerre or 'joke war', no matter how much the first efforts of Hitler's army concentrated on completing the invasion of Poland and its repartition with Stalin. Since January 10, the allies are aware of the German plans of imminent invasion of Belgium, France and the Netherlands. On that day, a German staff officer carrying invasion plans with him landed by mistake in a Belgian town (Maasmechelen), next to the German border. The Belgian police got hold of the documents before they could be destroyed. But life in Paris went on as if nothing was happening, and Miró prolongs his stay in Varengeville, traveling from time to time to the French capital. He is for example in Hotel de Royal on Boulevard Raspail in Paris during the week of April 1-7 –while the Katyn massacre takes place in Poland– to prepare, among other things, with Georges Hugnet and Christian Zervos No 3-4 of the Cahiers d'Art magazine. We have also verified, thanks to an unpublished letter to Georges Hugnet of 25.03.1940, that he visits etching magician Roger Lacourière to prepare the beautiful print –which reminds us of the Constellations– to be used in the luxury copies of No. 3 of the review L’usage de la parole directed by Hugnet and that will be distributed together with Cahiers d'Art. Confronted with the imminent invasion by the Wermacht, Miró had three options before him. The first was to stay in France, as did Picasso, Matisse, Sartre, Michel Leiris, Paul Éluard, and many other intellectuals and artists. The painter had nothing to fear from the Germans, as he had not even been designated by the Nazis as a degenerate artist. The curator of the Jeu de Paume museum Rosa Antonia Valland (Cate Blanchett in the movie The Monuments Men) said that some of Miró's work was burned as degenerate art on May 27, 1943 by the Nazi organization dedicated to the confiscation of artistic property Einsatzstab Reichsleiters Rosenberg (ERR) 144. There is no witness to this alleged burning, and in any case the material that Valland kept in the museum was not degenerate art, but the works plundered, in large part from Jewish owners, with the aim of swelling German collections or to be sold to obtain funds. In any case, in the great exhibition of degenerate art of Munich of 1937 (Die Ausstellung "Entartete Kunst") there was no work of Miró, and his name does not appear in the long list of artists included in the inventory of 'vicious' art (Beschlagnahmeinventar Entartete Kunst) 145. 3. The return to Franco’s Spain (1940) 144 McCloskey 2005 p. 26 "Degenerate Art" Research Center, Department for Art History, Freie Universität Berlin Available on-line at http://emuseum.campus.fu-berlin.de/eMuseumPlus (consulted on 09.29.2014) 145 61 The possibility of staying in occupied France came up with a variant in 1941, when the armistice took place: moving to the south of the country to the so-called free zone or Vichy, where many artists went in order not to have to endure the presence of the Germans. The difficulty posed by the French option was that the painter no longer had an outlet for his work in Europe. His dealer Pierre Loeb had been mobilized and the other gallerists did not live during the war but on trading with the plundering of the assets of incautious Jews, whether collectors or dealers. In short, the war blocked the remittances of Pierre Matisse, Miró did not have any source of income in France, and the state of autarchy and poverty in Spain made it impossible to receive remittances from his mother. The second option open to Miró was to temporarily emigrate to the United States, as many artists and writers did: Breton, Matta, Zadkine, Tanguy, Ernst, Chagall, Léger, Mondrian or Masson. On the other side of the Atlantic Miró did have a dealer, but relations with him, which had been fruitful from the artistic point of view, had deteriorated due to the inability of Pierre Matisse to provide the painter with sufficient income in ten years of relations. For the rest, Matisse had suggested to Miró in a letter of 11.10.1939 that he cross the Atlantic, but not to go to New York, but to settle in Mexico, where he said that they helped the Spanish refugees a lot 146. Miró imagined his family therefore barely surviving in a foreign and rough country and with the meager income provided by Pierre Matisse, or rather, that his dealer promised to pay, since he had not received since many months before the 320 dollars a month of the contract. In the United States, Miró, who was not famous and popular as Dalí, would have been totally dependent on Matisse to pay rent and food, and probably could not return to Europe in many years. Dalí's case was different: the painter and Gala, Paul Éluard’s ex-wife, opted since the arrival of the Germans to go to the United States, where he had almost inexhaustible sources of income. To cross the Atlantic, Dalí did as Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg: he obtained in June 1940 visas for Portugal from the Consul in Bordeaux and Portuguese national hero, Aristides Sousa Mendes, days before he was dismissed by dictator Salazar's government. The visa was probably issued on the same day (16) when Miró crossed the border at Port Bou, at the other end of the Pyrenees. That day, Mendes issued payment visas for those who had money, the Rothschild family bankers among others. The next day he issued hundreds of safe-conducts for those who had no money. Once in Lisbon, Dalí had no problem obtaining another visa for the United States and embarked on the Excambion ship, arriving in New York in August. Most Surrealists opted for exile in the United States. But those who, like Miró, did not have a good amount of money in their pockets could not do what Dalí did. The trip of these to the other side of the Atlantic was quite hectic. First they took longer to move. André Breton did not go to the French Riviera until August 1940. There he met a young American journalist, Varian Fry, who with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt – and within the framework of the International Rescue Committee conceived by Albert Einstein in 1933– had created the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose main objective was to remove from Europe the maximum number of anti-fascist and Jewish 146 Letter from Pierre Matisse to Miró del 11.10.1939 PMGA 18.23. 62 intellectuals and artists. Before arriving in Marseille, where he established his headquarters at Villa Air-Bel, Fry asked his ex-Harvard classmate Alfred H. Barr., then director of MoMA, a list of artists in danger. To prepare the list of intellectuals Barr .counted on the help of Thomas Mann. In Marseille was also Jewish millionaire and collector Peggy Guggenheim –who had come there called by fellow millionaire Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy's wife– who funded Fry's risky operation and ended up marrying one of the artists that Fry took to the United States: Max Ernst. It was not until the spring of 1941 that the first refugee ships sailed for New York, Mexico or the islands of the Caribbean, where some had to wait a long time for the coveted American visa –Benjamin Péret was forced to remain for the entire war in Mexico. André Breton himself asked for help from his contacts in the United States, such as wealthy surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann, without receiving an answer. He then went to Bordeaux to head for Spain and Lisbon. Then he changed direction, heading to Marseille to meet Varian Fry. Finally he was able to leave France in a boat together with anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on March 24, 1941. But the ship went to Martinique, in the French Antilles, where after Breton was detained for a few days the family had to wait until June. Thanks to an affidavit of support for him, his wife Jacqueline Lamba and his daughter Aube, issued by Pierre Matisse, he was able to travel to New York, where they lived a precarious existence that produced a estrangement between the writer and his wife and an immediate divorce . The prospect was not what Miró expected for him, his wife and their ten-year-old daughter, and he preferred not to join his fate with that of the surrealists of Marseille, who also did not constitute an ideal company for him in those years. Miró said –when already an old man– that his first intention was to go to the United States. When Georges Raillard asks: “After the Spanish Civil War, in 1940, you left France and returned to your country. Did not you think about exile at that moment?”, Miró responds: “I tried to go to America with my friend, architect J.L. Sert, but there were no seats on the boats. My daughter Dolores was small. For me it was a great responsibility. And since we could not go to America, Pilar and I decided to return to Spain” 147. The Miró establishment has maintained since the restoration of democracy in Spain this assertion that his intention was to go to the United States and that if he did not do so, it was because of the impossibility of obtaining tickets. It was possibly done because it was aesthetically unacceptable that an anti-Franco painter directly opted for the alternative he finally chose. But the examination of his correspondence shows that the idea never crossed his mind. In several letters he talks about the intention of one of his friends to make the leap, but in none does he show the slightest interest in doing the same, while he clearly expressed his intention to return to Spain 148. Besides, in the extensive correspondence between Miró and Sert 149 there is not one single reference to Miró’s alleged plan to go into exile in the United States. There is no 147 Raillard, Georges. “El surrealismo arraigado de Miró”. In Bonet Correa, Antonio (ed.). El surrealismo. Cátedra. Madrid. 1983 pp.135-142. Cited in Reus 2004 p. 239. 148 A Domenec Escorsa, Epistolario 2009, pp.591-603 149 Juncosa 2008 63 doubt that the painter had decided from the beginning to return to Franco's Spain, as his friend Joaquim Gomis had done when Franco won the war. Sebastià Gasch, who meets Miró at the painting materials warehouse of Catalan Antonio Castelucho in Paris when the painter flees from Varengeville, remembers that he was absolutely overwhelmed by the events: “Pale, disheveled, the features disfigured by fear, he only repeated like a litany: 'They have bombed Varengeville, they have bombed Varengeville'”150. Gasch had followed the opposite path to that of Miró and Gomis, staying in Barcelona during the war and fleeing to Paris before Franco's troops entered Barcelona in 1939. But he returned home in 1942 and joined the editorial staff of Falangist magazine Destino . A clear indication of Miró's determination to return to Spain can be found in information from Asturian painter Luis Fernández, Miró's partner in the Llotja school in Barcelona. A short article by the English collector Peter Watson published in his magazine Horizon: a Review of Literature and Art ends with the following words: “The last (about Miró) received directly from a friend of his, Louis Fernandez, a Spanish painter still in Paris, was that he was leaving France last April for the home of his wife’s parents in the Balearic Islands”151. It is also worth noticing that Miró claims in his statement to Raillard that his intention was to go to America with J. S. Sert, but that he could not do it because “there were no seats on the ships”. But as everyone who tried the adventure knew then, in Varengeville in May 1940 it was not possible to know whether there would be places on the ships for the United States. The only way to find out if the trip could be made was to go to an Atlantic port, and wait there for both a visa for the United States and the availability of a ticket. All those who in the spring of 1940 fled the German advance and wanted to go to America took the train in Paris to Bordeaux and Hendaye, as did Dalí and many thousands of refugees trying to reach Lisbon as a port of departure. The same direction took the surrealists, who once arrived in Bordeaux went to Marseille when they learned that it would be possible to take a boat from there. But Miró headed towards Port-Bou. He can not pretend he planned anything but to return to Spain through Catalonia. Moreover, the attraction of the United States and of joining Sert was very low in June 1940. The architect, who ceased to receive his salary as an official of the Republic in Paris in the first months of 1939, immediately went to Cuba, where he arrived in March. From there he mobilized his contacts until he arrived in New York at the end of June, entering the United States with an invitation from James Johnson Sweeney, then Director of the Department of Painting of MoMA, to give lectures in the country. His early days there were difficult, living in a hotel room and not getting practically any work. It took several years until Paul Lester Wiener, who had built the American pavilion at the 1937 exhibition, offered him to collaborate on urban projects in Latin America. Thus was born in 1942 Town Planning Associates. The life standard of Sert was not in the spring of 1940 a model for the gentrified Miró. 150 151 Gasch, Sebastià. Joan Miró. Alcides, Barcelona, 1963.p.60. Cited in Reus 2004 pp. 242 Watson 1941 p. 133. 64 What Miró had decided long ago is that once the circumstances that had forced him into exile –the revolution in Catalonia– disappeared, he would return to Spain. As soon as he received his family in Paris, he had written to Pierre Matisse on January 12, 1937, saying: “All my friends advise me to stay in France. If it were not for my wife and child, however, I would return to Spain.” And he asks him to make the necessary preparations to send him money there if at some point there was censorship in France or if he went to Spain. While it is true that Franco's Spain was far from the ideal that Miró had dreamed of, the truth is that it had restored normality in the country, the condition the painter had established in a letter to Pierre Matisse of 18.12.1936 to return when he fled militia violence (“We are going to remain in Paris until life returns to normal in Catalonia”). Even his grandson indicates that in 1939 “Miró knows that, although the civil war in Spain has ended, he will have to wait before returning home”152, that is, it was not a question of opting to go to the United States or Spain, but of what would be the right time to return to his country. Besides, if in France all his friends were aligned on the antifascist side, in Spain the situation was more complicated. Some of his friends, like Sert or Prats, were moderate Republicans, but many others had clearly gone over to the side of the new regime. And finally, Franco's troops had swept away precisely those revolutionary communist, anarchist, Trotskyist and Catalanist forces from whom Miró had fled in 1936. Thanks to the triumph of the nationals, the Miró family had recovered all the properties that the republic had confiscated. In fact, the painter's mother and sister remained in Montroig until the troops of General Yagüe entered Barcelona on January 26, 1939, returning to the capital to launch recovering procedures for their properties the following month. Four months later, Maria Dolors will marry builder Lluís G. Ylla. The painter could therefore count, if he returned to Spain, with a safe roof, sufficient means to live with a certain comfort and with the Montroig estate that provided him with many pleasures – in addition to food and a secure income. The problem that arose was how the regime would react to the return of someone who had carried out two propaganda works for the republic: the pochoir Aidez l'Espagne and the mural The Reaper. Miró had between April 1939 and June 1940 more than enough time to find out what awaited him if he returned. And he had someone to consult and to support him. If the only two sins he had committed –as we saw he had refrained from publicly speaking about the war– he had made them for the Propaganda Commission of the Generalitat. And the Propaganda Commissariat of the Franco regime had been founded in Madrid by Dionisio Ridruejo, helped by his mentor since the beginning of the century, writer and art critic Eugenio D'Ors. And since 1938 D'Ors was National Head of Fine Arts of the new Francoist Ministry of National Education, position in 152 Punyet Miró & Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p. 63 65 which he was responsible for negotiating the return to Spain of the treasures of the Prado Museum together with Josep María Sert, José Luis Sert’s uncle, who had taken them out of the country at the end of the war. As publisher and writer Esther Tusquets recalls, the arrival of Franco's army in Barcelona was received with enthusiasm by a large part of the population: "One of my first memories is seeing a crowd of soldiers advancing on a road or a avenue. There were many people acclaiming them from both sides of the road or from the sidewalks. My father, who had not set a foot on the street for almost two years, was holding me up to watch the troops march past. My mother shouted Franco's name with an enthusiasm that I would see her manifest on very few occasions throughout her life, and followed a good distance the soldiers without ceasing to cheer and applaud. It was the army of the military rebels... I was three years old and I only knew that something very good had happened, and that the street had been filled with people, and that everyone was happy and shouting a lot, and that my mother was shouting more than anyone, and that also the soldiers smiled and greeted us, and one of them gave me a little red and yellow flag in passing”. What united the thousands of people was the experience of three years of terror : “My people received Franco as their savior, and for them he was. My father, totally disinterested, like many other Spaniards, from politics until the beginning of the war, had defected from the Republican army. Undoubtedly because they were not his people, but also because, as he told me in one of his infrequent confidences, he could not bear the task that as a doctor he had been assigned –to go to the victims after the executions and, if he still detected them alive, give them the coup de grace– and he lived hidden, not even daring to lean out of a window or raise his voice, with the constant fear that someone would denounce him or that they would find him during a 66 casual search, as we had suffered several... Neither mom, of liberal family and with a freemason father, had been interested in politics before the war, but from there on, and unlike dad, remained Francoist to death. A mother extremely tolerant in many aspects and to top it an atheist, but a conservative one”153 . Writer Laura Freixas also recalls that her grandparents, both belonging to “the Catalan bourgeoisie –my grandfather was a textile entrepreneur– spoke Catalan, did not go to church, read Aldous Huxley and Stefan Zweig; they belonged to... the Catalanisht Lliga ... However, when the troops of the Generalissimo entered Barcelona in January 1939, my grandparents received them screaming and shouting, right arm in the air: 'Franco, Franco, Franco!’”154. For a large part of the three million inhabitants of Catalonia, the choice presented to them in the summer of 1936 was the one spelled out by to the humanist and diplomat Joan Estelrich i Artigues: Facing an independent Catalan state with dictatorship of an anarchic proletariat, the victory of the military appeared as the lesser evil. Estelrich himself recalled in 1940 that “One year ago, the day of liberation, all of Catalonia was unanimously for Franco and the National Movement”155. In addition, it can not be forgotten that the Miró's belonged in 1940 to the large family of victims of the Red Terror, praised and glorified by the new regime. To our knowledge, the painter has no doubt: he must return to Spain. And his family and friends tell him that he does not have much to fear. The only thing he is advised to do is to remain discreet for some time and to take some precautions so that the episode of his modest collaboration with the republic does not come to light. Miró will follow these instructions and soon will have solid support among the regime’s artistic establishment in Barcelona, such as Santos i Torroella, artistic director of the Layetanas Galleries; critic Sebastià Gasch; Juan Eduardo Cirlot and all the group of collaborators of the magazine Destino, founded in the Franco headquarters in Burgos, in May of 1937, by Xavier de Salas (friend and neighbor of Miró in Montroig) and José María Fontana Tarrats (Miró’s neighbor in Reus). Jorge Luis Marzo points out for 153 Tusquets, Esther La falangista Tusquets, El País November 18, 2007. See also her memoirs Habíamos ganado la guerra - Ediciones B/ Bruguera, S.A., Barcelona, 2007 154 Freixas, Laura Una generación de catalanes. El País January 21, 2014 155 Estelrich i Artigues, Joan Dietaris, Quaderns Crema, Barcelona 2014 (August 26 and September 1st, 1936). Cited in Freixas, 2014 67 example that “Sebastià Gasch was a 'recalcitrant pro-Franco', in the opinion of the apparatchik Rafael Santos Torroella” and “Juan Eduardo Cirlot professed complete admiration for the Nazi universe” 156. Despite of this background, Gasch, Santos Torroella and Cirlot will be included by the Miró establishment among a large group of freedom fighters during the Franco dictatorship, accompanying other resistant artists d intellectuals such as Alexandre Cirici, Antoni Tapies, Josep Llorens Artigas or Alberto del Castillo 157, the latter being the person who, together with Llorens Artigas, showed Franco in 1951 the first Tapies painting the dictator saw. The painter, Pilar and their daughter Maria Dolors leave Paris, according to repeated statements by Miró and his wife, collected among others by Roland Penrose, eight days before the arrival of the German army 158 on 14 June –which means they left on the 6th of June. “We left Paris eight days before the entry of the Germans”, says the painter 159. The information is confirmed by Pilar Juncosa: "We were in Paris until eight days before the Germans entered”160. Undoubtedly, the date repeated incessantly in the Mironian historiography is incorrect. He could not have left Paris on June 6 and, after a trip that was undoubtedly difficult, be in Perpignan, installed in a hotel and sending letters, postcards and telegrams on the first of June. The most logical thing would have been for Miró to leave Varengevillesur-mer just after signing on the back gouache No. 10 of the Constellations series, Acrobatic Dancers, on May 14. The exact day could be the subject of conjecture, but we do not see how Miró could escape the panic caused in Varengeville by the German bombings from May 11 to 14. If he had left, for example, on Thursday, May 16, he would have done it three weeks before what has been said since the 70s. Although it would have been logical that the terrified Miró Gasch describes left the same day or the day after the end of the bombings, that is, on Tuesday 14 or Wednesday May 15, when his last gouache, which he had been painting since April 29, more than two weeks before, was dry. While bombs fall, one takes refuge at home or wherever one can, and when it clears up one tries to flee. What seems inconceivable to us is that since the bombings took place, the painter would have waited quietly in Varengeville for two or three weeks, while the rest of the population fled and Georges Braque went off with all his possessions to dealer Paul Rosenberg’s shelter in Bordeaux 161. Although Miró tells Raillard that they spent several days waiting at Rouen station, Dupin will later point out that it took him a whole day to travel the 200 km that separate Dieppe from Paris 162, where we think they should have arrived by Friday 17 or Saturday May 18, 1940. We also think that it is possible that Miró was able to reach 156 Marzo 2010. p. 120 Minguet, Joan M., Montaner, Teresa & Santanach, Joan, Joan Miró, escriptor català, in Epistolari 2009, p. 20 158 Penrose, Roland. Miró. Editorial Destino. Barcelona 1991 (1st edition 1970), p. 100-101: 159 Taillander 1972, p. 19. 160 Juncosa, Lluìs. “Apunts per a una petita biografia”. In Aubert 1994 p. 20 161 Dantchev 2005. pp.207-208 162 Dupin 2012, p. 248 157 68 Rouen by car, so as to avoid the Dieppe railway station and the railroad lines between the two cities, typical target of bombings. We have a clear confirmation of our interpretation to the effect that the always cited date of “eight days before the entry of the Germans into Paris” is wrong. This is a letter from Miró to Roland Penrose, in which the painter explains the genesis of the Constellations, while the Briton was preparing his book on Miró, published in 1970. It states that the eight days are before the arrival of the Germans to Normandy, not Paris. “We had to leave Varengeville in haste. In this region, which had remained calm, the Germans opened pitiless bombardments. With the Allied armies completely defeated and continuous bombardments we took the train for Paris. Pilar took Dolores, who was then a little girl, by the hand and I carried with me under my arm the portfolio containing those Constellations that were finished and the remainder of the sheets which were to serve for the completed series. We left Paris for Barcelona eight days before the Germans entered Normandy. We left there at once as a measure of prudence, and went to Palma where I could live peacefully, ignored by everyone and seeing nobody” 163. In fact, the Germans never bombarded Varengeville, a small holiday village of 1,000 inhabitants without any strategic interest, but the city and port of Dieppe. What happens is that the Clos des Sansonnets of Varengeville, where the painter lived, was about 4 or 5 km away from the port of Dieppe, so the feeling was that they were bombing next to your house . The dates coincide: the first German bombardments on Dieppe took place on Saturday, May 11, and the army corps formed by two panzer divisions of General Heinz Guderian (Heinz the Rapid) took the Normandy coast –through Abbeville to the north, not through Dieppe, which will not fall until June 11– breaking the Allied army in two on May 20. Miró also noted that they left Varengeville “amid the bombings”, which gives credibility to our hypothesis of an exit on May 14. But when the Roland Penrose book is reissued in 1985, in a publication that maintains exactly the same pages as the 1970 edition, the reference to Normandy disappears, leaving the text like this: “We left Paris for Barcelona eight days before the entry of the Germans” 164. Plain manipulation, as this modification endorsed the interpretation of the painter and his family that they had left three weeks later, which as we have seen can not be true. Jacques Dupin, the biographer and scholar of the painter who had most contact with Miró, ends up giving a date that has been endorsed by historiography, without confirming our hypothesis that Miró could have left Varengeville on May 14, 15 or 16, but in any case advancing in almost three weeks the official version of eight days before the entry of the Germans in Paris: "On May 20, 1940, the advance of the German armies and the mass exodus of the civilian population in a terrifying disorder finally forced him to stop work and leave”165. Our interpretation of a departure between the 14th and the 16th of May, seems to us more convincing than that of Dupin insofar as it gets closer to the initial statement of Miró, gives the painter two weeks to 163 Penrose 1970. pp.100-101 Penrose 1992 p. 101 165 Dupin 2012, p.248 164 69 get from Varengeville to Paris, make his arrangements in the capital and make the long trip that will take them to Perpignan, where they will probably arrive a few days before June 1. With Dupín they only have ten days to do it all. Be that as it may, Miró, Pilar and María Dolors must have been in Paris on the weekend of Saturday 18/Sunday 19 of May. In Paris, they probably spent a week making arrangements, both for their trip to Spain and to safely leave behind the paintings and goods they had in the capital. Actually the paintings should have been sent to the United States, but it seems that at that moment, when he was not receiving the stipend from his dealer, his main concern was not to fulfill his wishes. But saving the paintings should be a priority. The encounter with Sebastià Gasch in Castelucho would indicate that the painter also buys materials to work. In a letter to Matisse on June 6, Miró explains that “We have passed very quickly through Paris, and it has been impossible for me to take care of sending you the paintings. I will take care of it as soon as I arrive in Barcelona” 166. And as soon as they can they head by train to Perpignan, where Miró and family arrive before Saturday, June 1st, date of a postcard to Tristan Tzara, then in Marseille, kept at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, in Paris. In it the painter gives the impression of having been for a few days there and notes that “for the moment we are here without knowing exactly what we are going to do”167. It is very probable that, although at that moment Miró knows exactly what he is doing, that is, going back to Spain, he opts for not telling Tzara openly that he is one step from reintegrating Franco's Spain. The poet had been in the Republican zone during the civil war and had organized numerous acts in France in its support. Tzara, who was a Jew, chose like his son Christophe to join the French resistance instead of going into exile in the United States. Perpignan was the last days of the spring of 1940 a hotbed of refugees. For example, in the Villa Crépuscule in Canet, poet Robert Rius hosted painters Jacques Hérold, Oscar Domínguez, Víctor Brauner, Henri Goetz and also Benjamin Péret, accompanied by Miró ‘s friend Remedios Varo. But Miró does not seem to have made any effort to see them, nor they to see him. In the aforementioned letter of June 6 to his dealer, Miró also says that he had been for "several days" in Perpignan. Pierre Matisse is worried. This year of 1940 the war will prevent him from making his annual trip to France and pick up the production of Miró and other painters, and despite numerous requests, still has no news of the shipment of the paintings by the Spaniard. On June 4 and 5 he sent two telegrams, the first to Varengeville and the second to Paris, to architect Paul Nelson's address, announcing Miró that he already has at Royal Canada bank the money he was claiming and asking him to send him the canvases 168. But it's too late, because the painter and his family have been for more than a week in Perpignan, where the messages arrive. On June 6, Miró writes a long letter to the gallerist, but he advances by telegram: "We are going back to Barcelona. Pasaje de Crédito. Letter Follows” 169. The painter explains in his 166 PMGA 18.34 Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004 p. 726 Reus 2004 p.242. Archived in folder TZR C 2702-TZR C 2751 of the Jacques Doucet Library, Paris. 168 Reus 2004 pp. 724-725 169 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004 p. 725 167 70 missive that “I’ve decided to return home. I think this is the wisest thing to do at the moment to safeguard Pilar and the little one... I know that this entails very great sacrifices on my part, but I cannot allow my little family to remain in the midst of a tempest. We are thinking of leaving on the 8th... I do not know what will await me upon arrival.... but I hope that once this has passed, I will be able to concentrate once again and to set to work” 170. But it took a few more days to cross to Spain. The painter will tell Georges Raillard in the seventies that in Perpignan “they did not want to give us the visa; but fortunately the consul of Spain was a good person, who cared little about Franco. Thanks to him, after a certain time we were able to leave” 171. The explanation changes when Pilar Juncosa speaks: “There was a mayor in, what’s the name, Port-Bou should be, who was anti-Franco, how odd, because Franco was there, and Joan told him directly that we would like to return to our countrys”172. Obtaining the safe conduct to enter Spain was not difficult, although it did take a few days. Victoria Combalía considers that the ease with which they obtain the permit can be explained by “the help of a relative from within nationalist Spain, very frequent then, and the fact that, in 1940, Miró was no national glory as Picasso was, had not behaved in any scandalous or provocative way (as 'scandalous' and provocative the fascists found, for example, the populism and gay personality of García Lorca). Whether one or the other is the reason, the truth is that Miró was not held at the border, nor was subject of any interrogation” 173. According to Pilar Juncosa, “when we arrived at the border, there was a list of all those they did not want to let in... those days I was very afraid ... and I thought if now Joan can not pass, it will be my fault. And they looked at the list, brr, brr, Joan Miró... and nothing, as Joan had not done much, they let us through”174. But Miró told Raillard, however, that the list was not checked at the border, but within Spanish territory: “At 170 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 and Reus 2004 p. 726 Raillard 1998 p.36. 172 Juncosa, Lluìs 1994. p. 29. Cited in Reus 2004 p. 240 173 Combalía, Victoria. Picasso-Miró. Miradas cruzadas. Editorial Electa, Madrid 1998. p. 104. Cited in Reus 2004 pp. 244-245 174 Fageda & Lacasa, 1994. p. 21. 171 71 the Figueras stop, they checked the list of suspects. I was scared, but my name was not there” 175. Once crossed the border and saved the obstacle of the list of those disaffected to the regime, they took a train to Gerona, where according to Miró, “my friend Prats was waiting for us” and were advised them not to go to Barcelona. From Gerona they went to the place where they thought they would be safer: to the residence of the victim of red terror that Miró's sister María Dolors was. According Pilar Juncosa, they went to Mas Riambau de Tona, near Vic 176. The same erroneous version is repeated by María Lluisa Borràs in 1995 in the catalog of an exhibition (Record de Joan Prats) held at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona 177. But Pilar's brother, Lluís Juncosa Iglesias, who lodged with the Mirós in the forties while studying medicine, corrects Pilar and gives a more plausible explanation of how the events developed: “On the advice of Joan Prats, they stopped at Quintanes of Voltregà, an estate owned by Juan's sister. They met Joan Prats and our father. They agreed that for political reasons it was not advisable to go to Barcelona, and my father offered them our house in Palma” 178. In short, everything was planned in advance by Joan Prats: Miró would go back to Spain, go to Gerona by train and then would drive by car to the Quintanes estate in Sant Hipòlit de Voltregà, about 80 km away, where himself and Lamberto Juncosa Massip –Pilar’s father–were awaiting them, and urged them to seek anonymity in Majorca. As we had seen, the imposing Quintanes estate should theoretically have been ceded to the Church and charities after the death of Jaume Galobart in 1936. However, the Miró family managed to maintain Dolors’ husband's landed property after her marriage with builder Lluís G. Ylla i Cassany in 1939. Mas Quintanes is currently an important Opus Dei agricultural professional training center. After crossing the border and spending some time in San Hipólito de Voltregà, Miró returns briefly to Barcelona, but soon leaves with his wife and daughter to Majorca, where he will continue to paint the Constellations series of. As Miró told Raillard, the decision to settle in Majorca obeyed above all to the fact that “as the people of Palma had suffered the oppression of Franco from the beginning, they were fed up” with the dictator179. Two decades later, Pilar will repeat the same comment: “Because my father was anti-fascist too, and he told Joan: if you would listen to me, I would not be around a lot (in Barcelona), because in Palma there was an atmosphere that was already antiFranco, because here they had spent the war with Franco and they were already fed up with him”180. Undoubtedly, the Miros’ comments were politically correct in the 'anti-Francoist' late 1970s –once the dictator was dead– but they are far from true, because the Balearic 175 Raillard 1998, p. 36-38 Juncosa, Lluìs 1994. p.21 177 Borràs, Maria Lluïsa "Joan Prats, biografia col.lectiva" in Record de Joan Prats. [Exp.20.12/95-03.03/96] Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona 1995. p. 19. Cited in Reus 2004 p.244. 178 Fageda y Lacasa, 1994. p. 35. Cited in Reus 2004 p. 240-241 179 Raillard 1998, pp.37-37 180 Juncosa, Lluìs 1994. p. 29. Cited in Reus 2004 p. 240 176 72 Islands were a bastion of Francoism. The elections of February 1936 had been comfortably won in the region by the conservatives, not the popular front. As for Pilar Juncosa's comment on paternal 'anti-Francoism', suffice it to say that although Pilar’s brother Lambert spent some time imprisoned during the civil war due to his Lerrouxist past, he was later recovered by the Franco regime as councilor and Deputy Major of Palma de Majorca. Industrialist Lamberto Juncosa Massip had strong ties to the wealthy classes of Majorca, who were his main clients. Special was the bond with Juan March, the main financier of the Francoist rebellion. Lamberto’s company had built and installed all the cabinetry of the palace the arms dealer and smuggler –and later banbker– had built. The palace is now the seat of the Juan March Foundation Museum, and the building was redesigned in 1990 by Lamberto’s grandson, Alberto Juncosa. In the spring of 1941, Miró quietly returns to Barcelona and spends the summer at the Montroig estate, which has become the main income source of the family and which he prepares as a residence and study for the years to come. In fact, in the summer of 1942 he moved his official residence and that of his wife and daughter to Montroig 181. But they spend winters in Barcelona, where they occupy at least two floors of the family building in Pasaje de Crédito. Although he did not want to be too visible so that the accusations of republicanism may not reappear, Miró attends the literary and artistic gatherings as well as the exhibitions of his friends in the Barcelona of the forties. He illustrates several copies of Ariel, Revista de les Arts and numerous articles are published praising his work, written by Joan Perucho, Vicente Molina Foix, Cirici and Tapies. In 1944, together with Jean Cocteau and Grau Sala, he illustrated the book Vía Áurea by César González-Ruano, who had just returned to Spain after being arrested in Paris, accused of having sold Spanish visas to Jews, while at the same time denouncing them to the Gestapo 182. It has also been claimed that the writer could have returned to Spain as an agent of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence 183. In 1947 Miró has no difficulty obtaining a passport to travel to the United States. From that moment, when he acquires a more stable economic position and can afford it, he will not stop traveling abroad. The grandson of the painter Joan Punyet Miró says that, back in the 40s, the artist would affirm his anti-Francoism by pointing out, in relation to the Barcelona series, made according to him in the early years of the decade and published in 1944, that “Miró expresses again his aversion to the Franco regime. Through these monstrous figures, he strongly denounces the horrors of dictatorship and the ugliness of its authors”. Although, as we saw, in the happy 70s Miró said that the monstrous persons of the series, which are the continuation of those of his savage paintings and The Reaper of 1937, represented Franco, if it had been so Miró would not have dared to 181 Cable of 07.23.1942 from the Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes to the Mayor of Montroig. Cited in Martí Rom 2014. p. 8 182 García-Planas, Plàcid y Sala Rose, Rosa, El marqués y la esvástica: César GonzálezRuano y los judíos en el París ocupado, Anagrama, Madrid 2014 183 Castillo, Fernando Noche y niebla en el París ocupado. traficantes, espías y mercado negro, Fórcola Ediciones, Madrid 2013 73 draw or publish it in May of 1944, when he tried to go unnoticed and to get rid of the label of being a republican. Nor would Joan Prats print the engravings, since he had spent a few months in prison for his role in the exportation of works of sacred art in the framework of the Zervos exhibition in 1938. The painter will explain to Georges Raillard, however, that “censorship did not see that they were political prints” 184. It does not seem far-fetched, however, to think that apart from the fact that censorship of course never saw the series of prints, of which only five copies were printed, artist and publisher could have a prepared explanation in which the monsters drawn did not represent the dictator, but his enemies. In any case, we understand that what happened is that Miró had painted the series –which share the aesthetics of the savage paintings– much earlier (probably in 1937 and 1938, before painting the Varengeville series, which in turn gave way to the Constellations). And in 1944 Prats printed the lithographs to avoid that the natural deterioration of the fine report papers would destroy the drawings. Report paper is meant to be passed to stone immediately, not to be stored. Another reason for Miró to have the lithographs printed was that he was preparing a shipment to MoMA with the Constellations. The Barcelona series does not bear any similarity with Miró's graphic or pictorial work since he returned to Spain in June 1940 (saving the Constellations, completed in November 1941), while many of the lithographs look very much like etchings made especially in 1938 (See Miró Engraver I pages 42 to 64), and as we have already pointed out, the peasant of The Reaper of 1937 is practically identical to the monster of lithography VII of the Barcelona series. What could have happened is that when it is decided that the series has to be printed urgently in 1944, to prevent the deterioration of the paper or to send them to the MoMA, some of the fifty sheets of the notebook remained unused. The artist then completed the empty notebook pages with signs and drawings that are characteristic of his 1944 work (see, for example, lithographs numbered as 34, 36 and 41 of the Barcelona series). Miró insisted in 1944 in sending the Barcelona series to the United States to be shown along with the Constellations, presenting it as a complement to it. It does not seem very smart to flaunt anti-Francoism in the MoMA of 1944, already led by an anticommunist establishment. Neither do we believe that he tried something similar three years later when he reissued the series in the United States in a circulation of 1,500 copies during his stay in the country 185. This second edition of the portfolio was accompanied by a text by Michel Leiris, entitled Around Joan Miró that underlined the marvelously childish character of the work reproduced, which was a good excuse in case someone asked about the monsters of the series. Not very far from what Antoni Tàpies commented in his text Miró's Innocence, included as a prologue to a book by Yves Bonnefoy XE "Bonnefoy, Yves" in 1964: “What it has of joy, innocent, childish, aesthetically funny and that many believe harmless, the purely formal magic attributed to it, quiet magic...” 186. Nor of what Miró’s friend of and philo-Nazi Juan Eduardo Cirlot said: “The spontaneity of Miró, his search for the poetry of the line and the 184 Cited in Punyet Miró y Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p.73 The Prints of Joan Miró, Curt Valentin , New York, Fall 1947. 186 Tàpies, Antoni, La inocencia de Miró, in Bonnefoy, Yves Miró, Editorial Juventud, Barcelona 1970 185 74 stain, in proximity to children's art, some facets of popular creation and of the pictographs of the prehistoric style of the Spanish Levant, find a very suitable means of expression in the different forms of engraving”187. Cirlot himself was in charge of prefacing the 1959 Spanish edition of the book by American critic Sam Hunter Joan Miró: His graphic work, which also included reproductions of the Barcelona series 188. And the lithographs were also exhibited in the 1949 Miró tribute show in Barcelona. One of them is reproduced in the catalog of the exhibition 189, in which his friend Cirlot describes the series as a simple continuation of his schematism 190. Once the process of rewriting the painter's biography began, Miró and his clan must have thought that Leiris had exaggerated a little the trivialization of the Barcelona series. On the occasion of the reprinting of the series in the first volume of the catalogue raisonné of his lithographs in 1972, the poet was forced to rewrite the 1947 text. After apologizing to the painter for “the abuse that I made earlier of flowery words”, he corrects the shot saying that “You can talk about childhood about Miró, but provided that it is the childhood of the world and not of his own childhood” and he apologizes again for having compared him in 1947 to Walt Disney 191. The toughest critic in this regard with Miró is Nobel Literature Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, who in a chronicle in which he extolled the mastery of Matisse and above all Picasso, dispatched Miró with a blunt paragraph: "I was deeply disappointed. Miró was a good painter at the beginning, who doubts it, and introduced into modern painting a playful, naughty and frisky innocence that breathed poetry and good humor. But how soon he lost the creative impetus, the risky spirit, and began to repeat and imitate himself until he became a cacophonous, artificial and falsely naive industry. While, between boring and desolate, I went through the exhibition, I remembered an insolent phrase about Miró by Juan Benet that I read somewhere in the seventies –a suitable painter for dentists’ waiting rooms or something like that– and I found it very unfair then. Now, after this experience, I do not find it so unfair anymore”192. 187 Indice de Artes y Letras, nº 124-125, April-May 1959. Cited in Ureña 1982, pp.235-236 Hunter & Cirlot 1959 189 Cirlot 1949, Figure 31 190 Cirlot 1949, p. 33 191 Leiris, Michel, Enmiendas y adiciones 1970 En torno a Joan Miró 1947. In Joan Miró Litógrafo 1972, p. 13 192 Vargas Llosa, Mario Pintores en la Costa, El País, Madrid 09. 20.2009 p. 35 188 75 2nd PART: THE CONSTELLATIONS AND THE FIGHT FOR APPROPRIATE REMUNERATION 4. The Constellations or how to tame monsters (1940-41) The 23 Constellations gouaches do not in themselves bring any artistic novelty in Miró. Some of the horrendous characters of his previous period and of the Barcelona series make their appearance again in the gouaches, but miniaturized, hidden or schematized to the extreme in the form of a curved line for the mouth and a series of triangles for the teeth. Although Miró did not paint the first of the series until January 21, 1940, he actually began to change his perspective, to abandon his wild paintings, starting in early 1939. On March 14, for example, he painted the large canvas(130 x 195 cm) Young Girl with Half Brown, Half Red Hair Slipping on the Blood of Frozen Hyacinths of a Burning Football Field 193, that anticipates the aesthetics and characters of the gouache series. As they are also anticipated by the lithographs of the Barcelona series, 1937/38, that in fact constitute the base on which the are built the Constellations, which would only 'dissolve' the monsters of the Barcelona series. In this sense, it is worth remembering that Juan Eduardo Cirlot, in his 1949 book on Miró, in which he completely ignores the Constellations, does pay special attention to the series of lithographs, which he dates erroneously but describes as follows: “Later, in the lithographs of 1944, the schematism continues, this time without the most powerful help of colors. The lithographs are like a kind of game to which Miró surrenders without hesitation. He starts with 'visual melodies' and then, through the series, he confabulates a world, the old world of his primordial style, in which the astral and sexual signs open up, like brothers, in the middle of the ineffable action of the backgrounds, because emptiness is also, in Miró, protagonist” 194. We think this is a splendid description, not of the Barcelona series, but of the Constellations. Between the months of August and December 1939, Miró painted two series of small canvases, Varengeville I and Varengeville II, the first on a red background and the second on sackcloth. The dominant characteristic in both is the safety of the stroke and 4. The Constellations or how to tame monsters (1940-41) 193 194 Joan Miró Paintings No 608 Cirlot 1949 p. 33 76 the firm line drawn on the background. The characters still come from the savage paintings, but a tendency to move and establish a relationship that frees them from isolation becomes evident 195. The name Constellations, denomination that would not be applied to the series of gouaches until 1958, appears for the first time and the series also carry titles that seem small poems. These paintings, among which stand out Women and Kite Among the Constellations (81 x 60 cm) and Dew Drop Falling from a Bird's Wing Wakes Rosalie, who Has Been Asleep in the Shadow of a Spider's Web (65 x 92 cm), mark the appearance of the geometric figures and characters that would later populate the gouaches, and these are distributed with a great density in the canvas, they cross and relate to each other in the same way as in the 1940/41 series. Miró uses in these paintings the same pictorial elements as in the Constellations but, given their size, in the series of gouaches the density of drawings increases considerably, the elements are related to each other and integrated into the matrix. The figures are now diluted and the arrangement of the set and the incorporation of bright and cheerful colors make the aggressiveness of the subjects disappear. Most of the pictorial surface is occupied by other benign figures, such as stars, moons, suns, eyes, soft representations of the female sex, etc., all located in a matrix that occupies all the space by means of lines –in the way of Picasso in the Carnet deJuan-les-Pins of 1925 and La Cuisine of 1948– but in this case in an apotheosis of colors. In the Constellations, the main lines that dominate the composition are those of the main figures, persons and animals. These guide and direct the distribution, dimensions and color of the secondary components, each of which is tamed and controlled so that it maintains its place in the balance of the whole. Miró's most complete explanation of his Constellations series, and probably the most authentic and least contaminated by later historiography, was the one he made to James Johnson Sweeney during his trip to the United States in 1947, and which was published in the form of an interview in the New York magazine Partisan Review in February 1948 196. The painter explains then that he began in 1939 in Varengevillesur-Mer a new stage of his work that had its source in music and nature. He remembers that this happened more or less when the Second World War broke out, when he felt a deep desire for escape and deliberately locked himself in. He also points out in this interview that, perhaps because of his isolation from other painters, materials began to acquire a new importance in his painting. In watercolors, he would harden the surface of the paper by rubbing it, and when painting on this hardened surface it produced curious random shapes. He recalls that after the series of paintings on burlap, he began the series that in 1948 was not called yet the Constellations: “a 195 196 Malet 1983 p. 17 Sweeney 1948, Reproduced in Rowell 1992, pp. 206-211 77 group of gouaches... an entirely new conception of things. I did about six of them before I left Varengeville for Spain and Majorca at the fall of France. There were twently-two (Sic) in all in the series. They were based on reflections in water. Not naturalistically –or objectively– to be sure. But forms suggested bu such reflections. In them my main aim was to achieve a compositional balance. It was a very long and extremely arduous work. I would set out with no preconceived idea. A few forms suggested here would call for other forms elsewhere to balance them. These in turn demanded others. It seemed interminable. It took a month at least to produce each watercolor, as I would take it up day after day to paint in other tiny spots, stars, washes, infinitesimal dots of color in order finally to achieve a full and complex equilibrium. As I lived on the outskirts of Palma I used to spend hours looking at the sea. Poetry and music both were now all-important to me in my isolation. After lunch each day I would go to the cathedral to listen to the organ rehearsal. I would sit there in that empty gothic interior daydreaming, conjuring up forms. The light poured into the gloom through the stained-glass windows in an orange flame. The cathedral seemed always empty at those hours. The organ music and the light filtering through the stained-glass windows to the interior gloom suggested forms to me. I saw practically no one all those months. Bit I was enormously enriched during this period of solitude. I read all the time: St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and poetry –Mallarmé, Rimbaud. It was an ascetic existence: only work. After having finished this series of paintings in Palma, I moved to Barcelona. And these Palma paintings had been so exacting both technically and physically I now felt the need to work more freely, more gaily –to ‘proliferate’... Forms take reality for me as I work. In other words, rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work. Even a few casual wipes of my brush in cleaning it may suggest the beginning of a picture. The second stage, however, is carefully calculated. The first stage is free, unconcious; but after that the picture is controlled throughout, in keeping with that desire for disciplined work I have felt from the beginning.” 197. Miró would give more details to Roland Penrose, in a 1969 letter –almost thirty years after painting them– on how he had made the first stage of pictorial suggestion in the Constellations: wetting the brushes he had used in a painting made the same day in turpentine and rubbing them against the white sheets of a notebook of sheets of high quality paper that he had bought in Castelucho. “The blotchy surface put me in a good mood and provoked the birth of forms, human figures, animals, stars, the sky, and the moon and the sun. I drew all this in charcoal with great vigour. Once I had managed to obtain a plastic equilibrium and bring order among all these elements, I began to paint in gouache, with the minute detail of a craftsman and a primitive; this demanded a great deal of time.” 198. When he ran out of leaves stained by dirty paintbrushes soaked in turpentine, Miro says he repeated the same operation, cleaning the brushes 197 198 Sweeney 1948, Rowell 1992 pp. 210-212 Penrose 1992 p. 100 78 he had used to paint the first Constellations with the solvent and staining the necessary number of sheets of the notebook. 199. The method used by Miró in the Constellations is similar to that used by Marc Chagall years later to make his portentous lithographs. It has always been understood that the painter first drew the contours with a brush or lithographic pencil in black and then filled the drawings with bright colors. In fact, after observing samples of the painter's work stages in the Chagall Museum in Nice, we can assure that very often the painter made one or several spots of color and then used the charcoal, marking the edges of the stain and filling it with drawings of characters or objects that the stain had suggested. It seems to us that in reality these three stages –preparation with paintbrushes and turpentine, drawing with charcoal and coloring– are not enough to explain the process. In fact, with the brushes impregnated with the colors of the previous Constellation, the painter could not have created the backgrounds of the following one without further deliberate action. The clearest example is the passage from gouache number 2, The Escape Ladder, to number 3, People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails. In the first one, made on an ocher and gray background, red and black predominate and there are only a few small final touches of blue. With turpentine in the brushes one could not obtain the overwhelmingly blue background of the second wash, applied in two layers, one light blue and the other a much darker shade. And the same can be said of the transit from number 3 to 4. As we have seen, People at Night ... has a totally blue background, on which Miró applied red, white and black. But the fourth gouache, Women on the Beach, has a light cream background on the right that is darkening to the left and that can not result from rubbing the brushes used in the previous gouache, which does not include this color. In short, Miró may have discovered that the paint dissolved in turpentine from his last oil before the series produced in the paper of Castelucho's notebook a wrinkle effect that marked the grain and suggestive spots. But what he did next was to prepare a colored background in each tempera. When we look at the gouaches in the series, the first thing that catches our attention are the figures, well-colored with gouache of pure colors and bright tones. These are elements or figures of drops, balls, stars, inverted triangles joined by the tip, eyes and bicoloured leaves –representing these the female sex. But if we look closer we discover that the fine lines drawn by the painter surround or define silhouettes, some of them more or less adapted to the color stains of the background and others located discretionarily over the entire surface of the paper. Those silhouettes are the characters that the painter alludes to in the titles. It has been pointed out that the images represented by Miró in the Constellations mean to represent the whole order of the cosmos. Astral bodies are represented by circles or planets and stars. The characters symbolize the earth and the birds would be the union of earth and heavenly world. For Rosa María Malet, “the artist feels an inner desire to escape from the reality that surrounds him and provokes in him a great repugnance. Miró evades inward: deepening in his interiority, in his thoughts. Retired life favors 199 Tone 1993. p. 4 79 this process of introspection, in which the sky and the night play a fundamental role with their stars, to which Miró associates music” 200. As we had seen, Picasso also associated the astral constellations with music in 1925. For J.J. Sweeney, a multitude of microscopic forms swim in an infinite space; delicate lines, freely drawn, move between these tiny symbols, drawing larger forms of phantasmagorical character. The tiny shapes are so numerous and so subtly arranged that the whole composition seems to be in constant movement 201. The characters are mostly the monsters of the savage paintings and the Barcelona series of his previous period, but the key to the issue, the release that Miró gets with this series is that the monsters lose their terrifying character here. As Dupin points out, “the figures are still those of the preceding years, except that the counterpoint of the lines and colors that constitute them is so tight and so precise that they no longer seem threatening and cruel in their isolation, but literally caught in the meshes of a network of great charm that nullifies its primitive aggressiveness. The aggressiveness remains, but as above the rhythmic joy that contradicts it 202. The monsters are no longer solid and powerful, but ethereal. To dilute their malefic power, Miró makes them transparent. Miró has escaped from the world of real monsters and has chosen to enter the world of the reflections of reality in moving water, or in the light filtered through the stained glass windows of the cathedral. When the lines that define each character intersect with those of another or with figures of balls, stars, etc. the crossing divides the figures into two parts, each with a different color. This produces the impression that the fearsome characters of yesteryear, although they retain their teeth or viperine tongues, are actually innocuous transparent jellyfish, which reveal both the hidden side of the figures and the background of the paper. Transparency implies a loss of matter that makes dangerousness disappear. Miró manages to make the monsters that terrified him in the Spain of 1934-39 become mere inhabitants of an ethereal existence, which move –like reflections in water– in multiple intersecting planes but do not affect the reality marked by the crumpled and painted background paper. Ended the war with the victory of Franco, the monsters no longer populate reality, but have lost their corporeality and float above it as parts of a visual composition orchestrated by Miró himself, who is no longer prey to chimeras, but their tamer. In Constellation No. 21, The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers, we see as the main figure, which occupies almost half of the gouache, a figure 200 Malet 1983, p. 17 Sweeney 1945. p. 126 202 Dupin 2012 p.250 201 80 of a woman with only one eye and a nose in the shape of an elephant trunk. But in reality there are two women in her because her big breasts create an impression of a face of another woman in the belly of the first, the breasts being the eyes and a huge vulva being the nose. The counterpoint of the big woman is a small lover located to the left of the gouache, with a distracted air, a hairy wart on the nose and five hairs on the head. There are two other characters, the beautiful bird that is a parrot with its prominent tongue, located in the upper right, and a slug with a large stylized head and body, which advances to the left as all the characters except the ventral woman, who throws a deep look at the observer of the gouache. And it is this second woman who focuses attention. For Roland Penrose, it is as if Miró “had decided to condense all that he loves most, women, the night, stars, birds, dewdrops at dawn, into these small paintings, while emphasizing the precariuous, illusory nature of our existence. Nostalgic themes such as The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain are troubled by the appearance of grotesque masks that reveal Miró’s underlying anxieties. He presents us with a world that is vast and richly furnished with good and evil” 203. The result is that the Constellations transform the characters of the savage paintings and integrate them into a dreamlike landscape, arranged like a melody by Bach or Mozart. Not in vain Miró had confessed J.J. Sweeney in 1947: “The night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings. Music had always appealed to me, and now music in this period began to take the role poetry had played in the early twenties –especially Bach and Mozart when I went back to Majorca upon the fall of France” 204. But, as Dupin recalls, we must not forget that “this musical creation is linked to the presence of anguished beings at the beginning of the work; transfigures them in their movement and drags them into the vertigo of the night where their poison dissolves” 205. Miró inscribes the poetic titles within a drawing on the back of each gouache. Some are simple and descriptive as Toward the Rainbow, Nocturne o Woman and Birds. But others constitute sketches of poems, like People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails o Women at the Border of a Lake Irradiated by the Passage of a Swan. The drawings within which he writes the titles are made in a space of about 25 by 20 cm and represent male or female persons with a tiny body and a large head, inside which Miró writes his name. Below is a horizontal line ending in small circles, followed by 203 Penrose p. 105 Sweeney, 1948, Rowell 1992 p. 209 205 Dupin 2012 pp.254-255 204 81 another line or lines with the title of the gouache between asterisks. Below is a drawing of a spiral; below is the place where he completed the gouache; below the date in the figure format of day/month in Roman numerals/year in standard format. And they all end with a typical Miró star formed by four lines that cross in the center and whose vertices are completed here with small circles. So in each of the 23 gouaches. As Penrose recalls, Miró alludes in a subtle way “to his desire to evade the horrors that menace him. The ladder of escape is the title of an early Constellation, just as on 14 October 1940 he wrote on the back of another The 13th, the Ladder Brushed against the Firmament. Another is named The migrating bird, and the last of the series, which began with Sunrise, is The Passage of the Divine Bird. Perhaps the most expressive title, in circumstances from which deliverance seemed so improbable, is People in the night guided by the phosphorescent tracks of snails ”206. Undoubtedly, Miró was deeply depressed in the period 1934-39 that precedes the Constellations. But the painter has a steel spirit with sufficient resources to get out of this situation. For Penrose, “It must be very rare that a series of paintings that contain such coherence and lyricism should be completed in the midst of such catastropic events affecting both the native country of the artist and the country he has adopted as a refuge. It is a sign of the fortitude and equanimity of which Miró is capable that his work continued unchanged in its quality and its impact”207. The question of the relationship between depression and the work of Joan Miró has been the subject of several studies. One of them, Mind and mood in Modern art I: Miró and “melancolie” 208 guesses a relationship between the feelings of despair and the inner torment of Miró and the evolution of his artistic work, but does not dare to establish a direct link between his depressive state and concrete works of art. It notes however that through introspection and meditation, the spiritual beliefs of the artist sustained him in his sufferings, and made his isolation, loneliness, dissatisfaction and the desire to ascend to the celestial heights subject of his art. The author, Harvard Medical School professor Joseph J. Schildkraut, is an expert in the interrelation between depression, spirituality and artistic creativity and was called in 1993 by the Joan Miró Foundation to organize and preside in Barcelona a symposium on the centenary of the birth of the painter. The result of this event was the book Depression and the Spiritual in Modern Art: Homage to Miro 209. One of the most famous phrases by Miró is the one that was included in the December 1933 issue of Minotaure magazine: “I find it difficult to talk about my painting, because it is always born in a state of hallucination, caused by any blow, objective or subjective, and of which I am totally irresponsible”210. The statement is the written response to the question posed by publisher Stratis Eleftheriadis Tériade, who, fed up 206 Penrose pp.105-106 Penrose p. 102 208 Schildkraut 1995, p.p. 139-156. See also Schildkraut 1982 209 Schildkraut 1996. Among the essays included, one is ‘Rain of Lyres Circuses of Melancholy:’ Homage to Miró by Schildkraut wth Alissa J. Hirshfeld. 210 Minotaure, nº 3-4, Editions Albert Skira, December 1933. p.18 207 82 with the delirious interpretations of intellectuals about artists' paintings, decided to give the latter the floor in an article 211. Picasso's friend Beaudin and Miró sent him brief texts, while Bores devoted himself to theorizing ("A painting is a confession made in a secret language") and Dalí gives free rein to his delusions ("As for spontaneity, I would say that it is also a pig’s foot, but a pig’s foot upside down, that is to say, a lobster"). Both Miró's statement and the text that Tériade chooses from Georges Braque refer to hallucination as the basis of the creative process. For the French painter, “Impregnation is all that enters us unconsciously, which develops and is preserved by obsession and is revealed one day through creative hallucination. Hallucination is the definitive realization of a long impregnation, whose beginning goes back to the (first) youth”212. In 1947, Miró also told Sweeney that in the thirties, and as a result of reading the surrealist poets “I began gradually to work away from the realism I had practiced up to The Farm, until, in 1925, I was drawing almost entirely from hallucinations.... Hunger was a great source of these hallucinations” 213. It can be imagined that the process that Miró underwent in the preparation and during the time in which he made the Constellations resembles the one many years later Carlos Castaneda, another son of a watchmaker goldsmith, and a traveler like him, will describe. According to the anthropologist of Peruvian origin, compassion for oneself is caused by personal importance, a powerful force that prevents us from perceiving the hidden realities of our own existence. To undo personal importance, the individual must move his assemblage point, the place where the person's consciousness, his soul, lies. By moving that point you can reach different perspectives that discover planes of consciousness different from the daily reality of everyone. It is much more than a change of perception, because it opens consciousness to unusual worlds. We will recall also that already in February 1937, Miró had anticipated his intention to escape from the difficult reality that surrounded him and paint something that would later take him to the Constellations. In his long letter of January 12 of that year to his North American dealer he indicates that, since all his unfinished works have remained in Barcelona, he will try to do something new: “I have decided to do something absolutely different; I am going to begin doing very realistic still lifes. I was already thinking of doing that, but later, and alternating with other things in which I would have attempted to escape reality entirely –and create a new reality, with new figures and fantasmagoric beings, but ones filled with life and reality. I am now going to attempt to draw out the deep and poetic reality of things, but I can’t say whether I will succeed to the degree I wish” 214. As early as 1940, on February 4, Miró wrote to Pierre Matisse from Varengeville: “I am now working on a series of 15 to 20 paintings in tempera and oil, dimensions 38 x 46, which has become very important. I feel that it 211 Tériade, E. Émancipation de la peinture, Minotaure, nº 3-4, Paris 1933 pp.9-20. Minotaure, nº 3-4, p.12 213 Sweeney 1948 p. 208 214 PMGA 18.22. Rowell 1992 p. 146, Umland 333 & Reus 2004, p. 711. 212 83 is one of the most important things I have done, and even though the formats are small, they give the impression of large frescoes.” 215 Miró seems determined to move his assemblage point and have access to these new planes of consciousness, for which Castaneda points out that what is essentially needed is will: “To face the attempt, we need abandonment and coldness and, above all, boldness”216. According to Castaneda’s Don Juan, “a high fever can move the assemblage point. Hunger or fear or love or hate can also do it. The same mysticism and inflexible intent, the preferred method of sorcerers”. The favorite reading of Miró in those years were the poems of San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Jesús 217. And the painter does not lack the audacity necessary to start the process. As early as 1936, upon his arrival in Paris, he had declared to Georges Duthuit,: “Courage consists in staying at home, close to nature, which does not care about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something wonderful. But to understand it we have to recover the magical and religious sense of the things that belong to primitive peoples ... In fact, people are always the same, and everywhere –spontaneously– they create wonderful things”.218 In 1917, in a moment that for Miró was as difficult as the time of the drôle de guerre in Varengeville, to the extent that as we said before, he was doing his military service and his battalion was destined precisely in Barcelona where it had taken place an insurrection, Miró has a reaction similar to that of 1940. The painter then writes to his friend Enric C. Ricart: "I have worked a lot. Now I'm in Montroig with my people, and here I plan to finish the summer painting. This summer I have written very little, against what I proposed, and also with great synthetism. The lonely life of Ciurana, the primitivism of those admirable people, my intense work, and above all my spiritual retreat, the opportunity to live in a world created by my spirit and my soul, set apart, like Dante, from reality (do you understand all this?) have imprisoned me inside myself, and as I became skeptical in everything that surrounded me I have been getting closer to God, to the trees and mountains and to friendship. A primitive like those people of Ciurana and a lover like Dante” 219. Miró's introspection exercise is recognized by his grandson, for whom “When he realizes that war is approaching, Miró retreats into himself and establishes an invisible barrier with the world. Like a monk, solidly rooted in the soil, allowing himself to feed on purity by nature. His imagination, forced to limit itself to sheets of paper, develops even more to interpret his feelings and transcribe them with drawings. The ladder is more present than ever in the Constellations, as if to transcend his material destiny” 220 . 215 PMGA 18.22. Rowell 1992, p. 168, Umland 1993 p. 335 & en Reus 2004, pp. 720-721 Castaneda, Carlos El conocimiento silencioso, Gaia Ediciones, Móstoles 2002 p. 105 217 Santos Torroella, Rafael: Miró aconseja a nuestros jóvenes pintores, Correo Literario nº 20, Madrid 03.15.1951. Rowell 1992 p. 227 218 Duthuit, 1936 219 Epistolari 2009, pp.65-66 220 Punyet Miró.& Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p.65 216 84 The Constellations have also been interpreted using other keys. One author suggests, for example, that the series constitutes Miró's artistic testament, made in Hebrew ciphers. For Murilo José Farias Dalla Costa, the set of washes is structured as a funeral song or meditation on death and the meaning of life. A work in which Miró “reveals in an allusive way his most prolific and secret beliefs –among which his religious beliefs of Jewish origin” 221. Saturnino Pesquero also sees influence of the Jewish cabal in the figures of Miró. This author develops his philosophical-metaphysical vision’ 222 of the painter citing Miró himself, who in a 1957 statement for XXe Siécle, responds to Pierre Volboudt that his true reality “is a deeper, more ironical reality, indifferent to the one before our eyes; and yet, it is the same reality. It need only be illuminated from below, by the light of a star. Then everything becomes strange, shifting, clear and confused at the same time. Forms give birth to other forms, constantly changing into something else.” It would be, according to Miró, “a secret language made up of magic phrases, a language that comes before words themselves, from a time when the things men imagined and intuited were more real and true than what they saw, when this was the only reality.” 223 221 Dalla Costa 2012, p.p.15,125 Pesquero 1999 223 Rowell, 1986 p. 240 222 85 5. Skipping his dealer: the failed exhibition at MoMA (1941-1945) In the frustration of his personal, artistic and economic situation in the oppressive Spain of the early forties of the twentieth century, Miró, advised by Joan Prats and other Spanish friends, tried various strategies to overcome the trance. He could not sell in Spain because of the disastrous economic situation that the civil war had left and that provoked by autarchy, and because he was practically ignored in his country. Lost the source of French relations and income due to the war and to the flight to Cuba of Pierre Loeb, the only contact and source of money that he has left is his United States dealer Pierre Matisse. He is the first to whom he addresses in search of artistic outputs and cash icome. He will even decide to send him the only important work that he treasures and that somehow thinks that will constitute his lifeline: the Constellations. And this despite the fact that he knows that the dealer will consider that more than half of the gouaches of the series belong to him. But the Constellations are not sent to New York and Matisse does not respond to the call, for long periods not giving any news. The little cash that his dealer sends him barely serves to cover his most elementary expenses, without being able to lead the life he thought he deserved, and forced him to depend economically on his elderly mother. These circumstances add frustration to the already discouraged painter, who then tries –in 1944– two parallel strategies: on the one hand to try to bypass Pierre Matisse and sell through other channels in the United States, the only real market given the economic boom that the war had generated, and on the other hand, to organize on his own two magnificent exhibitions of his work, first in New York and then in Paris. As we will see, the two strategies fail miserably due to a combination of lack of good contacts and poor preparation: he will not manage to sell anything, Matisse will wrest the Constellations from his hands, and the museums in New York and Paris will reject the idea of doing a great exhibition of his war work. Until the great 1993 exhibition in MoMA, historians had shown no interest in ascertaining the vicissitudes of the series of gouaches since its creation until its rise to fame in the second half of the 40s and its resurgence in the late 50s. But when preparing the Centennial exhibition, MoMA commissioned Lilian Tone –whom she identifies as former research assistant of the Department of Painting and Sculpture– to make the catalog of the exhibition. Tone not only makes the catalog, but is interested 86 in the genesis and avatars that surround the series, which she guesses will constitute the center of gravity of the display. The result is the essay "The Journey of Miró's Constellations” 224, that the MoMA relegated to the 1993 Autumn Museum Review instead of publishing it in the magnificent catalog of the exhibition225. The author –now curator of the museum– has indicated to the author of these lines that the reason for not being included in the book was that she finished the text, fruit of her 'fascination' for the Constellations, when the book was practically ready. Tone’s text will constitute the oracle of truth for all those who since 1993 have written about Miró and the Constellations. The problem is that the text was supervised by one of the parties involved and does not shed any light on the many uncertainties surrounding the role of MoMA, the way in which Pierre Matisse takes control of the series and the maneuvers of Miró himself and his team of advisers in Barcelona. As for the way in which the Constellations actually arrived in New York, historiography has established that it was through Brazilian Paulo Duarte. But in fact the details have not been published in any opf the thick essays dedicated to the artist. For the rest, Miró himself and his family have contradicted themselves several times in this regard. For example, the painter told Lluis Permanyer in an interview with Gaceta Ilustrada in 1978: “In Paris I met the cultural attaché of the Brazilian embassy. He sent the 23 Constellations to my dealer from New York, Pierre Matisse, in the diplomatic bag”226. But he does not specify who it is. Permanyer states in his 2003 book of conversations with Miró that the “deputy to the head of the department of culture at the Brazil Embassy in Paris” to whom he delivered the gouaches for shipment to New York was undoubtedly Joao Cabral de Melo Neto 227, disregarding the fact that since the opening of the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery it had been conclusively proven that the person responsible for the shipment was Paulo Duarte. Miró’s brotherin-law Lluís Juncosa indicates for his part in his Notes for a small biography of Miró: “And he will meet Adriano de Guzmao, a Portuguese diplomat, and a Brazilian who was called something like Melo Neto, who will be the person who sent the Constellations, by diplomatic bag, to the Matisse Gallery in New York” 228. As we will see, the person responsible for the shipment was not Melo Neto, who in 1944 had not yet joined the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor Gusmão, who was not a diplomat. The books on Miró, which did not address the issue during the five decades that followed the completion of the Constellations, have later settled the matter thanks to Lilian Tone. Dupin, Penrose, Malet, etc. limit themselves to making a brief reference to the essence of Tone's article, that is, that MoMA could not get hold of the gouaches for economic reasons. We are going to try to shed some more light on the matter using 5. Skipping his dealer: the failed exhibition at MoMA (1941-1945) 224 Tone 1993, p.p. 1-6 Lanchner 1993 226 Permanyer 1978 Rowell 1992 p. 295 227 Permanyer 2003, pp. 141-142 228 Juncosa, Lluìs 1994, p.38. Cited in Boix Pons 2011 225 87 the documentation that has been published or made available since then, contrasting it with other data that had not been taken into account, in order to see to what extent Tone’s story needs updating. John Russell, in his documented 1999 work Matisse: Father and Son, does not cite Tone's article, but indicates that the 23 Constellations would have been brought to MoMA “under diplomatic immunity, by a Peruvian diplomat who was stationed in Madrid. They were consigned to the Museum of Modern Art, to which the diplomat in question had been of service on other occasions” 229. Undoubtedly, Russell refers to Paulo Duarte, but he is wrong in almost everything: Neither Duarte –who is not Peruvian– nor any of those involved in the shipment are diplomats; the expedition is commercial and is made by ship and not personally carried by the Brazilian. Nor 23 gouaches are sent, but 22, although Russell correctly points out that the addressee is not Pierre Matisse, as Miró says, but MoMA. In order to try to reflect what really happened, there is no other way than following the chronological approach. Tone’s description is repeated word by word in one of the two only relatively long essays dedicated to the Constellations of which we have had knowledge, the Master thesis of Murilo José Farias Dalla Costa Mortuary meanings of the series The Constellations of Joan Miró: “According to the initial idea of Miró, the series of paintings ... should have been acquired all by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which would have guaranteed its permanent exhibition in this prestigious institution in New York” 230. The same goes for Antonio Boix in his exceptionally well-documented blog Mirador: “Miró initially planned to send his paintings to MOMA in March 1944, so that they would be exhibited towards the spring” 231. This same version is repeated in the 2004 doctoral thesis of Jaume Reus Morro Escape and internal exile in Joan Miró's work: 1939-1945, the most elaborated work up to the moment that addresses the Constellations theme: “Miró is convinced of the significance of the series, and that is why he plans their exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York” 232. But if Miró had wished to market the Constellations by any means other than Matisse, he would not have written to the gallerist from Varengeville on Wednesday, January 12, 1940: “Work runs smoothly. I am now doing very elaborate paintings and I feel I have reached a high degree of poetry –a product of the concentration made possible by the life we are living here” 233. And he says this nine days before completing the first gouache of the series, Sunrise, which he finished on Friday, January 21. As we saw, Miró gives again details of the series to Matisse three weeks later, on Friday, February 4, four days after completing his second gouache, The Escape Ladder, when, after telling him that he was working on the series, he added that “With this series and the one before it 234, you could do a very, very fine exhibition. I am planning to work on these paintings, using a very elaborate technique, for about 3 months –making 229 Russell 1999 p. 252 Dalla Costa 2012, p.15 231 Boix Pons .2011 232 Reus 2004 p.293. 233 PMGA 18.34. Rowell 1992 p.168, Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, p.720 234 Varengeville series I & II, precursors of the Constellations 230 88 allowance for the fact that, fortunately, they will lead me to conceive of other works which I will prepare at the same time...”. The fact that he points out later in this letter that he will not send them until they are all finished does not indicate in any way that he was trying to avoid the commercialization by the gallerist: “With the series of 38 x 46 canvases I m working on now, I can’t even send you the finished ones, since I must have them all in front of me the whole time –to maintain the momentum and mental state I need in order to do the entire group”235. In short, Miró thought from even before finishing his first gouache that they were destined to be exhibited and sold by Pierre Matisse. Miró was convinced that Pierre Matisse was the right dealer and propagandist. He was happy with the way he carried out his exhibitions and with the promotion he made for his work to be displayed in museums, either in exhibitions or in permanent collections. What he could not understand is how he did not get a better slice of the cake, how the exclusive rights he has given to Matisse to market his work does not allow him to live materially as he deserves, that is like a good bourgeois. In January of 1939, when the end of the Spanish civil war approaches (“the rebel troops are getting closer and closer to Montroig”), Miró is calm. In a friendly letter to Pierre Matisse 236 written from Paris on January 2, he sends him a photo of the – frightful– decorative panel he had made for the bedroom of the gallerist's children and tells him about Pierre Loeb, without showing any sign of concern for the future of his French dealer –who was Jewish. But he continues to point out that “In view of the very disturbing state of Europe, I would prefer that you deposit my emoluments in my bank account in New York. That will be more prudent, and I will let you know when to make a transfer to my bank in Paris as I may need funds. According to my accounts, you owe me $ 660 for the year 1938 plus 220 for the year 1939 (which makes a sum of 880)”. Matisse answers him on January 16 and confirms that in a next letter he will send him the receipt of depositing the money in his New York account. And he adds, apologizing in advance, that Miró needs to send him paintings, because he plans an exhibition for the spring 237. The following letter of which we have proof from Miró to Matisse dates from August 25, just a week before Hitler invaded Poland, and is sent from the Clos des Sansonnets in Varengeville-sur-mer. The tone has changed and the concern becomes more present: “I was working very well in this beautiful country and here we are immersed in this nightmare” 238. The next letter from Miró to Matisse is also written from Varengeville on September 15, 1939, two days before Stalin invaded Poland from the East, despite which Miró, installed in the tranquility provided by the drôle de guerre, tells him that “I have resumed my ordinary life and I am satisfied with my work”. Again the economic concern is paramount, and for the first time we see that he suspects that his source of income in Europe will disappear. After asking the gallerist to put the New York 235 PMGA 18.34. Rowell 1992 p.168, Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, p.p. 720-721 PMGA 18.24. Umland 1993 p. 334 & Reus pp. 713-714 237 PMGA 18.24. Reus pp. 714-715 238 PMGA 18.24. Umland 1993 p. 334 236 89 account in the joint name of his and Pilar Juncosa's, and do what is necessary so that both can draw cash from the Parisian branch of the bank when they need it, he adds that “Since all that will take a while, I ask you to send me a check for $ 220 (monthly payment for July)”239. The same disregard for the military situation is clear from the content of his next letter to Matisse, dated October 24, when Hitler has just ordered his armies to invade France, an assault that will not occur because his generals convince him to wait until spring. Five and a half years after having signed his first contract with Miró, and after having made a good amount of money from the works of the painter, which he obtained for very few dollars –some $ 11,400 at 2016 purchasing power for the entire production of one year– Matisse decided to take a step forward and offer a stable and better remunerated contract. He does so because in those years he had organized numerous solo exhibitions by Miró (New York and Chicago in 1934, New York in 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938 and 1939) and placed his work among the great North American collectors and museums, making handsome profits. Another reason that prompts the gallerist to offer more money to Miró is that the painter had done a lot of work in those years: the famous savage paintings that so please Pierre and his clients, especially the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which will acquire in this time, among others, Rope and People of 1935, Still-life with old shoe of 1937 and Self-portrait 1 of 1938. Each painting that MoMA acquires and exhibits implies a multiplying effect on American demand, which means cash for the dealer. And MoMA exhibits Miró's work in two exhibitions in 1936, one in 1937 and one in 1939. Less important museums, such as those in Philadelphia, Chicago or Minneapolis, also acquire paintings by Miró, and they are followed by big collectors, always passing through Pierre Matisse's. In addition, the paintings Miró does those years are the size that collectors and museums prefer –an average of 75 by 110 cm. Pierre Matisse evaluates the situation and decides to offer Miró a contract that, without being opulent, is much better than the previous one. This also prevents the painter from being tempted to accept offers from other American dealers. On November 3, 1939 and after having met Matisse in Paris, Miró has already made his decision. In a letter to the gallerist, and in view of the difficulties he guessed to haunt Jew Pierre Loeb –meanwhile mobilized in the army– he accepts Matisse's offer: “I have reflected on our conversation and I have decided, to put you in a position to deal thoroughly with my work, of giving it to you in its entirety. I do it to encourage your efforts and those of Teeny by giving you facilities, and so that, once the market is restored, you will not hesitate a moment and be in a position to place my painting in where it will have the right to demand.” The remuneration is set at 320 dollars per month (about $ 5,480 of 2014 taking into account inflation) for the entirety of his work. The letter ends with rudimentary accounts, in which Miró indicates that Matisse owed him as of July 31, 220 dollars, but that a check from the gallerist on September 19 of $ 250 resulted in Miró owing him $ 30. It also indicates that the “Contract with Pierre (Loeb) is paid until August 31” 240. For Miró, the fact of having a contract in 239 240 PMGA 18.24. Reus pp. 715-716 PMGA 18.24. Reus pp. 717-718 90 dollars and not in French francs is a considerable improvement, because the Gallic currency had suffered devastating devaluations in previous years. In 1936 two depreciations, the first of 35% and the second of another 25%, which in a few months meant the value of the currency was reduced to less than half. In addition, charging in dollars allows him to have the money deposited in New York or Geneva and play fully in the forex market, a game he had learnt from friends and diplomats, who at that time –and today also in many parts of the world– obtained by this method a good part of their real income. But once the deal is concluded, the tug of war on payments on one side and delivery of canvases on the other, begins immediately. On Monday, November 20, 1939, Pierre Matisse sent Miró a telegram from Paris, stating that he can not make the deposit in the bank and that he leaves for New York on Saturday, but another undated cable sent from the United States confirms that he has “Telegraphed the monthly installments, November included”, adding immediately that he impatiently awaits the paintings he has seen in the Miró’s studio and he needs for the exhibition and beggs the painter to communicate by telegram the date of delivery to Arthur Lénars in Paris, the company he used to send works of art to the United States 241. Miró feels at any rate calm in Varengeville. He considers that he has won some points from Matisse and that he is in a position of strength, so he does not hesitate to show reluctance to send work, even if it belongs to the gallerist. The painter responds therefore on February 4, 1940 from Varengeville giving the gallerist the dimensions of the paintings he has seen and the information that Christian Zervos will reproduce them in in Cahiers d'Art. After telling him for the first time about the Constellations (he has already painted two), he suggests something that will obviously displease Pierre Matisse: “The Zervos came the other day and said that all those paintings should be shown in Paris before leaving for America and that Yvonne would like to exhibit them in her gallery, which is very beautiful. The idea seems interesting to me, because what matters most is that the works be consecrated in Paris, where our paintings have a resonance, which would undoubtedly have an impact in New York and the success of your exhibition would be more considerable and effective.”242 Matisse does not want delays nor does it please to thim that meddlesome Yvonne Zervos exposes the works, and he replies to Miró in a telegram dated February 19: “SHIPMENT IN PREPARATION AT LENARS. PRAY INCORPORATE WITHOUT DELAY THE CANVASES, WHICH I NEED URGENTLY” 243. And he does not cease from then on to ask Miró for paintings, which he considers appropriate due to the monthly payments he makes. Matisse also fears they might be blocked in Europe, given that the drôle de guerre has ended in the meantime: on April 9 Germany has invaded Denmark and Norway, and On May 10, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Fall Gelb, the Western offensive against the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. On Tuesday, June 4, 1940 Matisse comes back to Miró asking for canvases in a telegram: "MONEY WENT TO ROYAL CANADA STOP 241 PMGA 18.24. Reus pp.718-719 PMGA 18.34. Reus pp. 720-721 243 PMGA 18.34. Reus p.722 242 91 DELIVER THE PAINTINGS IMMEDIATELY TO LENARS STOP ADVISE CHANGE OF ADDRESS WE THINK OF YOU. FOLLOWS LETTER” 244. Although he has no news from indolent Miró, he is worried because in those days the evacuation of 350,000 British, French and Belgian soldiers from Dunkirk to England is taking place, an operation completed on June 4. Ten days later German troops enter Paris. Miró receives the Tuesday 4 cable on Thursday 6 in Perpignan, next to the Spanish border, from where he sends a telegram to Matisse giving him the address of his parents' home: "BACK TO BARCELONA PASSAGE CRÉDITO” 245. In the letter that he wrote to Matisse that night from the Hotel de France, he informed the dealer that since “we passed very quickly through Paris, it has been impossible for me to send you the paintings. I'll take care of it when I'm in Barcelona” where he will head in two days. Miró asks Matisse to behave in these difficult days as a friend and not as a dealer, and after assuring him that he will undoubtedly find a way to send him his paintings, he asks him not to speak in the correspondence that he sends to Spain – addressed to his wife– about money or monthly payments and that when he needs money he will ask for it, using the catalogs code (1 catalog ordered equal to 100 $ requested) 246. The next letter we are aware of is one sent by Pilar Juncosa from Palma de Majorca on August 22, 1940, in which Miró says he has received news from the gallerist and talks about family issues, without mentioning at any time the question of sending the paintings that Matisse awaited –nor the Constellations, of which he has already completed ten– nor the money 247. And nothing more until the 7th of January of 1941, when Pierre Matisse shows in a telegram to Pilar Juncosa his restlessness due the lack of news: "WORRIED WITHOUT NEWS WE SEND BEST WISHES NEW YEAR AWAITING NEWS” 248. In another letter from Pilar Juncosa to Pierre Matisse dated March 23, 1941, we find a hidden reference to the subject of the canvas shipments: “The field was marvelous here at the time of almond tree bloom, it is a beautiful country, full of poetry, unfortunately I do not see at the moment how I could send you the images” 249. He is referring to the impossibility of sending the paintings that Matisse is still waiting nor the Constellations gouaches, of which he has already finished 16. One month later, on April 28, Pilar writes again from Palma, referring cryptically to the Constellations: “Juan always studies a lot; now he works in an extremely thorough and intense way and we are very happy, not only for the results obtained, but also for the documentary value of those studies, which can represent new starting points for new and important achievements that he prepares”. And then he informs Matisse that he will still not send him paintings: “It is for this reason that this work is very valuable for him and so for some time he will need to have it at sight to use it as control material, for comparison and study. As soon as he doesn’t need them, he will inform you”. She e immediately 244 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.724 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.725 246 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, pp.725-727 247 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, pp.727-728 248 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004 p. 729 249 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, pp.729-730 245 92 goes on to talk about the reverse side of the coin, that is, about remuneration: “Let us also hope that the material difficulties we face today are going to decrease” 250. We understand that despite Matisse’s insistence and the promises of the painter, he has not taken any streps to send the paintings he had in Paris, occupied by the German troops for already ten months. It is not until six and a half months after that Miró tells Matisse, through a letter from Pilar Juncosa, that he has done something to take care of the matter. In a letter of November 15, 1941, he informs him that “During the days we spent in Barcelona (Miró) has made some efforts to send images and hopes to succeed.” We have here confirmation that the images of the previous letter were the paintings that Matisse has been waiting for three years. But the main reason for the letter is not the sending of canvases, but to ask for money: The letter begins in its first line with a reproach to the gallerist: “For some time now we have not received news from you”, and Pilar soon tackles the gist of the matter: “We need to receive catalogs, naturally at an advantageous price for us. Could you tell me as soon as possible if you can send them to us? Talk to Moncha and her husband, they could give you some advice” 251. In short, Pilar criticizes the gallerist on Miró’s behalf for not giving any signs of life (or sending money), he insinuates that Miró may be able to send him work, but immediately urges him to send a good amount of money. To prevent Matisse from claiuming he would get into trouble by sending cash, he reminds him that the person who is already his informal agent, José Luis Sert, is in New York. Sert could find a way to get the money to him, and precisely through the black market, so as to be able to get pesetas “at an advantageous price”. The method of sending money through Paco Sert, the architect’s brother, undoubtedly in charge of finding Barcelona businessmen, black marketeers or wealthy people who need foreign currency on a regular basis, paying him in pesetas, will not fail to raise problems, as shows a letter from Miró to his architect friend of October 14, 1948, after his 1946 contract and when in addition to catalogs at $ 100 there is also talk of prints at $ 1,000: “He also asked me to tell you that at the moment he has problems finding the money to pay for the lithos and begs you to suspend remittances for the moment... As soon as Pierre sends you the announced consignment of 1 engraving and 5 catalogs, tell me, so as not to disturb to your brother, and I'll tell you what to do with it” 252. Miró had completed the last gouache of the series, The Passage of the Divine Bird, on September 12, 1941. And the lack of money makes him think of sending them to the United States to earn cash. The advantage of the gouaches with respect to canvases was that they would be much easier to transport. On November 12, three days before Pilar wrote to Matisse, Miró had asked Joan Prats to send money to Palma and explaining a detailed plan for sending the series through architect José María Gudiol Ricart 253. He was an old acquaintance of the family, since he was very attached to Vic and knew the two successive husbands of Dolors, Miró's sister. Nephew of Josep Gudiol i Cunill –who carried out excavations in the Mas Riambau of Jaume Galobart 250 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 335 & Reus 2004, p.730 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp.731-732 252 1 etching = 1.000 $ Letter reproduced on Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p. 121 253 Epistolari 2009, p.609 251 93 and intimate of Lluis G. Ylla– he had also tried to stop the exactions of the republican militiamen in Vic and region in order to safeguard its artistic heritage, which included that of the old Rectory of Tona and the private collection of Galobart, owner of the Tona Iberian Stele. In this first letter, Miró does not indicate who will be the recipient of the shipment, not mentioned either in his following letter to Prats on the matter, dated December 1, which also reminds him of the money issue 254. It is not until December 8, 1941 that in a third letter to Prats Miró asks his friend to inform him of the date of departure of the gouaches, so he can “write to Matisse so that the gallerist is ready and makes his preparations” 255. In fact, in the third letter to Prats, and after thanking him for having taken care of sending him funds, he asks him to tell Joaquim Gomis that he is waiting for a reply from Matisse about the money, which proves that Gomis was now in charge of the black market currency operations. We can therefore assume that Miró has decided to send the Constellations to his dealer, perhaps as an element of pressure to force him send the monthly emoluments he has not seen since September 1939, that is more than two years before. The gallerist certainly does not see things with the same eyes as the painter: if he has not sent Miró funds for two years, much longer time has passed without receiving work for which he had already paid. Miró has a plan, since on Wednesday, November 12, he writes –in Catalan– to his friend Joan Prats, from Palma de Majorca, a letter exclusively dedicated to sending the series and in which we see that the project has been discussed since some time. After pointing out to Prats that he thinks the architect José María Gudiol Ricart must have already returned from Madrid, he informs him: “He told me that he will embark in a month's time. I would greatly appreciate you interviewing him to talk about how to send my works. I insinuated that he take them with him in his suitcase. You could ask again if it would be inconvenient to do so, I do not think this would be abusing him because it is only a small porfolio with 22 works on paper of 38 x 46 cm. In case that caused him some inconvenience, you could ask him what we could do to do the shipment by other means”. The problem that arises to Miró is that he is in Palma, while the paintings are in Montroig, and he asks Prats whether “If it is not a problem for you, you could go and get them on a weekend”. Miró gives his friend all kinds of details on how to find the Constellations and how to protect them: “The porfolio is on the last shelf of a kitchen table that you will see to the right of the studio. As the covers of the porfolio are not very solid, to avoid receiving blows during the trip, it would be convenient to take a corrugated cardboard, the one used to send packages by mail, so they would be protected. Once you have them, pack them yourself leaving them flat, and before sending them we would agree to show them to a small group of friends and I would tell you which one you have to leave apart to keep it for Pilar”. In that same letter of November 12, 1941 , Miró reminds Prats of his need for money 256. 254 Epistolari 2009, p. 611 Epistolari 2009, p. 612-613 256 Epistolari 2009, p.609 255 94 But it seems that Prats does not rush to follow Miró’s instructions and travel the 130 kilometers that separate Barcelona from Montroig, so the painter writes again on Monday, December 1, 1941, reminding him of his previous letter: “Some weeks ago I wrote you a few words talking about the issue of sending my last series of paintings. Since our friend Gudiol told me that he should embark on the 16th of this month and that this date is approaching without you having talked about it again, I would be grateful if you could write to me a few lines to know what to expect. If Gudiol would take them, you could show them before they leave to a small group of friends, we'll agree on that. I would also indicate the painting that would have to be separated to stay here, and that I would keep for Pilar”257. Miró's interest and concern with this issue of the Constellations is evident in the fact that one week later, on Monday, December 8, he wrote again to Prats: “Thank you very much for all your efforts regarding what I asked you. And many thanks also to friends Gudiol and Figueras, to whom I beg you to transmit them.... In case you still have not been to Montroig, I will tell you that my mother has already returned to Barcelona, but the tenant Peret and his family are very kind people and they will attend you very well. The paintings porfolio is on a shelf of the white wooden table in my studio.” In this third letter to Prats on the 'Gudiol affair', Miró again suggests to his friend the possibility of making a small show of the series. The painter includes in this letter to Prats some instructions on the way in which the works should be displayed, instructions that he will later develop when he sends the series to the Museum of Modern Art in New York: “I also recommend that you show them in strictly chronological order, in order to see exactly the trajectory of my thought during this stage that I consider one of the most important of my œuvre, and that opens me unsuspected horizons. I also have the greatest interest in showing the back of the painting in which, in the form of graphics, I have indicated the date and the title of the painting, the latter written in the form of a sketch poem, this being important, as these gouaches exceed painting, so petty as purpose, to fully reach music and poetry”. The last instructions to Joan Prats are to let him know the reactions of the attendees to the small show, to indicate exactly the date of departure, so as to foretell Matisse of their arrival and to separate the gouache that will be offered to his wife. “I would also be grateful if you could also tell me exactly what day Gudiol is embarking, so that I can write to Matisse so that he will be prepared and do his preparations. Of these paintings, you can remove from the porfolio, after having made the exhibition, the one I keep for Pilar, which is dated in Varengeville-sur-Mer on 16/III/1.940, and is entitled L'étoile matinale. This painting, keep it yourself, placing it in a flat surface”. And finally, he thanks his friend for sending him the money he needed in Palma. Miró still hoped that his dealer was going to send him money, and so he tells Prats: “I am also very grateful for having taken care of the matter of money. Tell Joaquim that I am waiting for an answer from Matisse, and that once I receive it, I will come to Barcelona to sort things out with him”. It seems reasonable to think that, since his return to Spain, Miró has started, through his friend Gomis, a method to bring money 257 Epistolari 2009, p.611 95 to Barcelona without going through banbks, thus benefiting from the black market exchange rate. The money could come from Pierre Matisse's remittances or from what the painter managed to park in Switzerland when he fled with his family from Republican Catalonia. It is Gomis, in any case, who provides him with pesetas in Palma de Majorca or Barcelona, and it was he, too, who, through his brothers in Zurich, facilitated the opening of an account in Switzerland. Note that in those years, everyone who had access to foreign currency in Spain used the black market to obtain pesetas. Even American film distributors honored their exhibition contracts in Spain with money multiplied in this way 258. Architect José María Gudiol Ricart did not take the gouaches to the United States. Catalan historiography talks about his intention to go into exile in that country 259, but in reality Gudiol, who had been enlisted by force in the republican army, went to France in February 1939, to immediately move to Paris. Once there, Gudiol himself explains in a letter the first thing he did: “From there, I wrote immediately to the Marquis of Lozoya 260, giving account of my situation, offering to collaborate in the reconstruction and recovery of the Artistic Heritage of Spain and notifying him some concentrations of art improvised in the last moments and that I considered in danger” 261 . Thanks to his contacts with ancient art dealers and art historians in the United States, Gudiol moved from France to that country, where between 1939 and 1941 he taught at the University of Toledo, Ohio and at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York 262. But he returned to Spain in 1941, where he was appointed director of the Amatller Hispanic Art Institute in Barcelona, where he would develop a wide career until his death in 1985. In any case, in the following letters from Miró to Joan Prats, dated December 24, 1941 and April 27, 1942, the issue of sending gouaches to the United States is not mentioned at all, and when through other letters and sources, the issue of the shipment resurfaced two years later, the Miró clan has had another idea: given that his dealer does not provide money, instead of sending them to Pierre Matisse, they will sell them to MoMA itself to make an exhibition. 258 Aguinaga, Pablo León PhD Thesis El cine norteamericano y la España franquista, 19391960: relaciones internacionales, comercio y propaganda. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Facultad de Geografía e Historia Departamento de Historia Contemporánea. Madrid 2008 259 Epistolari 2009, p.610 260 Since 1939 Director General of Fine Arts. 261 “En su defensa: la intervención de Josep Gudiol en el Salvamento del Patrimonio Artístico durante la Guerra Civil”, reproduced in Ramón, Artur & Barbié, Manuel Tres escritos de Josep Maria Gudiol i Ricart., Opera Minora, Barcelona 1987. Cited in Cañameras 2013 pp. 178-211 262 Peiró Martín, Ingnacio & Pasamar Alzuria, Gonzalo Diccionario Akal de Historiadores españoles contemporáneo. Ediciones Akal, Madrid 2002 pp. 317-318 96 In the absence of the gallerist's reaction to his wife's messages, Miró personally writes a letter to him on February 26, 1942, and in it he reminds him again, with undisguised insistence, that he owes him money: “I have to know if the catalogs that I left are available and how many do you have, because I need them. Please be kind enough to inform me by telegram” 263. Matisse reacts, but not by telegram, but by means of a letter to Pilar Juncosa dated March 11, in which for the first time in years he talks about money, although in reality he does not explain why he has not sent it before, but why he can not send more thereafter: “The government allows me to send only $ 100 per month pus $ 25 for each member of the family, so I have sent $ 150” 264. We have not found any reference to the issue of sending paintings against money orders in the known fragments of the following letter from Miró to Matisse, dated May 12, 1942, although in fact there must be, since in another one dated July 11th indicates: “As I said in this letter, it is difficult for me at this time to send you new paintings. In view of this difficulty, I believe that it is necessary not to let the interest of the people who follow my work wane and that it is necessary to send them from time to time illustrated catalogs of my exhibition” 265. On the economic difficulties of Miró in that period we have a proof in his letter to his sister Dolors Miró Ferrà and his brother-in-law Lluís G. Ylla of March 2, 1943 266, in which he refers to the impossibility of launching the construction of the new Montroig studio. “I received a letter from Mossèn Josep, very pessimistic about the prices of fruits, that are falling in an alarming way. I also had the same information here. Given this, and that the end of the war is not foreseen any time soon, I panicked and I think it would be imprudent to undertake the works of the studio, which are expensive .. the most prudent thing is to postpone until the situation is clarified”. The situation would not improve until May 27, 1944 when his mother dies and he inherits half of her assets, so in July he writes again to his sister and brother-in-law, who would be in charge of carrying out the construction works, to launch the project 267. Second World War had already entered its final phase with the landing in Normandy (June 6) and the liberation of Paris would occur in August, so that in addition to his new patrimonial situation, Miró had reasons to be optimistic. Again a communication gap between dealer and painter, and Miró does not cease to proclaim his discomfort with the absence of letters from the gallerist. In a letter from Miró to José Luis and Moncha Sert on March 11, 1943, in which he urges them to write him, since their last letter dates from June 6 of the previous year, the painter asks them for news “because I barely have”, and insists: “And Pierre Matisse, how is he ? I'll appreciate if when you see him you tell him that I have not received any letter since one year ago.” The letter to Sert had an effect, since on March 22 Matisse writes to Miró asking him once again to send him paintings. Miró's response of June 1, 1943, while keeping a friendly attitude, is also openly frank: he doest not hesitate to reproach him for the lack of news: “Finally, with your letter of March 22, I have been able to 263 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.734 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp.734-735 265 PMGA 18.34. Umland 1993 p. 336 & Reus 2004, p.736 266 Epistolari 2009, p. 627 267 Epistolari 2009, p. 644 264 97 receive news, which I had not had since you wrote to me on March 25, 1942”. The painter has also accepted as a fact of life that Matisse can not or does not want to send him money, and he keeps his temper and is not discouraged. He puts a brave face on it: “Fortunately, we are also very well, excellent health. Every once in a while I have hard times from the economic point of view, but nevertheless I manage to get ahead as best I can”. The next thing Miró does in the letter is to to make envious a dealer who does not stop asking him to send paintings: “The work is going well, this life of almost absolute isolation that I have here is doing great to immerse me thoroughly in meditation and in the realization of my work. My painting can thus become more and more concentrated and vigorous... I dare to say that the whole of my production in recent years will be very impressive; let's hope it can be seen one day”. And once exhibited his charms to the dealer, he clearly informs him that he will not be able to enjoy them: “What you ask –that I should send you some more paintings– raises many difficulties at this moment. We would have to be certain that they would reach you safely. We should also have to hope for an immediate and substantial financial return. As things now are, we cannot count on either of those conditions. I think it would be wiser if I simply concentrate on my work and make my way as best I can. If you wish, we can talk about our arrangements when we next see one another” 268. To underline his bitter economic situation, he reminds Matisse that “From Pierre Loeb I have no news”. Miró means to tell in these letters to his dealer to take care of keeping alive interest in his work, but in regard to his new work and that of the last five years, he is not willing to send anything despite the contract with Matisse, who covered two years of the period. To see his paintings again, Matisse will have to accept a much improved agreement and put a lot of money on the table before the painter agrees to send anything. This is Miró's mood in the summer of 1943, and this is the strategy that his friends Prats, Gomis and probably Sert have advised him to follow. We have no more indications of the two having discussed the issue of work against compensation in a long time. No reference appears in the fragments that we have another letter from Miró to Matisse on November 24. In short, Miró considers that he has a treasure in his hands with the Constellations series, and he does not want to send it to his gallerist as he had tried two years before, desperately seeking at that moment how to sell it. It is probably then, in the fall of 1943, when Paulo Duarte appears in his life, introducing himself as an envoy of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Paulo Alfeu Junqueira de Monteiro Duarte (1899-1984), called the Brazilian Quixote, was a lawyer and journalist who was forced into exile after the failure of the 1932 revolution of the Sao Paulo oligarchy against the dictatorship of General Getulio Vargas, whose coup d'etat he had supported two years before. Very involved in the intellectual milieu of his country, he met 268 PMGA 18.34. Russell 1999 p.250, Umland 1993 p. 336 & Reus pp. 740-741 98 Benjamin Péret in 1928, and when he went into exile abroad he chose France as his first destination. He met in Paris Breton, Picasso, Miró, Dalí, etc. and also Henri Laugier and Jean Cassou, who had just been appointed inspector of historic monuments and then director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Until 1945, when he returns to Brazil once the war is over, and is named Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, Duarte remains initially in the French capital, where he works with ethnologist specialist in pre-Columbian America Paul Rivet, the friend of Cassou who founded in 1937 and directs the Musée de l'Homme. Duarte also forms part until the Germans arrive of the intellectual vanguard groups of the Parisian capital and together with Rivet and Laugier, forms the core of the network of FrancoBrazilian scientific contacts 269. After the 1940 armistice, the Brazilian intellectual travels to the United States, where he manages to get hired –possibly with the help of Laugier– in the programs that, at the initiative of Nelson Rockefeller, the Inter-American Affairs Office of the State Department establishes to strengthen relations with the countries of Latin America, and especially the Brazilian giant. His relations with the Department of State will create the hoax that Duarte is actually a paid agent of it. During his American exile, and with the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, Duarte taught at the University of Montreal, where Laugier was a fellow too. In New York he writes chronicles for public radio NBC and does small jobs for the Department of Architecture of MoMA. When after the Rio Conference in January 1942, Brazil breaks relations with the axis powers and declares war on them, MoMA, following the indications of Rockefeller, sends Chairman of the MoMA Architecture Committee Philip Lippincott Goodwin to the country to prepare an exhibition on Brazilian architecture. To plan the trip, Goodwin has the help of Paulo Duarte, whose status as an external collaborator in the museum climbs a step thanks to this circumstance. In the catalog of the exhibition, which Goodwin signs, the architect thanks “Dr. Paulo Duarte for translations into Portuguese and many good suggestions” 270 . When the war in Europe ends and MoMA wishes to establish contacts with cultural institutions of the continent, Duarte offers to act as its itinerant representative in Portugal, Spain and also in France, where he has many contacts among the intellectuals and in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS. In 1944 he returned to liberated Paris and resumed contact with his friends Jean Cassou (again appointed director of the Museum of Modern Art) and Paul Rivet, returned from his exile in Colombia, and with whom Duarte founded in 1945 the Institut français des hautes études brésiliennes, in which Henri Laugier was also integrated. It is in one of these trips that he visits Barcelona and enters, or resumes contact with Miró. The contact is established this time through Joan Prats i Vallès, the childhood friend of Miró and promoter of art in Barcelona since the 1930s. Prats, founder 269 Petitjean, Patrick Miguel, Paul, Henri et les autres: Les réseaux scientifiques francobrésiliens dans les années 1930, Université Paris VII, Paris 2001 270 Goodwin, Philip Lippincott Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942 Museum of Modern Art New York, 1943, p.7 99 together with José Luis Sert and Joaquín Gomis of ADLAN (Friends of the New Art) had played a role in safeguarding Catalan architectural heritage during the civil war, had many contacts with the French surrealists and it was normal for Duarte to get in touch with him. Paulo Duarte presents himself in his travels around Europe as a MoMA representative, and uses in his correspondence the institution’s letterhead with name and address (11 West 53rd street), as shown by a letter sent on April 22. of 1944 from Lisbon to Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, who had also resided in the United States at the invitation of the State Department. This letter also gives us an idea of the level of his contacts, since he talks about his interviews in Madrid with the Marquis of Lozoya, whom he describes as “the only support in Spain of leftist intellectuals or exiles.” 271. It has been said that Duarte was Director of the Latin Department of MoMA, but this statement is based solely on the statements of a presumed con man, Candido Costa Pinto, who in a letter of May 18, 1945, to a New York gallery trying to sell a group of gouaches that Miró will declare false, makes reference to his supposed friendship with Duarte 272. The two persons that according to the forgetful Miró facilitated the exit of the Constellations from Spain would have been “some Melo Neto and Gusmão ”. The confidence is picked up by journalist Lluis Permanyer 273. Miró's brother-in-law, Lluis Juncosa, also refers to the two people: “Adriano de Guzmao, Portuguese diplomat”, and the Brazilian “Melo Neto” 274. Boix Pons, for his part, identifies Gusmão as “Portuguese consul in Barcelona” at the time, and states that his participation consisted in “helping Miró to pass correspondence to Duarte, then living in Lisbon” 275. But memory must have failed Miró once again, and he confuses names, jobs and roles. Melo Neto is none other than Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. But the problem is that he was not appointed Vice Consul in Barcelona until 1947, and in 1944 he resided beyond doubt in Brazil, where he joined only in 1946 the Itamaraty, the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Cabral de Melo will in Barcelona befriend Miró and publish a book about the painter in 1950, which contained woodcuts in the style of Parler Seul lithographs276, but he could not play any role in the matter before us, much earlier in time. As for the second person, he is Adriano de Gusmão, and he was not a diplomat, but a Portuguese art critic and founder of the Portuguese Museology Association, but most likely he played a real role in the journey of the Constellations. In October 1943, the prestigious Lisbon cultural magazine Seara Nova published an 271 Letter to Sérgio Buarque de Holanda dated 04. 22.1944, published by Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brasil 2002 on the centennary of his birth. Available on-line in http://www.siarq.unicamp.br/sbh/biografia_14.html 272 Letter from Costa Pinto to Downtown Gallery of 05. 18.1945. PMGA 18.35 Reus 2004, p.p. 770-771 273 Permanyer 2003 pp. 130, 141-142 274 Juncosa, Lluis 1994. p.38 275 Boix Pons 2011 276 Joan Miró “Private edition” for the author, printed by Enric Tormo and formally published by Edicions de l'Oc de Barcelona. Print run 125 copies, all signed by Miró and Melo 100 interview with Paulo Duarte, identified as “delegate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York”, by Adriano de Gusmão 277. In short, Duarte is the one who comes in contact with Prats and Miró and suggests the possibility of sending the Constellations to the MoMA, which he claims to represent. We can assume that the date on which Miró opts for the Duarte solution is December 1943 or January 1944, because on February 2 of that year the painter dedicates a drawing with watercolor and ink made on a page of the catalog of Miró's exhibition at the MOMA in 1941, which was undoubtedly brought by the Brazilian: “for Paolo Duarte, with all my heart. Miró. Barcelona. 2-2-1944” 278. We have a letter from Miró to Paulo Duarte, who by then has already become a close friend of the family, judging from the farewell: “Pilar and the girl send you two good greetings. My regards to Juanita and for you a big hug”. Reus dates the letter towards the month of January or February of 1944 279. If we take into account that Duarte has returned to Lisbon at the end of February or the first days of March –on March 5 he writes to MoMA–; that he has spent almost three months in Spain; and that when he passes through Madrid, essential point of his trip to Spain, he already has the Constellations with him, we must conclude that the letter must have been written by Miró probably in the second half of February, when Duarte has left Barcelona for some time and the painter thinks that he will already be in Lisbon. At the time of writing this letter to Duarte, the painter thinks that the shipment is imminent, because Miró will expand on this missive about his ceramic work, at this moment discarding the possibility of having it finished to be part of the expedition: “With Artigas we are working hard on ceramics, I believe that our effort will be a very serious thing. The realization of these pieces is a very slow process; because I suggest new techniques and also because fire intervenes with all the improvisations and unexpected things, we will still have work for quite some time. I do not think we can finish until the end of April”. Miró also made in this letter the first reference to the sculpture that will finally also be sent for the exhibition: “I will keep you abreast about this work, to see if you suggest any idea to see if there is any possibility of exposing these things too”. Miró thinks that the exhibition in New York will be made only with the Constellations, and will only add ceramics depending on the possible favorable response of Duarte and given the delay in the shipment. Basically that satisfies him, because in those moments he is absolutely accelerated with the technique: “This mode of work has allowed me to get more and more away from the idea of painting, with all the narrowness and limitation of spirit that it represents, and all get out of this idiocy that represents making a painting in a rectangle of cloth enclosed in a frame. All my efforts are to reach pure magic, naked and miraculous. The collaboration with Artigas is perfect, it is full of this spirit of the Far East, which Rimbaud already felt. Chance 277 Gusmão, Adriano, Uma oportuna entrevista sobre arte. Seara Nova, n.º 842, October 2, 1943, p.p. 94-95. Cited in Rodrigues Fitas, Manuel Joaquim Seara Nova – Tempos de mudança… e de perseverança (1940-1958), Master Thesis, Universidade Do Porto, Faculdade De Letras, 2010 278 No 1070 in Volume II of Joan Miró - Drawings : Catalogue raisonné des dessins de Jacques Dupin y Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Galerie Lelong, París 2007 279 Reus 2004, p.293 101 and superstitions continually come into play; the fact that a mouse, the Chinese god of ceramics walks through the garden when preparing the oven is a good omen” 280. The shipment of the temperas, ceramics and lithographs did not arrive in Philadelphia in a diplomatic pouch, which could only be addressed to the State Department, but as a simple package addressed to MoMA. Another proof that there was no diplomatic shipment is the fact that tariffs had to be paid to release the package from customs and that this took time. It is likely that Duarte told Gusmão about Miró's concern and that he would then volunteer to helping bring the Constellations to Portugal. We will point out in this sense that Gusmão published in 1946 a book entitled Inquérito museológico em Espanha (Museological Inquiry in Spain) and another one in 1948 titled Espanha artística. Notas de viagem (Artistic Spain. Travel Notes), which indicates that he had made trips through Spain in previous years. Miró talks about Gusmão in his letter to Duarte on May 15, 1944, in which he informs him in the first paragraph that he has had “direct news about you through our friend Gusmão, who is a man full of sensitivity and intelligence. He has arrived just in time because we had just finished the last piece of ceramics. We will give you 5 jugs together with a sculpture and an object, in total 7 ceramic pieces.... I told to you some time ago that we were printing lithographs. I have activated the test run and now they are finished; I will also give them to our friend Gusmão”. In Cirlot’s book, Gusmão appears photographed next to the painter and Joan Prats in the Miralles lithographic workshop, while plate XXXVI of the series is printed. He is identified as “Portuguese critic A. de Gusmão”. In any case, the activation of the Barcelona series would confirm our impression that it was printed precisely to be sent to MoMA and constitute in the exhibition the counterpoint to the Constellations, that is, the wild world before being domesticated by Miró’sspirituality. On March 5, 1944, Paulo Duarte wrote to his “dear friend” Philip L. Goodwin, then president of MoMA’s Architecture Committee. The letter is not written in English, a language in which they normally communicate, but in French, for which Duarte apologizes in the first line of the letter. If Duarte writes in French it is because he is following directives from the meticulous Miró/Prats/Gomis clan, which wants the painter's instructions to be transmitted to MoMA in the exact terms in which they were written by him. Duarte does not address the subject of the exhibition proposal until the fourth paragraph of the letter, in which after having indicated that the painter lives “completely ignored in Spain”, he tells Goodwin: “As for Miró, I think I have something interesting for the Museum: Miró has worked hard, but does not exhibit or sell anything. Even so, he has consented to send twenty-two paintings to be exhibited in the Museum and that I am going to send you possibly through diplomatic channels. They are completely unknown works, and only a handful of people in Spain have seen them... The twenty-two paintings measure 38 by 46 cm each, and are dated between January 21, 1940 and September 12, 1941”. Duarte adds a political note to confirm that the series has never been exposed and create a certain war drama, thinking that anti-fascism is still selling in the United 280 Reus 2004 p.p. 744-745 102 States: “The Spanish authorities, upon learning that these works were in my possession, asked if I did not want to expose them for a week in Madrid. In my opinion, it was a question of attenuating the very clear impression of political oppression, of which artists do not escape either. I told them that I could not do it without Miró's authorization. Once I consulted him, he refused, and the mentioned works came with me without having been seen”. According to Duarte, “the whole series constitutes a new phase of Miró. As he has told me literally, he is progressively abandoning all objective painting to devote himself exclusively to pure painting and magic”. Duarte's letter to Goodwin 281, written in connivance with, or directly by Miró, includes commercial instructions established by Joan Prats. In fact, just after informing MoMA that he has in his posession the series, and before manifesting how the Constellations are to be displayed, the first thing that Duarte does in the same fourth paragraph of the letter is to detail the commercial conditions of the operation, which are as flexible as Prats’ hats. On the one hand it affirms that MoMA will not have any obligation to buy the Constellations. But if it did not do so, he encourages the museum to sell them if by chance buyers appear, setting a sale price: $ 500 each tempera (about $ 6,700 in 2016, adjusted for inflation). Regarding the role of Matisse, the Miró clan states that once the exhibition is over, the unsold gouaches “should be handed over to Pierre Matisse, who is Miró's commercial agent in New York”. And if MoMA “does not want to take care of the commercial part, it can, after the exhibition, deliver everything to Matisse”. They do not say that if the objective of selling is not met, the gouaches must be given to Matisse, but that they can. Miró's reticence is justified by the fact that 13 of the 23 gouaches in the series have been painted while his last contract with Matisse (1939-1940) was still in force. In fact, the one that the painter gives to his wife, Morning Star, painted on March 16, 1940, also belongs to the dealer. To cover this fringe, the painter indicates to Goodwin in Duarte's letter that “if in the course of the exhibition buyers for all the paintings show up” –Miró gives a new opportunity to MoMA to decide to buy– “at least 7 must be reserved for Pierre Matisse to sell them in his gallery”. Miró does not want Matisse, his only potential source of income, to think he has been revoked from the commercial point of view, hence the minimum of 7 that he reserves for his dealer. This stipulation in favor of the gallerist constitutes an acknowledgment by the painter of the claim that Matisse has on a part of the series, and is also an insurance not to break with him and be able to market it in case the museum is not in conditions to buy or sell the gouaches. Duarte and Miró had to get the idea that the MoMA itself might sell the Constellations from the fact that the museum actually sold exhibited items from time to time. But in these cases they were pieces of much lower value than the gouaches, as was the case of the following exhibitions: Useful Household Objects under $5.00 (MoMA Exhibition No 80, 1938), Useful Objects of American Design under $10.00 (No. 93, 1940), Useful Objects of American Design under $10 (No 117, 1940), American Color Prints under $10 (No 118, 1940), Useful Objects Under $10 (No 160, 1941-1942), Silk Screen Prints Under $10 (No 161, 1941-1942), American Photographs at $10 (No 281 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.p. 745-750 103 162, 1941-1942), Useful Objects in Wartime under $10 (No 208, 1942-1943) or Christmas Sale of Pictures Under $75 (No 248, 1943-1944). Miró has also transmitted to Duarte written instructions about the planned exhibition at MoMA, instructions that the Brazilian literally copies in his letter: "Miró has given me some written instructions for the exhibition: 1. These paintings should be exposed together; under no circumstances should they be separated from each other; 2. I believe that they must be exposed following a strict chronological order, which will explain my evolution and my state of mind; 3. They should be framed with double glazing, so that one can see the title; 4. They should be framed in a very simple way, hanging on a simple white background and well separated from each other. 5. Before framing, check carefully if there is any mold in some places, especially on black, due to the humidity of the trip. In that case remove it carefully with a brush of marten hair. 6. In the event that the ceramic arrives in time for the exhibition, expose the pieces in a showcase that allows to see them from all sides ". Following the painter's instructions, Duarte also tries to promote in MoMA his recent production of ceramics and the personality of Artigas, whom he says has worked with Picasso: “The case of instruction no. 6 is also very interesting. For the first time, Miró makes ceramics. With this objective he has teamed up with a famous Catalan artist, who has lived many years in Paris, where he stayed until the German occupation. His name is Llorens Artigas, he has already made ceramics with Picasso and with many famous artists... They have agreed to send me 5 medium-sized vases, the first ones they made, for the aforementioned exhibition, which would provide a guarantee of high interest, since it will be the first time that ceramics will be seen along with Miró's paintings”. The claim that Artigas had worked with Picasso was false, since the Spaniard did not start making pottery until 1948, although he did know Llorens Artigas, whom he had denounced for theft. It is the so-called Picasso affair in which Artigas helped in 1930 a friend –Miguel Calvet– obtain the painter’s authentication of four hundred drawings by Picasso obtained from the painter's mother. They were exposed in a gallery, where they were seen by the artist, who immediately filed a complaint for theft. The lawsuit lasted for eight years and in the end Picasso recovered the drawings 282. Another interesting aspect of Duarte's letter is the confidence he has in having powerful allies with whom to carry out its objectives: “I am here taking the necessary measures so that the American Embassy in Madrid or Lisbon agrees to transport the ceramic pieces with urgency. But it would be very useful if the Museum tries to obtain 282 Richardson, John A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Alfred A. Knopf (Random House), New York 2007, pp. 403-412 104 an order in this regard from the State Department. In that case, the order must be given immediately, and include the paintings that I have with me.” Duarte had made some operations for MoMA commissioned by Goodwin, and of whose nature he gives an approximation in his letter of March 5, which states that “your written instructions have been followed to the letter”. He points out that the interest aroused by MoMa in Spain, and mainly in Barcelona, has been great. He informs his interlocutor that the Higher Council for Scientific Research in Madrid is very interested in establishing an exchange of publications with MoMA and that they have given him a good number of books in exchange for the ones he brought from the museum, including one about Picasso, which they have literally taken out of his hands. The letter also includes a reference to another parallel Duarte activity. He thanks Goodwin in his letter the –negative– answer that he has given him about some tapestries he had proposed that the museum buy. He justifies his action in an elegant way, stating that “it is not possible for me to avoid being offered things by people who come to see me as a representative of the museum. When it comes to works of art of exceptional value I send the data and the offers that they make because they can interest MoMA. The decision you take matters little, both because I can get rid of the people who offer them and because some might interest the museum.” Paulo Duarte’s letter to Goodwin is a formal and quite detailed proposal. It is undoubtedly based on written instructions written by Miró. Duarte however includes the proposal in a letter related to other matters that actually occupy more than half of the text, which appears to us as a blunder. Miró's proposal had enough importance to be dealt with in a separate letter, and since Duarte had to know that the letter would have to be circulated to several people in MoMA, the fact of dealing with several matters made it very difficult for the offer to be taken into consideration. Being drafted in French, rather than in English, will undoubtedly make it even more difficult for museum officials to take it into account. Two days after the letter from Duarte to Goodwin, on Tuesday, March 7, 1944, and without having said anything to Pierre Matisse, Miró, no doubt within the strategy designed by Prats, communicates his plans to make an exhibition at the MoMA to gallerist Valentine Dudensing. We have news of this letter only thanks to Anne Umland, who in the catalog of the 1993 MoMA exhibition reproduces a paragraph of it: “I’ve entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art several paintings which I consider very important –from the 1940-41 period. I think they will hold an exhibition this spring”. The quote has been taken from a letter from Dudensing to Monroe Wheeler, dated October 30, 1944 to which Umland has had access and in which the gallerist reproduces Miró's text and provides the date of Miró's letter 283. Wheeler was since 1940 head of the MoMA’s Department of Exhibitions and Publications. This letter from Miró to Dudensing could be interpreted as an act of Machiavellianism. On the one hand, we know that Dudensing was the one who had provided the painter the first opportunity to hold an individual exhibition in the United States. This could make us think that he was looking for an alternative to his dealer. But on the other 283 Lanchner 1993, p.336 and Note No. 663 in p.359 105 hand, Valentine was the first friend that Pierre Matisse made in New York. Writing to Valentine could be a way to send an indirect message to Matisse. Miró's perception of who Duarte was is clear from a letter he wrote two months later. The painter, and therefore Joan Prats, are convinced that they are dealing with a MoMA official with decision-making ability, or at least great influence. Miró gives him three signed proofs of the Barcelona series and treats him with great deference: “I think both the museum and you will be happy that I give you all this material, which together with everything you already have will allow you to make a great exhibition. Along with these 250 prints you will find, separated by a paper, 3 unnumbered proofs, one for Juanita, one for you and one for Gusmáo, which I want to offer you... I know that the museum will organize all this very well, but let me still say that in my opinion these lithographs, in black and white, very intense, should be exposed together with the ceramics, which have a great color potentiality” 284. When he wrote that letter on May 15, 1944, and despite not having any information that would hint a favorable reaction from MoMA, Miró and Prats still think that the exhibition will take place and prepare documentary material for it: “We have done also many photos of Artigas study, both of us working, of the printing press pulling the lithographs, and of my study. All this I will also give to Gusmáo and I think it will be interesting for organizing the exhibition, as documentary elements.... I have hastened to write to you all this so that you can communicate it to the museum, which for organization purposes will need to know it urgently”. Until today, no documentary evidence of how Pierre Matisse learns of Miró's initiative has been published. The painter refrains from communicating it to him, hoping to place him in front of a fait accompli, and the gallerist does not show signs of having found out. But it seems far-fetched to think that Matisse had not been immediately informed by his friend Dudensing or directly by the museum, given the very intense relationships between MoMA and the gallerist. Between 41 East 57th Street where the Pierre Matisse Gallery is located and MoMA’s 11 West 53rd Street, there are only 500 meters. For the rest, given that the museum was, at least in its first 30 years of existence, a matter of a handful of collectors, we are talking about extremely close commercial and personal relationships between Matisse and the great patrons of the museum. We can recall in this sense that Philip L. Goodwin himself was a client of the gallery. But there is still more: Anson Conger Goodyear, the founder and President of MoMA since its opening in 1929 until 1939, was in fact the first client of the Pierre Matisse Gallery, when he bought the drawing by Henri Matisse Jeune Marocaine in 1932 285. And he had also bought him paintings by Joan Miró in 1935. In 1944, despite having ceded the presidency of the museum, the millionaire was a member of the Procurement Committee and was also a member of MoMA’s Board of Trustees, of which he formed part until his death in 1964. Goodyear’s successor in 1939 as chairman of the MoMA Board of Trustees, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, retired from the presidency in 1941 to focus on his war work as 284 285 Reus 2004, p.p. 751-753 Russell 1999, p.82 106 coordinator of anti-Nazi activities in Latin America and as Deputy Secretary of State, but continued being a member of the organization and regained the position of President of MoMA on his return to civilian life in 1946. In 1938, Rockefeller had commissioned, through Pierre, a Henri Matisse decoration for his new apartment, and continued buying the dealer paintings, even by Miró. Stephen C. Clark, one of the founders of the museum that had acceded to the position of Chairman (coordinator or nº 2 of the Board of Trustees) when Rockefeller arrived at the Presidency and the person who exerted the maximum authority of MoMA in 1944, was a client of Matisse in the Valentine Gallery since 1931, although he declined to buy in 1937 Miró’s Harlequin's Carnival, which was also rejected byJoseph Pulitzer. As for James Thrall Soby, who had been appointed Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture in October 1943 and was therefore the person most directly involved in both the possible acquisition and the eventual exhibition, the critic was one of the main clients of Pierre Matisse, and had bought him in the 30s paintings by Miró, Balthus, De Chirico and Matta. Finally, although Alfred H. Barr .had been removed from the direction of the Museum –which he had been leading for 14 years– a few months before Duarte's letter, he was then acting as Advisory Director, so he had to be informed of the proposal. And the relations between him and the gallerist were also very close since the founding of the museum in 1929. In short, all those who know Miró's proposal to sell and expose the Constellations in MoMA are people very close to Matisse and some of them had to tell the gallerist, if only to make sure that the proposed works were not subject to contractual easements. In any case, we have proof that the gallerist was informed immediately. In a letter from Matisse to Miró on April 6, 1944, he informs him that he has known that he works in ceramics: “According to Sweeney, you do ceramics. I hope it is not due to lack of material. In one of my last letters, repeated afterwards, I told you of the great hopes I had of receiving some gouaches to use them in a publication that I would like to make of your paintings, at least of those I have” 286. Sweeney was the Director of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA from 1935 until he was replaced by Soby, but he returned to his position in January 1945 and remained curator of the museum until becoming Director of the Guggenheim Museum in 1952. This reference to ceramics and The Constellations confirm our hypothesis that the gallerist is already aware of Duarte's letter to Goodwin on March 5 and his letter can therefore be interpreted as a warning to the painter, giving him the opportunity to explain himself. He also informs Miró that he is moving the gallery from the 17th floor to the 6th, always in the Fuller Building, and that he will inaugurate the new premises with an exhibition of his paintings. From the following letter from the gallerist to the painter, dated April 22, we only have the reference that he informs him that Miró’s “exhibition will be made with works from 1934 to 1939, oils and gouaches on celotex and trôle”287. Matisse had found out and, in the absence of the painter's reaction to his warning, he sent a letter to Miró, of which we have no other references than those that appear in 286 287 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.751 Reus 2004, p.751 107 Miró's reply. Matisse tells the painter that he knows everything and demands explanations in a now open way. The answer is the first letter from Miró since Duarte submitted his proposal to MoMA. It is dated June 17, 1944, that is, more than a month after writing to the Brazilian the letter of May 15 we mentioned earlier and in which the painter tells him of the intense preparations he is making for the MoMA exhibition, how he has finished firing the ceramics and printing the lithographs, and in which he conveys above all his absolute conviction that the exhibition will take place. As for the date of Matisse's letter, we would place it in April, since it is very likely that, like Matisse will do later, Miró took his time before responding, after consulting his friends Prats and Gomis. In fact, Matisse's letter asking for explanations to Miró could be that of April 22. The gallerist would have left the painter more than two weeks to respond to his letter of April 6 and Miró let almost two months pass before answering him, both to reflect on how to react to the fact that Matisse was aware, and to find out before writing what had been the result of Duarte's efforts and what MoMA had answered. The two letters that we will comment below, that is, Miró's response to Matisse's announcement that he is aware of the plan and the gallerist's answer, constitute an example of the tug-of-war that constitutes the basis of any relationship between artist and dealer. Miró lies shamelessly, is affectionate and haughty at the same time, challenging and conciliatory, firm and flexible. He affirms his rights and the high vision he has of his art and his future and demands from the gallerist that he show himself up to the circumstances. And Matisse responds in kind: he lies openly, he is almost sarcastic about the absence of news from the painter, but he also shows himself affectionate, conciliatory and ready to forgive Miró's affront. And he warns him not to get carried away by the siren calls that promise him glory and wealth that will eventually reveal themselves as transient. Miró begins his June 17 letter 288 with irony: “My dear friend, I am very happy to finally receive your recent news, especially considering that until now I did not receive even answers to the letters I sent you”. Indeed, Miró was at the beginning of the decade complaining of not having news of Matisse, and especially of not receiving any remuneration, as attested letters to other friends. But it is also true that he had neither sent him a single painting nor had he written to him while planning and developing his MoMA strategy. The gallerist has asked for explanations, but Miró refuses to give them and only evokes his initiative to bypass him in a line and a half, placed precisely after a paragraph in which he communicates the death of his mother three weeks before. He deals with family matters at the end of the letter, but the information of the death goes up to the beginning, no doubt to soften Matisse so that he would not to react too harshly. And he does not admit to having worked behind the dealer's back, since he claims that he had kept him informed, and that only chance has caused the letter to be lost: “According to what you tell me, the letter I had entrusted to Duarte, of the Museum of Modern Art, has not reached your hands”. He implies shamelessly that the Post Office is to blame. In any case, Miró is not willing to waste more time and energy 288 PMGA 18.34. Russell 1999 p.251, Umland 1993 p. 336 & Reus 2004, p.753-755 108 in the discussion, and then ditches the question: “Duarte tells me nevertheless that an agreement has been reached with you regarding the paintings that I have sent to the museum, but if there is still any difficulty, I am absolutely convinced that everything will be easily fixed when I come to see you in New York, which I will do as soon as possible”. We do not believe that Duarte has given him such information about an agreement, to which the gallerist does not make any reference in his answer. It is simply a way for the painter to end the discussion pretending that it is dialectically closed. Then, after assuring Matisse that if he makes ceramics and lithography it is not to abandon painting, but to “resume it with a new impetus”, Miró returns to his defiant attitude and refuses not only to send him paintings, but also photographs of them: “If I do not send pictures of the paintings I have here is because I think it would be a mistake, since the reproductions do not give more than a very weak idea of the original. Also, I want to save the bulk of my production here; it would be equally a considerable error to send things separately, it is all that will have to be seen one day, and not fragments, then I prefer to wait”. And in case the dealer did not understand, he says it more clearly then: “Quite apart from all that, you will understand that, as I now have no money, I prefer to maintain a considerable stock of paintings that will help me to get back on my feet again after the war. Once my debts are paid off, I can reclaim the position in life that is due to me”. And he concludes by noting that he is “fully aware of the capital role that my painting should play in the future, and at 51 years old, it is time to play hard, to be or not to be. It is therefore legitimate for me to contemplate things from an exclusively objective point of view, these last years have been quite hard for me, and they are even more so now, as to act differently”. The painter in any case still does not know anything in those moments of the whereabouts of the Constellations or of Duarte. The only reference to the departure of the shipment that we have is a letter from Duarte to Goodwin dated July 10, 1944 289 in which he warns him that he has managed to ship the Constellations, the seven ceramic pieces and the 250 lithographs aboard the ship S.S. Pero de Alenquer, that departing from Lisbon was expected to arrive at Philadelphia between the 23 and the 30 of July. But Duarte does not communicate it to the restless Miró, given that the painter asks in a letter to Joan Prats of July 23, 1944: “Have you had more news from America or Lisbon? Take note that if you have something urgent to communicate you can call me to phone No. 10 of Montroig, La Tira farm, owner Xavier de Salas 290”. Before receiving the answer from Matisse, Miró remains convinced that the exhibition will be held, whether Pierre likes it or not. In a letter to Joan Prats on September 10, 1944, Miró says: “You should have already received the signed documents related to the exhibition long ago. It seems that everything will work very well, mainly in these moments” 291. Pierre Matisse takes three months to respond to Miró's letter, probably to try to see the gouaches, get hold of them as soon as possible and design a future strategy for his 289 Umland 1993 p.336. Epistolari 2009, p.642 291 Epistolari 2009, p.648 290 109 relations with the painter, who is no longer subject to any contract with him. And his letter of September 20, 1944 292 is as full of contrasts as Miró's: cold and warm, irony and sincerity, firmness and temporization, offers and warnings. And it also contains some blatant lies. As Miró did, Matisse initiates his letter with a heartfelt message of condolence for the death of the painter's mother. But he immediately responds to Miró's tirade about the absence of letters with his: “Your letter is the first one I receive since November 24, 1943”. And then he returns to the topic of the Constellations: “Unfortunately I have not received the one that you sent to Duarte for me, and that is why I had not told you about the museum. I only found out in July because of the clarifications I asked from the museum about the rumors that had reached me”. He pretends to have learnt in July about a matter that he openly reproaches Miró in a letter from April and which the painter answers in June. The gallerist denies that he has agreed anything with Duarte, but concurs with Miró in that they can reach an accommodation: “There is no definitive arrangement because the customs formalities have not been completed yet. I am sure that we will always agree between us and I want to point out that I have been very moved by the fact that you have thought of me spontaneously in your arrangement with the museum”. But immediately he launches into a sermon that has all the elements of a rap on the knuckles to the painter: “In fact, I have not worked to make your œuvre known for the last ten years, dear friend, without having developed for you not only a great admiration for your work, but also a great affection for you. It may have crossed your mind that I used you to elevate my position. But I am convinced that if youI had been able to realize the efforts I have made to make you known, you would not have paid any attention to the people who were trying to harm me before you. Since my first exhibition of yours, in which I did not sell anything, I have restarted with perseverance and I have never ceased to give you the first place in the gallery and to present your works with the care and dignity that you seemed to appreciate. The numerous testimonies that have come to us from all parts prove it. Many artists have come to me since then, despite being solicited by others, and their choice shows that they have realized that their interests were defended both morally and materially. I understand your concern for the future and the trials you have had to face in recent years, which have also hurt me especially because I was not in a position to remedy them. One day you will be able to realize what the situation was. We will soon recover a little peace and we can then resume the occupations that we like. Then I hope you will not forget everything that I have done for you and that you will reserve me in the presentation of your works the place that I hope corresponds to me for the battles I have fought for them for so long. Otherwise, you will have all the compensation you could wish for and the prestige that corresponds naturally to a work that is one of the firsts of our time. I believe that I am in a better position than any other to provide it, especially because you also occupy the first place in my publishing projects. Loquacious people are often dangerous and do much less than what they say, even if they manage to dazzle doing great projects that most of the time are never carried out. Remember the 292 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp.755-757 110 example of Masson, who for a year or two in Paris could congratulate himself of a brilliant situation that unfortunately did not last.” Matisse ends his letter by telling Miró that he is “convinced that you and Pilar know where the true values are, as well as the best defenses of your interests and I look forward with confidence to the renewal of our relations”. And he says goodbye reminding him of his publishing projects: “I wanted to publish in a series of albums most of your paintings made during the war”. Miró continues without news of the Constellations and the administrative procedure is delayed. The first information he receives about their clearance through customs is not from Duarte or MoMA, but a telegram from Matisse dated November 21, 1944: "WONDERFUL PAINTINGS. I REQUEST TELEGRAPH AUTHORIZATION REPRODUCE WITH LITHOGRAPHS IN BOOK ON YOU. GREETINGS TO ALL". This is the second time that Matisse cites his plan to do what he will eventually accomplish in 1958/59 with the Miró pochoirs and the André Breton poems. The painter responds with another telegram dated on the 27th: "I AUTHORIZE REPRODUCTION WORKS IF MUSEUM ACCEPTS. GREETINGS. JUAN MIRÓ” 293 . As we can see, Miró still thinks that the plans to hold the exhibition go on. In fact, Miró's desire to have the gouaches exhibited by MoMA was perfectly compatible with their commercialization by Pierre Matisse. It is true that there is a dispute between Miró and Matisse regarding 13 of the 23 gouaches, which the gallerist claims as his property in compliance with his contract, but this could well have been arranged between the two. The fact of being exhibited by MoMA would have only increased the value of the paintings, thus facilitating the gallerist's ability to sell them at an interesting price for painter and dealer. A proof of the fact that Matisse did not object to the museum exhibiting the Constellations is the fact that the dealer did not formally assert his rights over the paintings until November 24. He knew that out of the two Miró demands to MoMA, that is to organize an exhibition with them and to try to sell them itself, the first one the museum has to take is to exhibit or not, which is independent of any challenge on ownership. The museum had Miró's permission to exhibit, and this suited Matisse. Then MoMA should decide whether to choose selling or declining the offer, either for lack of interest or for the veto of the gallerist. But Matisse already knows then that the museum does not intend to exhibit the gouaches. When in November 1944 Pierre Matisse finds out that the Museum of Modern Art has no plan to exhibit the Constellations or the material that accompanied them, he formally addresses himself to it by sending on the 24th a letter to Goodwin claiming possession of the pieces. The very fact of directing the letter to the architect, who does not hold any function in the artistic framework of the institution, proves that MoMA did not want to have anything to do about the matter. The museum is deaf and the issue of the gouaches is at the level it was six months ago: that of an external occasional collaborator who has made a proposal to the head of the department of architecture, a proposal that, formally, has not even been considered. “As I told you, I had a contract with Miró, under which all the work he created from November 1939 to 293 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp. 757-758 111 November 1940 were my property in consideration of monthly payments to him during that period”. He adds that “Mr. Miró was unable to send these pictures on account of war conditions and for that reason held them until some time when he could safely ship them to me”. Matisse concludes that in case “these works do not fit into your regular schedule of exhibitions, and you... decide not to exhibit them”, the paintings should be returned to him “in order to further the interest in Miró’s work in America” 294. Immediately afterwards, the gallerist contacts Paulo Duarte, who is in New York, to formalize the terms of the agreement through which Miró accepts Pierre Matisse's getting hold of the pieces. Miró’s approval of the conditions will come in two letters by Duarte, also signed by Notary New York’s Public Morton Planitz and dated both December 20, 1944, in which the artist submits to all the conditions of the gallerist, and even affirms that the Constellations were from the beginning destined to Matisse. In the first one, Duarte points out that “In relation to the sale of the Miró material (ceramics, lithographs and gouaches) that you have received from the Museum of Modern Art and in relation to the deposits that you will be making in the frozen account of Joan Miró, keep in mind that all the accruals of the first sales must be used to reimburse you for all the sums that you have had to pay to the Museum of Modern Art and that represent the costs of bringing the material from Spain (shipping, packaging, insurance, tariffs, etc.); all of which according to the instructions of Messrs. Miró and Prats” 295. Miró's concession is that the reimbursement covers not only the small deposit costs in the port of Philadelphia and the tariffs, but also the shipping, packaging and insurance costs, which had been borne by Duarte. Matisse himself has demanded this recognition of debt, so that it does not interfere in the economic agreement that appears in the second document. Duarte has preferred to charge his expenses in New York, and be paid directly by Pierre Matisse, rather than waiting for the Miró clan to pay him in Spain. His remuneration will therefore be in dollars, before the gouaches are sold, and long before the Miró clan sees the slightest income. In the second letter, also signed by Duarte and the notary Morton Planitz, are fixed the terms that the gallerist has imposed to commercialize the work and that Miró accepts. The letter begins with a statement by Duarte in which he claims that the shipment was originally for Matisse, and not for MoMA: “While I was in Barcelona before bringing the gouaches, lithographs and ceramics from Miró that you now have in deposit in the name of the artist, I had a conversation with him, Mr. Artigas and Mr. Prats during which I was granted the power to decide with you and change the prices, if necessary, of the different material that I was bringing”. The most important element of this letter or Miró’s armistice is treated last, and Duarte, on behalf of the painter, states: “I acknowledge that you informed me that twelve of the gouaches were made by Miró during the period in which he was under contract with you and that accordingly all this production is your property”. Once taken for granted that more than half of the twenty-two gouaches belong to him 294 295 PMGA 114.46 Fragment reproduced in Griswold & Tonkovich 2002. p.38 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp. 759-760 112 without any servitude, and since he has no current contract with Miró, Matisse agrees to appear as a commission agent for the rest of the material. Prats and Miró had tried that Matisse’s commission for the sale of the gouaches be of only 30%, the customary percentage for works in deposit. But Matisse demands more, and to achieve this he accepts to lower to 30% the commission for ceramics and lithographs, which he has no intention of selling (in fact he will not sell even a single one of the 255 pieces). “Consequently, in view of the current commercial situation in the United States, I agree with the following figures that we have jointly established for the sale in this country of the material that you have in your possession: Sale price Commission P. Matisse 3 large ceramics (each) 1.500 $ 30 % 2 small ceramics (each) 1.200 $ 30 % gouaches A (each) 500 $ 50 % gouaches B (each) 400 $ 50 % 30 $ lithographs according to size 40 $ 30 % 50 $ The usual commission practiced in the United States to work with work in deposit is 30%, which applies to both ceramics and lithographs. In relation to gouaches the commission will be 50% in view of all expenses (framing, presentation, insurance, catalogs, etc.) that will be covered entirely by you.” 296. In short, Matisse has obtained the recognition that more than half of the gouaches are his, and as for the rest, he will not have to pay Miró until enough sales to cover the expenses are produced. And he will only pay for these gouaches, which have taken the painter an average of one month to make each, between 200 and 250 dollars per piece, less the expenses. In short, Pierre Matisse has in his hands twelve gouaches that belong to him entirely and ten more in deposit, for which once sold all he would have to pay Miró is about 2,200 dollars, minus shipping, insurance, customs, duty, etc. which, according to what has been said insistently, were very high. It seems clear that the obligation to pay transport and management expenses imposed on the painter is a punishment for having worked behind the gallerist's back. If the initiative had been Pierre Matisse’s, he would have assumed the full cost of the operation. But in 1944 Miró, beset by economic necessity and once his attempt inspired by Prats to bypass Matisse has failed, has no choice but to accept the conditions of the gallerist. At least with this arrangement Miró will not have to pay Duarte for all the work developed in the failed maneuver. The amount was negotiated by Duarte with Pierre Matisse, and was added to the expenses paid by the gallerist to MoMA. 296 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, pp. 759-760 113 These simple arithmetic calculations can only confirm the veracity of at least the spirit of Rosa Maria Malet's assertion that Miró received as the only payment for all Constellations, an electric refrigerator 297. The episode of the refrigerator –or rather the refrigerators, because they were two– is true, and is documented in the correspondence of the Mirós with their friends the Serts. Apparently, the Miró couple marveled during their stay in 1947 with the electric refrigerator that their friends had in their apartment, where they lived for some time. And before leaving, they asked for the purchase of one for the Barcelona apartment and one for the Montroig estate. But one thing is to order and another to pay the hundreds of dollars that they cost to buy and to dispatch them –thousands of dollars of 2016– which from Miró's point of view corresponded to Pierre Matisse, from whom he expected the first important payment of his 1946 contract ($ 17,500) at the end of that year. The matter was complicated and was the subject of several letters from the painter and his wife to the Serts, who acted as his representatives in the United States, between November 1947 and August 1948 298 . And it required the intervention of the Serts, Teeny Matisse and others, and in the end was only solved by Marc Chagall’s accountant in the United States, the controversial Bernard Reis, who worked for Miró in order to formalize the role of Sert as his representative in the U.S. Once the battle of the Constellations won, Pierre Matisse is prepared for what he knows will be a tough negotiation of a new contract with Miró. But he needs to hurry up. Paris had been liberated for four months in December 1944 and Berlin would fall into allied hands four months later. The gallerist knows that the big Jewish dealers are returning to the Gallic capital, and that once their business is restored, Miró will have an outlet for his production, which at the moment can only be sold to him. Matisse therefore tries to reconcile with the painter and spoils him with frequent mails and telegrams, so that he knows that he is always there, taking care of his affairs and trying to promote his art. A few days after sealing the agreement on the Constellations, Matisse sent a telegram to Miró on December 27, 1944: “MY BEST WISHES NEW YEAR STOP EXHIBITION JANUARY MY GALLERY STOP WONDERFUL SET WILL SEND CATALOG AND PRESS CUTTINGS GREETINGS” 299. On January 17, 1945, a week after inaugurating the Constellations exhibition in his gallery, Matisse wrote again to Miró, praising him: “It was a great joy for all to see your work again after these long years of silence. The opinion has been unanimous and the public has found your exhibition very emotional. You have achieved an unprecedented degree of poetic intensity, and a dazzling mastery in both color and line”. But he also includes some information that Miró will not like: “Advised by a certain number of people, Sert, Sweeney, Breton and Duarte, I decided to expose only sixteen of the twenty-two gouaches” 300. Two weeks later, on February 2, he wrote again: “The exhibition is over this week and I will continue it with a new exhibition of the lithographs, of which I will send the 297 Amiguet, Lluís Intervierw Joan Miró cambió veintitrés cuadros por una nevera, La Vanguardia, Barcelona 12.24.2011 298 Juncosa, Patricia 2008, pp. 93 a 119 299 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004 pp. 760-761 300 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 p. 762 114 advertisement. We have naturally had great success and there is a lot of talk about the gouaches. Do you know that these are the first works that have come from Europe since the beginning of the war? The ceramics have been highly appreciated by experts. Unfortunately there are not many and we have not found buyers. I have asked Duarte if it would not be advisable to lower the price a little” 301. Pierre Matisse writes again to Miró on February 20, and this time he avoids giving bad news. Only two days before closing the exhibition of the Barcelona series lithographs Matisse has not sold a single one of the 250 prints offered, but he does not tell Miró: “After the exhibition of the gouaches that has reaped a lot of success and has been much talked about, I now make an exhibition of lithographs that also arouse much interest. I am very satisfied in all aspects, and above all for the moral effect. I think you will also be very happy” 302. But in those days Miró has a problem with mail, and these letters do not reach him, nor does another one from Paulo Duarte. In any case, on March 26, the painter writes to Duarte, upset by the absence of letters and also because he has not seen in the detail of the agreement with Matisse that Joan Prats has sent him a reference to all the works he sent: “Prats has shown me the letter of 22/12 that you sent him –I waited a few days to see if I received the one you were announcing to me, but it has not arrived. No letter from Matisse either about my exhibition, only a telegram announcing its opening. Let's hope, however, that everything worked very well”. Miró wants in this letter to thank Duarte for all his failed efforts: “Thank you, my friend, for all you have done to organize my exhibition, especially for the annoying efforts with the museum and Matisse. You have acted very intelligently and I thank you with all my heart. I hope that soon we can resume personal contact and we will discuss all the details with Matisse. Your letter does not mention the small sculpture and the ceramic object at all, and I hope that the two works have been exhibited”. In the letter he also makes reference for the first time to the new chimera in which he is going to embark: the plan to organize an exhibition in Paris. “It is quite possible that next winter will make a great exhibition in Paris” 303. As promised, Pierre Matisse sends Miró, with a letter of April 23, 1945, a good range of the reactions that the exhibition has aroused among American critics, asking him to lower the price of ceramics, for which he apparently has a client, and showing interest in negotiating a stable contract. And the painter replies on May 13, reproaching him from the outset for the absence of news of his exhibition: "I received your letter of April 23, the first that comes to me since the exhibition. According to the press clippings you sent me, I see that you organized it very well, so I want to congratulate you”. After some family messages, Miró, who knows that now time plays in his favor, tells his gallerist not to worry, that he is in no hurry to sign a contract: “Do not worry, dear friend. I carefully keep all your correspondence in a file and it will therefore be very easy for us to put our things in order when we see each other”. And in order that Matisse sees that now he will not accept price reductions, he immediately discards the offer that Matisse had transmitted to him, on the part of a client, of exchanging ceramics for the cost of making brochures: "The exchange of ceramics against 301 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp.762-763 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 p.763 303 Reus 2004 pp. 764-765 302 115 brochures that your client proposes to us does not interest either Artigas nor me. We prefer to keep the pieces. We are only at the beginning of this work, and ceramics will be revalued over time”. As we can see, the main motive of the letter from Miró, who is already in possession of the family inheritance, is not to negotiate anything. He does not want Matisse to have the impression that he is in a situation of economic need that would prompt him to accept any agreement. What he wants is to convey to his dealer the impression that he is now an important personality, with many contacts in Europe and therefore with magnificent prospects to find a dealer that brings his work to the market and provides him with good income. With that purpose, Miró focuses in the letter on announcing his plan to organize a major exhibition in Paris, a substitute in some way of the one he did not get at MoMA in New York and he asks him to send the Constellations gouaches that have not been sold 304. Miró exhibits in this letter of May 13 the power of his contacts in the new French political establishment, which will allow him this time to avoid the odyssey suffered when sending the Constellations to New York, traveling this time in a real diplomatic pouch. To recover the gouaches he must claim that they are for a very important exhibition and that they will be under the protection of the French State. Miró will remind his dealer one month later of his plans for the Paris exhibition and the need he has for gouaches, ceramics and unsold lithographs 305. The attempt to recover the Constellations gouaches still unsold after the January exhibition has for Miró an interest not only artistic, linked to the planned exhibition in Paris, but also chrematistic. Those of the first period, which he has recognized that they belong to Pierre Matisse, will have to return to the gallerist, but those of the second, which are at that time five, he does not have to return. The dealer has publisized them with his exhibition in New York and has assumed the cost of organizing and promoting them, but since they were consigned and had not been sold, once in Europe and out of reach, they belonged again to the painter, who could sell them at will, keeping with 100% of their value. Matisse knows this well, and despite Miró's insistence he will systematically refuse to send them to Europe until 1958, when once sold he will handle their transfer to Paris so that they can be reproduced in pochoir by Daniel Jacomet in yet another commercial operation of the dealer. While keeping Pierre Matisse at bay, Miró is also trying to re-establish contact with his pre-war dealer Pierre Loeb to put him in competition with Matisse and to have a secure source of income in Europe. As we had seen, he had already asked about Loeb in his letters to the Serts of March 11, 1943 and to Matisse in January 6, 1943, but in the spring of 1945 he still had no news. And on May 13, that is, five days after writing to Matisse, he writes to Christian and Yvonne Zervos in Paris, also inquiring about the gallerist: “And Pierre and Silvia, what has become of them? For a long time I have not had any news of them, except the very vague information that his brother Edouard has transmitted to me. Tell me what happened to them” 306. 304 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp.766-767 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp.771-774 306 Rowell 1992 pp. 90-91 y Reus 2004 pp.768-770 305 116 But the aim of the May 13, 1945 letter to the Zervos is obviously not to ask about Loeb, but to begin to re-establish contacts and ties with the Parisian intellectual world, interrupted five years ago, and to ask him for help to carry out his idea of making the great Parisian exhibition of his war work. Miró was answering a message from Christian Zervos in which the publisher told him about the reappearance of his magazine Cahiers d'Art, which had played in the 1930s an important role in the dissemination of his work. Miró closes his letter asking some favors from Zervos, which once again denote his economic difficulties and his urgent need to be aware of what is happening in the resurgent Parisian art world: “Now I ask you a favor. I have written to "Argus de la Presse" to come and see you and I have taken the liberty of telling them that you will pay an invoice of 116 francs. I would also like you to send me the Cahiers d'Art issues as soon as they they appear, the latest Éluard book and the album with reproductions of Picasso's latest works. Open an account with all that, because at the moment I have no way to send money from here and I do not know how my bank account in Paris is.” The press cuttings invoice that he asks the Zervos to pay is equivalent to only $ 24 in 2016. Miró had learned the usefulness of a press magazine service from Picasso himself, who had a subscription to a press review. Called LitTout (Read-All), this service summarized for the painter everything that was said about him. When he was absent from Paris, his secretary Jaime Sabartés was in charge of reviewing the press clippings and summarizing them in long missives that he sent him every day. Picasso had learned the usefulness of press reviews from Kahnweiler, who kept everything published about Cubism in the early years of the century, as well as reactions abroad to all his exhibitions307. Miró also asks his new French friends to help him bring the Constellations to Europe. In a letter dated June 19, 1945, the painter wrote to Philippe Rebeyrol, who he understood to be in charge of the so-called exhibition in Paris, emphasizing the importance of bringing gouaches from New York 308. In any case, the painful operation of the commercialization of the Constellations will leave its mark on the isolated Miró in Barcelona, and will even lead to reneging on them, at least for a few years. For example, when in 1949 a group of friends from Barcelona organized a tribute exhibition, accompanied by a book written by Cirlot , the gouaches were completely ignored. The critic does not cite them even once in his text, whose list of exhibitions even omitted to mention the presentation of the series in 1945309. 307 Orozco 2015 p. 68. See details of Picasso’s press cuttings in the Direction des Archives de France at: http://www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/chan/chan/fonds/picassohtml/d0e25936.html 308 Rowell 1992 p. 92 & Reus 2004 pp.775-779 309 Cirlot 1949 117 6. ‘Little paintings’ for women: The contempt of dealers, collectors and MoMA The main reason that drives Miró and his advisers to design the strategy of bypassing Matisse and offering the Constellations directly to MoMA is the retrospective exhibition that the museum had dedicated to him between November 19, 1941 and January 11, 1942. As we saw, before the exhibition was inaugurated, in the same month of November 1941 Miró was trying to send the gouaches to Pierre Matisse, as he tells Joan Prats in his letter of the 12th. Experts have underlined the importance of the MoMA exhibition of 1941, which undoubtedly makes Miró think that he can obtain an exhibition for the Constellations two and a half years later. Dupin points out for example that due to this exhibition, “critics, historians and amateurs from around the world will place him from that moment on the first row of his generation and among the greatest creators of contemporary art” 310. But it is not until Paulo Duarte shows up in Barcelona in 1944 with a museum business card, and after three years without receiving any stipend from the gallerist, that Miró and his advisers radically change their strategy. But Joan Miró's 1941 exhibition is by no means the most important exhibition held by MoMA that year, in which exhibitions number 110 to 164 of the Museum take place, that is, a total of 55 showcases 311, among which are the famous Frank Lloyd Wright, American Architect; The Ballet Today; We Like Modern Art; Understanding Modern Art; Britain at War; Paul Klee; Masterpieces of Picasso; New Acquisitions: Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism and Salvador Dalí. In fact, the 1941 success for Miró, but above all for Pierre Matisse, who inspires and obtains economic benefits from the show, is to get James Johnson Sweeney organize that retrospective with 73 works borrowed by collectors or taken from the unsold warehouse of Pierre Matisse himself, and especially that Sweeney writes a small monograph of 66 pages that MoMA will publish with a wide circulation for those years (8,000 copies) 312. This booklet constitutes the best sales catalog for the dealer. As for providing income to the overwhelmed painter, the show had no impact whatsoever. For the rest, of the two parallel exhibitions that MoMA celebrates at the same time and with the same duration, the one that constitutes a resounding success is that of Salvador Dalí, organized by James Thrall Soby and that monopolizes –perhaps unfairly– all the attention. If Miró's desire for the Constellations to be exhibited by MoMA in 1944 did not materialize, it is simply because MoMA decided not to approve the exhibition. The 6. ‘Little paintings’ for women: The contempt of dealers, collectors and MoMA 310 Dupin 2012, p.258 See MoMA Exhibition History List, http://www.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/archives_exhibition_history_list 312 Sweeney 1941 311 118 reasons that prompted the museum to make such a decision are complex and have much to do with the amateurism management of the Miró/Prats/Gomis/Duarte team, with factors internal to the museum and with the intrinsic nature of the gouaches, or at least their perception on the part of the MoMA establishment people that examined them. One of the reasons that militated against the Constellations was that they did not match their exhibition schedule. On the other hand, MoMA may have considered that the 22 small paintings, seven ceramics and 50 lithographs did not have enough entity to merit an exhibition. Besides, the museum was subject in those days of internal tensions that made decision-making difficult. In any case, the decision was MoMA’s. The initial excuse for the refusal was that Pierre Matisse has claimed the Constellations as his own. But later they will elaborate another: that the cost of taking the paintings and ceramics to New York was too high to be assumed by the museum. All the authors have followed since Lilian Tone's 1993 explanation that the reason for the refusal of MoMA must be found in the high cost that this would have entailed for the museum. Tone had pointed out that “Owing to significantly larger costs than had been originally anticipated, the Museum weas unprepared to pay for the shipment of the works to New York”. And she adds that in those sircumstances, “Pierre Matisse, in his capacity of Miró’s representative in America, took financial responsibility for the whole shipment” and kept the works 313. However, the notarized letter from Paulo Duarte to Pierre Matisse dated December 20, 1944, that is when Matisse already has the Constellations in his hands, authorizes him on behalf of Miró and Prats to deduct from the payment that corresponded to the painter “all the sums (that Matisse had) to pay to the Museum of Modern Art and that represent the costs of bringing the material from Spain (shipping, packaging, etc)”314. This indicates without any doubt that MoMA did pay the expenses, took charge of the entire shipment and examined the Constellations before deciding not to exhibit them. An additional proof is the aforementioned letter from Matisse to Goodwin on November 24 in which the gallerist claims ownership of the pieces –already customs cleared– and offers to participate in the expenses incurred when bringing them from Spain. Goodwin will inform the gallerist on November 27 that he has transmitted his request to James Thrall Soby, Director of the Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture 315 . This letter from Goodwin proves that MoMA has received the packages, has opened them and has examined the paintings and ceramics, since the architect indicates to Matisse that he is interested in acquiring one of the ceramic vases (the black one) of the five included in the shipment, and asks the gallerist to reserve it for him. Note that Goodwin is not interested in a gouache, but in a piece of pottery, which shows that the Constellations have not impressed him, although later, since the pottery is very expensive ($ 1,500), and perhaps feeling obliged about not having met Miró's wishes to have the MoMA exhibition done, he will acquire the gouache Acrobatic Dancers at a third or less of that amount. The same can be said of Stephen Carlton Clark, all-powerful MoMA patron at the time, who undoubtedly saw the gouaches in the museum before they were handed over to Pierre Matisse and decided that they 313 Tone 1993, p.5 PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004, p.p. 758-759 315 PMGA 114.46 314 119 were nice enough to give one to his mistress, but not to integrate his important art collection. After conducting some research, we can assure that the vast majority of gouaches in the series were acquired by or for women, some of considerable personal relevance, a fact that was not known until now. Lilian Tone naturally used in her catalog entries the data she obtained in the archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery, without taking the trouble of finding out more about the real buyers. The problem is that the data was not very precise and it basically sought to identify to which client the amount had to be debited. And married women did not then have the right to open current accounts, a possibility they only achieved by extension of the civil rights obtained by African Americans in the sixties and seventies of last century. Besides, women are always identified as Mrs. followed by the full name and surname of their husband, following a tradition that is still in force in much of the world. We will give a detailed account of the results of our investigation in another chapter of this book, dedicated to the journey of the Constellations after being sold. But we can reveal now that of the 23 gouaches, twelve were acquired directly by as many women: Helen Scherer; Irene Hudson, Natasha Zahalkaha, Claire Block, Hildegard Von Steinwehr Ault, Willavene Sober, Lallie Barnes, Elisa Bindhoff, Helen B. Lansdowne, Bobsy Fuller, Elizabeth Mason Paine and Pussy Nitze. Four others were bought for or given to as many women: Pilar Juncosa, Alexina Sattler, Mrs. Cable Senior and Patricia Kane. Another one was acquired with funds from the bequest of a woman, Lillie Bliss. Two others were acquired by a gay couple, consisting of Dwight Ripley and Rupert Barneby. Two couples bought three more temperas, the one formed by Georgia Talmey and Ralph Colin (two), and the one composed of Charlotte Bevans and William Lee McKim (one). And finally, a single man, Philip Goodwin, bought a tempera. As for subsequent buyers, women also lead: the aforementioned Natasha Zahalkaha bought another one in 1968. Vera Roberta McEntire bought another, Ellin Hobbins another, Patricia Helps bought it from Hobbins, and a gay couple formed by Stanley Seeger and Christopher Cone acquired another. Everything indicates that Miró's gouaches were met with skepticism, both in MoMA and from Pierre Matisse himself. Miró will also recognize to Lluis Permanyer at the end of his life that “when Matisse saw them, he felt disappointed” 316. In fact, Miró's instructions that the gouaches should be exposed all together were ignored by the dealer when he finally exhibited them. Although the 22 works appeared in the catalogs, the gallerist exposed them in batches, explaining in a letter to Miró that he had decided to exhibit them in groups “to avoid certain apparent repetitions that could have been misinterpreted by the public”. To reassure the painter, he assured him that from time to time he would alternate the works, so that the twenty-two had been exhibited when the exhibition ended 317. One of the reasons that might have prompted Pierre Matisse and MoMA to underestimate the Constellations is the rupture they represented with respect to Miró's previous work, and especially his savage paintings and the masonite paintings made 316 317 Permanyer 2003, p. 142 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004, p.762 120 just before the gouaches. As we have explained in a previous chapter, there is obviously a mutation. But to our knowledge, the main cause of the failure of the MoMA operation is the precipitation and lack of professionalism of the Miró team’s management. The most evident manifestation of the amateurism with which it was carried out was the lack of suitability of Duarte to carry out the running of the initiative, which is manifested in the reference he made to Alfred H. Barr. in his letter to MoMA. Neither Miró –who probably asked the critic to be mentioned– nor the ill-informed Brazilian seem to have been aware of Barr's. dismissal from the museum's top management position in October 1943. As proven by the fact that Duarte includes in his letter of March 5, 1944 to Philip L. Goodwin the following paragraph: “I know that issues relating to paintings should be dealt with by Mr. Barr.. However, I do it through you because you are the only person to whom I can send a letter such as this one. I beg you to explain it to Barr .so he does not think it's a lack of attention on my part”. The person to whom the initiative should have been addressed was undoubtedly James Thrall Soby, who at the time of Barr'.s defenestration had been appointed Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture. Soby was also at that time Chairman of the Committee on the Museum Collections, and therefore the person who could propose or veto acquisitions. In short, Miró and Prats accepted that the operation, which they hoped was the basis of a new life and artistic career for the painter, be carried out by Duarte, whose credentials for an initiative of this caliber were more than dubious. The Brazilian, for his part, proposed the operation to Philip L. Goodwin, who, despite having been – thanks to the influence of his family– one of the two architects who designed the MoMA building in 1939, against Alfred H. Barr’s. opinion318, had no influence in the museum outside of architectural questions. Philip L. Goodwin (1885-1958), born in Hartford, Connecticut, from a family of descendants of seventeenth-century settlers, was the son of J.P. Morgan Co. banker James Junius Goodwin, first cousin of the bank's founder, John Pierpont Morgan Jr. –founder of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library that houses the archives of Pierre Matisse. His mother was Josephine Sarah Lippincott, daughter of the owner of the J. B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia. Philip graduated from Yale in 1907 and studied architecture at Columbia University, without neglecting trips through Europe and Asia (19071908) and an extension of studies in Paris between 1911 and 1914. During the First World War he returned to New York, to work in the studio of Delano & Aldrich until 1916. The previous year his father had died, leaving a fortune of more than thirty million dollars (735 million of 2015) and Philip was 318 Kramer, Hilton The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972-1984, Free Press, New York 1985 p. 403 121 able to set up a new studio: Goodwin, Bullard & Woolsey. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the architect joined the Allied expeditionary corps as a lieutenant and participated in the 1919 diplomatic peace negotiations in Budapest. In 1921 he set up his own architecture studio, entered MoMA’s board and was named Chairman of its Archiecture Department. Besides being known for his conservative and nationalist positions 319, Goodwin had already been one of the strongest enemies of the influence of foreign architecture in the United States since the 1920s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had emerged in 1928 from an idea of three important women collectors: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller, who repudiated the idea, but provided the funds to finance it), Lillie P. Bliss (with whose bequest the museum acquired its sole Constellation) and pioneer modern art collector Mary Quinn Sullivan, a trio then known as the Daring Ladies. Together with collector Anson Conger Goodyear, they commissioned Harvard professor Paul Joseph Sachs to find a director for the planned museum. As it was an embryonic idea and there was not a large salary, Sachs proposed his pupil Alfred Hamilton Barr .Jr., a young 27-year-old PhD student who had studied with him. The mission that the founders entrusted to the new institution, and Barr. in particular, was none other than to validate their personal tastes by creating a museum for the art they collected 320. The museum did not buy anything, but it exhibited the paintings that the director was tracking down for his patrons to acquire, either following their inclination for some contemporary European painters or orienting it towards others that Barr .proposed. This model has been followed later by many other modern art museums, which often serve the interests of individual collectors, exhibiting their pieces and thus increasing their value. At the time of its founding, the museum was confined to five modest rooms on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. After its opening in November 1929 with the exhibition Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, Barr .achieved a stunning success for the museum, to the point that Rockefeller withdrew his opposition, offered a piece of land in Manhattan, facilitated the construction of a permanent headquarters and extended his control of MoMA, 319 Shanken, Andrew M. Between brotherhood and bureaucracy: Joseph Hudnut, Louis I. Kahn and the American Society of Planners and Architects, en Planning Perspectives, nº 20 International Planning History Society, London, April 2005, pp. 147–175 320 Alfred H. Barr in Sorensen, Lee. Dictionary of Art Historians. http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/barra.htm 122 which would last for decades. But in 1944 problems had accumulated for Barr. and led to the the dismissal of the museum’s director because of his promotion of surrealism in the 30s. A few weeks before the inauguration of the New York World's Fair of 1939, Paul Sachs, the Harvard Art professor who had placed Barr .at the head of MoMA ten years earlier, delivered a speech before the Board of Trustees of the museum at the ceremony of inauguration of the new headquarters built by Philip Goodwin. In his dissertation, Sachs urged the institution “to resist pressure to vulgarize and cheapen our work through the mistaken idea that in such fashion a broad public may be reached effectively”. And he emphasized that “in serving an elite, (MoMA) will reach, better than in any other way, the great general public by means of work done to meet the most exacting standards of an elite”. In Sachs’ view, in the unstable, troubled and disturbed times they were living, the only way to preserve high culture was scholarly activity that catered to an elite who could help guide the public in cultivating discriminating taste 321. Also in 1939, while the New York Fair was still open, took place the publication of the essay Avant-garde and Kitsch by critic Clement Greenberg322, that launches a call of attention before the threat that, according to him, a new form of pseudoart supposes for the artistic vanguard of the world. For the young critic, the new merchandise is “ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide” 323. Greenberg did not include Miró in the mediocre art he denounced in 1939, but instead put him in the category of avant-garde artists along with Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brâncusi, Klee, Matisse and Cézanne 324. Not in vain the Miró that Matisse had been showing in the last five years was the complex and hard of the savage paintings. In a footnote to the article, which followed the list of great masters –who he claimed derived their main inspiration from the medium in which they worked– the critic pointed with his finger to whom he was referring, who represented that spurious art, concluding that they were a typical example of a formulation by Professor Hans Hofmann: “From the point of view of this formulation surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to 321 Sachs, Paul Address to the Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, read on 05.08.1939.MoMA Bulletin Volume 6 No 5 (July 1939) p. 11 Cited in Zalman 2008 p. 80 322 Greenberg 1939 pp. 34-49. 323 Greenberg 1939, p. 39 324 Greenberg 1939, p. 37 123 restore ‘outside’ subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dalí is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium” 325. But as much as it displeased Sachs and Greenberg, the great star of the New York fair –which lasted from April 1939 to October 31, 1940– was precisely Dalí, who had a pavilion of his own and paid for it (Dream of Venus). Salvador Dalí had already overshadowed Miró in the historic MoMA exhibition Fantastic art, dada, surrealism (December 7, 1936 to January 17, 1937) that exhibited works of old and modern painters like them, Chagall, De Chirico, Duchamp, Arp, Picasso, Ernst, Magritte, Man Ray or Tanguy. The flaccid clocks of one of Dalí's most well-known works, The Persistence of Memory, monopolized all the attention of the visitors of that exhibition and, more importantly, of the press and the advertising industry, which saw in it an unparalleled source of inspiration. This tiny 24 x 33 cm canvas of 1931, which had been acquired two years earlier by MoMA for $ 340 ($ 6,000 in 2014), became the most famous of the exhibition. The painter's impact turned evident on December 14, 1936, when Time magazine devoted its cover to Dalí, reproducing a ghostly black and white photograph of the painter by Man Ray. And Newsweek named him the top media personality of the year. When he decided to go into exile in the United States in 1940, he was received there as a star and could live for eight years the opulent American dream Miró longed for, being entertained everywhere, making sets for movies and even writing scripts himself. Greenberg pointed out in a timely fashion in his 1939 article that “Kitsch’s enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted this temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely. And then those puzzling border-line cases appear”326. It does not seem unreasonable to think that, although Greenberg excluded Miró again from the kitsch black list by proclaiming him an abstract painter in his 1948 monograph 327, upon seeing the Constellations, MoMA leaders would think, confirming the radical turn that these festive and easy to enjoy paintings implied with respect to the complex and deep realizations of Miró’s previous work, that the painter was crossing the red line. Greenberg had used as an example of the appeal of mediocre art a Russian peasant who had to choose between a cubist painting by Picasso or a realistic work by Russian Ilya Repin. For the critic, “Superior 325 Greenberg 1939, p. 49 Greenberg 1939, p. 41 327 Greenberg 1948 326 124 culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no ‘natural’ urgency within himself that will drive him towards Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort” 328. The same argument would be developed in 1946 by Paul Éluard in defense of the creative freedom of Picasso, who was then accused of the sin of formalism by the leaders of the French Communist Party, who urged him to bend to socialist realism. In that year, the party magazine Les Lettres Françaises opened a survey on the theme Art and the public, to which Paul Éluard responds in No 100 of March 22: “From the nineteenth century painters express the reality of art more than reality. Since Cézanne, the painter strives to make paintings, and not figurative painting... For the general public, the only thing that counts is the subject. But artists are concerned only with art, while the public only cares about the content. There has therefore been a divorce, which was aggravated by the Impressionists... And yet the artist, from the moment he freed himself of all realistic restrictions, from the moment he uses forms to his free will, should have given the public the desire to free itself too. But the public does not want to free itself. As in politics, the public wants everything already digested. Divorce is not the fault of the artist but of the crowd and its bad education.... Critics and teachers should devote themselves to educate the masses". The text did not have much impact, and Picasso continued to withstand the party's attacks for years 329. If for Greenberg and the leaders of the New York museum the enemy of cultured art, of the artistic avant-garde, had to be found precisely in the ranks of the Surrealists, we can not forget that the introducer of Surrealism in the United States was none other than Alfred H. Barr. 330. And that he was removed from the direction of the MoMA in October 1943 to a large extent for having lent the museum to exhibitions of surrealist and magical art that many considered kitsch or mediocre. Although it is certain that the excuse adduced to separate to Barr .was the exhibition of the naïf painter Morris Hirshfield of the summer of 1943 331, the truth is that the root of his problems with the patrons of the museum was his promotion of the art denounced by Greenberg. The members of the governing body had already been irritated by the 1937 Surrealism exhibition 332. Then president of the group Anson Conger Goodyear wrote to Abby Rockefeller after the show, noting that “The unfortunate part of the exhibition is that it includes a number of things that are ridiculous and could hardly be included in any definition of art” 333. Barr .managed to avoid dismissal both in 1937 and the following year, when a reorganization of the museum was carried out. But in 1940, the board appointed a Director of Exhibitions and Publications (Monroe Lathrop Wheeler), formally to free Barr .of administrative obligations, but in reality to try to limit his freedom of choice. 328 Greenberg 1939, p. 46 See long explanation on the period in Orozco 2015 330 Zalman 2007 pp. 44-67 331 The Paintings of Morris Hirshfield. MoMA Exhibition No 234, June/August 1943 332 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism MoMA Exhibition No 55, December 1936/January 1937 333 Kantor 2002, p.357 329 125 In 1939 Goodyear ceded his supreme position to Stephen Carlton Clark, relieving pressure on Barr., who had re-offended exhibiting in 1938 works that many considered dubious in the Masters of Popular Painting exhibition. In 1943, Barr. organized a more extensive one, with a large circulation catalog, on Realists and Magic-Realists 334 . Barr defined magic realism in the catalog as “the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions” 335. Clark was of the same opinion as Goodyear, but could not dismiss Barr. for artistic reasons. He then told the board that the museum needed a Director to lead, who enjoyed the trust of the members of the board and could raise money and convince people to donate their collections. The governing body did not have the moral authority to question the artistic criteria of the Director, but it could reduce his artistic attributions and impose minimum management conditions. Barr served his dismissal to Clark on a silver tray: a few months before, he had written to the new president of the board explaining that he was behind in his writing plans; that he wanted to expand some of his monographs that could serve him as a doctoral thesis at Harvard; that he planned to write a history of modern art, etc. At the same time he recognized that since joining the museum he had stopped reading what he should have read and having an intellectual life. Clark did not miss the opportunity and acted: through a letter dated October 13, 1943 he informed Barr .that he was dismissed as Director because his lack of productivity as a writer made his salary of $ 12,000 per year –about $ 162,000 of 2015– unjustified 336. To avoid a possible rebellion by museum curatorial staff and Barr's. many friends, Clark abolished the position of Director, and his responsibilities were passed to a committee of department heads, coordinated by John Abbot as Chairman or non-executive president. Barr stayed in the museum, with the title of Advisory Director and Clark named Soby Director of Painting and Sculpture. In 1947 Barr .would be appointed Director of Collections of the museum, a position without executive functions he held until his retirement twenty years later. 334 Americans 1943: Realists and Magic-Realists MoMA Exhibition No 217, February/March 1943 335 Miller, Dorothy y Barr, Alfred H., AmericanRealists and Magic-Realists, Exhibition Cataslog, MoMA, New York, 1943 p. 5 336 Reproduced in Fox Weber, Nicholas The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007, p. 334 126 These are the circumstances under which the Constellations arrived at the museum, and the person that had to make the final decision to exhibit or not was therefore Soby. But the problem is that the gouaches came to him presented by Goodwin, who was unable to defend their suitability for an exhibition in the museum. And the paintings did not cause at that moment the busy Director of Painting an indelible impact. Not even in his study on the painter made fifteen years after seeing the temperas for the first time did Soby hide the impression of superficiality that they provoked in him: “The pictures in the series seem so spontaneous that it comes as a surprise to learn from Miro himself that they were ‘exacting both technically and physically’, and that each took at least a month to produce”337. Soby had been precisely commissioned by Stephen Clark, just after naming him, to eliminate the superficial, spontaneous and easy from MoMA’s exhibition calendar. Just before the Constellations arrived at the port of Philadelphia, Soby had submitted to the board of the museum a report on how it should exit from the period of exception of the war and contemplate the future of a standardized artistic landscape. The report was registered by MoMA on June 28, 1944, a few weeks before the Constellations arrived in New York, and in it Soby summarized the task he had assumed: “In very recent years, due to the pressure of war, we have probably relaxed our exhibition standards more than we realize. Most of our exhibitions relating to the war have been timely and of genuine propaganda, morale or instructional value. But with the war now nearing an end, it would seem a good time to pull up short and face the basic problem of standards to follow in the peace to come” 338. Soby was also at that time occupied with another controversy within MoMA not relative to exhibitions, but to acquisitions 339. If he had stated in that same year of 1944 in an article in the Museum News magazine that it was not the primary mission of the museum to acquire the work of novel painters, another October 44 report by MoMA’s Policy Committee affirmed that the didactic purpose of the museum imposed the need to acquire 'minor works' and not only masterpieces. Soby felt unauthorized and was forced to resign from his position as Director of Painting and Sculpture in 1945, but not before pointing out, in alliance with Barr .and James Johnson Sweeney, that the main factor for a work to acquire a didactic value is its quality, and that the museum should continue to devote the bulk of available funds to acquire important works, and in a much smaller proportion to buy lower quality pieces 340. And probably, both Soby and Barr, Sweeney and Clark himself considered that the 'little paintings' that Miró sent did not reach the necessary level. But let's go back to Matisse's takeover of the gouaches. In the fixing of prices of the Miró/Matisse contract of December 20, 1944, it is clear that two actors have intervened: on the one hand, the Miró/Artigas/Prats trio for ceramics, pricing high because many people must get paid –painter, ceramist, agent, expenses, gallerist–and 337 Soby p. 100 Report on Exhibitions for the Policy Committee, June 28, 1944. Submitted by James T. Soby. James Johnson Sweeney Papers in The Museum of Modern Art Archives, folder No 8, Museum Policy Committee 1944-1945. MoMA, New York. 339 De Santiago Restoy 2003. pp. 231-246 340 De Santiago Restoy 2003. p. 243 338 127 on the other Pierre Matisse, who not believing that ceramics can be sold does not oppose setting a high price, but in return pushes the prices of gouaches down. The Catalan team had proposed them at a sale price of 500 dollars each when they were sent to the MoMA, counting on the museum to pay the shipping and exhibition expenses, which meant Barcelona would receive 50% of the total sale price, that is, $ 5,000 net for the ten of them not covered by Matisse’s contract. When Pierre Matisse seizes the Constellations and imposes his interpretation that the first twelve belong to him without any limitation, he also demands that Miró be the one to pay the shipping costs, it seems reasonable to think that Prats insisted that the price of the gouaches be raised, so that Miró still received a considerable amount, that is, several thousand dollars. But the gallerist refused and even lowered the sale price of part of the paintings down to 400 dollars a piece, keeping the others at 500 dollars as Miró had offered them to MoMA if there was no intervention by Matisse. The dealer estimated that $ 400-500 was the appropriate price to reach the new middle-class collectors that James Thrall Soby would describe in a famous article of 1946. Those collectors, belonging to the new upper middle class made up of senior business executives and successful professionals were buying the work of young American painters, but Matisse also wanted to attract them to his gallery selling essentially works by painters of the School of Paris. To achieve this he needed to obtain minor works, small oil paintings, drawings and sketches of the great European artists. This he achieved in his long trips to Europe during the spring and summer of each year. There he bought at very reasonable prices, directly from painters or his colleagues Louis Carré, Pierre Loeb, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, etc. The procedure for the sale of drawings and minor works suited the painters, who skipped their contracts with gallerists, obtained an additional source of safe income, not controlled by the tax authorities, and knew that they would only come to the market after a few or many years. They were thus willing to sell cheaply. Lithographic printer Fernand Mourlot recalls in his memoirs how on one occasion Matisse wanted to double the price he had agreed for some drawings with Louis Carré. Faced with the protest of the dealer, Matisse agreed to return to the initial price on exchange for Carré's promise that he would sell them as expensive as if he had paid the double to the painter 341. Pierre Matisse had been buying this type of work for many years, which allowed him, in spite of the fact that the Second World War interrupted his trips to France, in 1943, to organize the showcase Summer Exhibition: Modern Pictures Under Five Hundred. (June 15-July 31, extended to August) with works by Miró, Bonnard, Bores, Calder, Carrington, Chagall, Chirico, Derain, Dufy, Fautrier, Ferren, Lam, Laurencin, Laurens, Léger, Lurçat, MacIver, Masson, Matisse, Matta, Modigliani, Pascin, Picasso, Rouault, Tamayo and Tanguy. In view of the success of the show, the gallerist repeated the following year, celebrating another exhibition also with works offered at less than five hundred dollars a piece: Summer Exhibition: Pictures Under Five Hundred and Examples of African and Pre-Columbian Art. (June 27 – July 31 1944), with works by Miró, Bonnard, 341 Mourlot 1979, pp.106-107 128 Bores, Brignoni, Chabaud, Chagall, Dalí, Chirico, Degas, Derain, Despiau, Dufy, Ferren, Gromaire, Hélion, Lam, Laurencin, Laurens, Léger, Lurçat, MacIver, Marquet, Masson, Matisse, Matta, Pajot, Picasso, Redon, Siqueiros, Tamayo, Tanguy and Toulouse-Lautrec. Unfortunately for Miró and his Catalan clan, when Pierre Matisse finally received the Constellations he understood that these gouaches fell perfectly into this category of minor works, both because of their small size and because they were made on paper, always undervalued in the art market, among other things due to the fragility of the support. After the relative success of the Constellations exhibition–40% of the gouaches sold at 400 or 500 $ piece– the gallerist repeated the experience twice in that same year of 1945. One of the two was the exhibition Pictures Under Five Hundred. (11-31 December 1945), with works by Miró, Bores, Brignoni, Chagall, Dalí, Chirico, Derain, Dufy, Ferren, Gromaire, Lam, Laurencin, Laurens, Léger, Lurçat, MacIver, Marquet, Masson, Matisse, Matta, Pajot, Picasso, Tamayo and Tanguy. It has been persistently asserted that the Constellations had, after their exhibition in the Pierre Matisse Gallery from January 9 to February 3, 1945 a great success among art critics. As we have seen, the gallerist indicated in a letter to Miró dated one day before the closing of the exhibition that “We have naturally had great success and there is a lot of talk about the gouaches... The opinion is unanimous. In this series of gouaches you have obtained the highest possible degree of expression, freedom and poetic invention, as well as a technique that had never been achieved before now” 342. For Jacques Dupin, after being exhibited, the Constellations “will be received very favorably” in the United States, the exhibition having "great resonance” 343. Lilian Tone says that the exhibit “excited a wide and overwhelmingly positive response in the press”344. James Thrall Soby himself maintains fourteen years after the exibition that “the remaining twenty-two were shown after the war at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, where they had an immense and well-deserved success.” 345. Let us examine in more detail what the American critics said about the exhibition of the Constellations. For this we will build on the compilation made in his blog by Antonio Boix Pons, for whom "the North American critics surrendered in this exhibition to the genius of Miró” 346. The first two reviews –in second-rate newspapers– were indeed very positive. An article published on page 9 of the New York World-Telegram of January 13, 1945, under the title “Joan Miro's First Pictures since the War on View”, affirmed that the exhibition was timely “not only because Miró is so talented and original a painter, but because these are the first pictures to come out of Europe since the war. They were executed in 1940 and 1941, and were brought to this county from Spain, where the artist is living, via Portugal. They have nothing at all do with the war. It is as if Miró turned his head away from the terror and destruction on earth to contemplate the 342 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp. 762-763 Dupin 2012, p. 460 344 Tone 1993, p.5 345 Soby 1959, p.100 346 Boix Pons 2011 343 129 eternal mad yet ever varying constellations... This is the best painting Miró has done to date” 347. That same day, the art critic of the conservative newspaper The Sun was ecstatic saying that “it is impossible to pick out the best picture in the display because all of the twenty-two pictures are the best”. But the main newspapers were more circumspect. The show does not convince the critic of the Herald Tribune Carlyle Burrows, who publishes his article on January 14, but he recognizes the artist's originality: “Joan Miró has never been able to persuade us of his great seriousness as an artist, save on the grounds of his skill in putting curious little shapes together in his pictures with a provocativeness sufficient to tickle the fancy perceptibly”. The only thing that Burrows is willing to grant Miró is that “all the little shapes which he combines to suggest biological life in many forms are designed with the Miró hallmark. So peculiar are they that many lesser artists have taken them up and included them with a vaguely Miró-like effect in the work of their own supposed creating”. Nor do the Constellations seem to have convinced the critic of the New York Times, who does not quite see in his review of January 14 what is creative about the gouaches, and for whom “These temperas, though perhaps not fully indicative of Miró’s aims in 1945, reveal a steady swing toward an all-over design made up of the tiny shapes of old with their envelope of wide-open space. The tiny shapes are threaded on weaving lines and, in the sum, resemble constellations. For me, something significant has been lost –lost in a maze that is mincingly instead of robusty decorative”. However, this critic liked the ceramics displayed. Critic Maude Kemper Riley of Art Digest was also more convinced by ceramics than temperas. As for the Constellations, she only described their curious consctuction, adding that “Part of the fascination of these fancies is the game he plays of changing color each time the mystic line crosses a solid. One may explore each painting unendingly at close range; then receive a separate emotion of wholeness by viewing it at six paces” 348. It has been commented, in a repetitive way, that the gouaches sold as donuts: “In 1945, Pierre Matisse exhibits the first ceramics and the twenty-three (Sic) Constellations. The success is brilliant. Matisse announces to Miró: 'I sell them like donuts'” 349. “This exhibition gave him enormous success –he sold everything– and respect, among other reasons, for being the first that allowed the American public to know what the European avant-garde masters had been doing during the Second World War” 350. Miró’s brother in law, Lluís Juncosa, also points out that “they were sold like donuts and this will be the moment Miró triumphs in America, with good economic repercusions” 351. Actual reality was something different. If we analyze carefully the history of each one of the gouaches, which MoMA researchers tried to unearth in the preparations for the 347 Unsigned, Joan Miro's First Pictures since the War on View, New York World-Telegram, New York 01.13.1945 p. 9 348 Riley, Maude New Temperas and Ceramics by Miró. “The Art Digest”, New York, Volume. 19, nº 7, January 1945 349 Punyet Miró y Lolivier-Rahola 1998, p.75 350 Pérez Segura, Javier, Scandal & success: Picasso, Dalí y Miró en Estados Unidos, Editorial Eutelequia, Madrid 2012, p.254 351 Juncosa, Lluís 1994, p.38 130 centennial retrospective and whose results were published under the responsibility of Lilian Tone in a brief and factual way on pages 415 to 422 of the catalog of the exhibition 352 we will see that in fact not so many temperas were sold in the exhibition, that the great collectors completely ignored the series and that the buyers were women or were bought for women, that is, the kind of work that is bought as a 'gift' for a woman, or in a couple of cases, for the mistress. It has been said on numerous occasions that the sale price of the gouaches set by Pierre Matisse was $ 700. Professor Antonio Boix points out, for example, that “the price was unusually high for new works of that format, 700 dollars a piece, in total $ 15,400 for the 22” 353. The source of this information seems to be the 1999 book by John Russell, in which he points out, without giving any reference, that “they sold very well indeed at $ 700 each” 354. But in fact the only reliable data available make us think that the retail price was not 700, but 400 and 500 dollars, depending on the gouache in question. That is, a price per painting of between $ 5,200 and $ 6,500 of 2014 adjusting inflation355. That is, the price of a ring with a not very large diamond. It does not seem likely that the sale prices were modified in the few days that elapsed between the letter/contract and the opening of the exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery on January 9. To get an idea of what the sum of $ 400 or $ 500 represented in the art world of that time, it is enough to remember that two years later the first Picasso paintings made during the war are exhibited in New York and the cheaper oil paintings (35 x 45 cm), smaller than Miró's gouaches, sold for $ 5,000 each, that is, between 10 and 12.5 times more expensive. The exhibition is Picasso’s revenge against his dealers Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Louis Carré and Paul Rosenberg, who refused to pay the prices the painter demanded, arguing that his affiliation to the Communist Party had lowered his price level in the United States. After refusing to sell at the prices they offered, Picasso invited at the end of 1946 for lunch American dealer Samuel Kootz and sold him “without subjecting him to the usual tortures imposed on Kahnweiler” nine paintings painted between 1941 and 1946. With them takes place in Kootz’s 15 East 57th Street gallery, very close to that of Pierre Matisse, the first Picasso exhibition of the postwar period in the United States. The show was an unprecedented success, with endless lines and with the nine canvases sold on the first day at prices of between 5,000 and 20,000 dollars (between 65,000 and 260,000 352 Lanchner 1993. Boix Pons 2011 354 Russell 1999, p.253 355 Calculated using the CPI Inflation Calculator from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm. 353 131 today) 356. The fact that Miró’s gouaches immediately attracted women and were classified by a disappointed Pierre Matisse as little paintings to offer one’s wife or mistress does not post a negative note on the temperas or the intelligent sensitivity of the women who remained fascinated of these works that MoMA, Pierre Matisse and their collector husbands had undervalued. During the exhibition Joan Miró: Ceramics 1944, Tempera Paintings 1940 to 1941, Lithographs 1944, held from January 9 to February 3, 1945, of the 277 works offered for sale, 22 temperas, 5 ceramic jugs and 250 lithographs –the five copies of the Barcelona series– only eight pieces were actually sold, all of them gouaches. It may seem a small number, but it was quite rare that in the course of an exhibition in the Pierre Matisse gallery eight pieces were sold directly without haggling, without a loan to see if it looked fine in the living-room, delays, etc. In view of the moderate success of reviews but good sales of the Constellations and the resounding failure of the lithographs, Matisse organizes with these another exhibition two days after closing the previous one (Joan Miró: 1944 Lithographs 5-25 February 1945), in which not a single print is sold. As for the ceramics, Duarte and Matisse agreed in December 1944 to sell them in the exhibition at $ 1,500 each (the bigger 3) and $ 1,200 (the smaller two) 357. But eight days after opening the show, and despite the success among critics, Matisse points out in a letter to Miró that the price has dropped to $ 1,300 for the large ones and $ 900 for small ones 358. The reason for the price drop is probably that some potential buyer has indicated that he found the price too high. But the climb down does not produce effects, and on February 2, 1945, penultimate day of the exhibition, the gallerist comes back to the painter: “The ceramics have been very appreciated by the connaisseurs. Unfortunately there are not many and we have not been able to find buyers. I have asked Duarte if we can lower the price a little” 359. But the ceramics remain unsold in Pierre Matisse’s warehouse, which incites him to write again to Miró resuscitating the subject in letters of June 4 and 13, 1947, proposing to reduce prices to $ 750 for the large ones and 600 $ for the small ones. Irritated, Miró hesitates to answer, but in a letter of January 2, 1948, says in his name and in that of Artigas that Matisse may sell the ceramics at the price he wants, although he defends them with all vigor: “although ceramics may not generally fall within the province of a picture dealer, they are a very beautiful form of art, and one with which it is possible to do very good business. We have every confidence in you, and we are sure that with your range of acquaiuntances and your enterpreneurial character, you will succeed with them” 360. Matisse replies that without going into a 356 Exhibition catalog available at the Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Kootz Gallery scrapbook no. 1, 1947-1948: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/kootzgallery-scrapbook-no-1-13281/35938 357 Letter from Paulo Duarte to Pierre Matisse dated 12.20.1944. Reus 2004 pp. 759-760 358 PMGA 18.35. Russell. 1999, p.258. Reus 2004 p. 762 359 PMGA 18.35 Reus 2004, p.p. 762-763 360 PMGA 18.39. Russell, 1999, p.258 132 discussion about the place of ceramics in the hierarchy of art, the fact is that ceramics are still unsold and that even if prices were lowered a lot, it would still be very difficult to sell them. In June 1948, an irritated Matisse communicated ruthlessly to Miró, that “before we go deeper into this kind of work, I would advise you to think twice. In any case, I shall not be able to include ceramics in our contract, which applies only to paintings, gouaches, etcetera” 361. The 1946 contract between the two clearly states that the payment is for a “production uninterrupted by travel or by the execution of commissions", stating that he is remunerated “for each month spent in his studio" painting. The painter must understand that if he persists in devoting his time to producing ceramics, his income can be considerably reduced. It should be noted, however, that a decade later, and given the fact that Maeght does too, Pierre Matisse will eventually accept and show Miró ceramics. The first of these exhibitions will take place in December 1956. The eight pieces sold in the exhibition of 1945 were gouaches, of which four were purchased directly by women, three of them registered by the gallery in their name (On the 13th, the Ladder Brushed the Firmament, Women at the Border of a Lake Irradiated by the Passage of a Swan and The Rose Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and of Birds) and another one formally registered as purchased by the poet André Breton (Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird) but that was actually acquired by his mistress Elisa Bindorff 362, for whom Breton had just written the book of poems Arcane 17, perhaps his best poetic achievement. Another was bought for his lover by a wealthy collector (Nocturne). A sixth gouache (The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers) was acquired by MoMA through a bequest provided by a woman. And yet another (The Migratory Bird) appears registered as acquired by a married couple in which the woman –Charlotte Bevans – was a known collector. A single one of the temperas was acquired during the exhibition by a man, who was in fact the architect of the MoMA to whom the complete series had been offered and had not managed to convince the museum either to buy or exhibit it (Acrobatic Dancers). Fourteen gouaches did not find a buyer during the exhibition. And again women come into play. In view that they have not been sold, Pierre Matisse offers a gouache to his wife (Woman in the Night) and another one to his young 23-years-old lover who years later would become his wife (Toward the Rainbow). Four others are bought, after the exhibition, by women (The Escape Ladder, The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain, Ciphers and Constellations in Love With a Woman and The Passage of the Divine Bird). Three others are again registered as acquired by married couples (Women on the Beach, Wounded Personage and Woman and Birds). Two are bought by a gay couple (Sunrise and Woman With Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars ). An important collector –married to a gallerist– acquired one (People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails) shortly after closing the exhibition, possibly influenced by his wife, by the relative success of reviews or the adjusted price. And two last gouaches (The Poetess, Awakening in the Early 361 362 PMGA 18.39. Russell. 1999, p.259 Hammond 2000, p. 72. 133 Morning) were sold in 1946 to one or two private collectors who preferred to remain anonymous. It has also been written that the collectors who bought the Constellations were the most important of the time. But in reality we can say that it was 'second class' collectors: that is, middle class in the sense that was retained in the 40s for that term. The authors are confused: although it is true that Pierre Matisse had managed to place Miró oil paintings with the main American collectors, including several museums, this does not mean that those same collectors were the buyers of the gouaches. Anne Deirdre Robson identifies in her doctoral thesis The market for modern art in New York in the nineteen Forties and nineteen fifties - A structural and historical Survey among the main Miró collectors two buyers of gouaches, the first of them being Eleanor Gates Lloyd ('Lallie' Barnes), adding that she began to collect works by “Klee, Miro and Georges Rouault” 363. But the Mirós of her collection were acquired after the purchase of the Constellations gouache, and especially in the years that preceded the death of the painter –and of herself in 1985. This is for example the case of the 1938 oil painting Les flammes du soleil rendent hystérique la fleur du désert and of the 1956 ceramic Figurine (Projet pour un Monument), which she bought in 1982 and was sold, like the previous oil painting, at a Sotheby's auction after the death of her husband in 1993 (New York Sale, May 12, 1994, lot 218). Robson also cites Philip Goodwin, purchaser of a gouache from the Constellations, but we have not found in the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery evidence of such earlier purchases of Miró paintings by Goodwin. Robson, however, does cite other major collectors who did acquire works by Miró before 1945, including Walter P. Chrysler Jr., who owned the 1917 Self-portrait; the 1918 Portrait of Heriberto Casany (bought in 1939); the 1925 Personage (bought in 1938) and Etoiles en des sexes d'escargot, of 1925 (bought before 1941). Robson also quotes Peggy Guggenheim, who apart from the works she acquired to sell in her gallery, also kept in her collection works such as Dutch Interior II of 1928, bought in 1940 and Seated woman II, 1939, bought 1941. Another cited collector is Henry Clifford, who owned among others The Tilled Field, 1923-24 (bought in 1941) and Bather, 1932 (bought in 1933). But none of these collectors acquired a tempera of the Constellations series. Other important North American collectors of Miró works before 1945 that we can mention are Thomas Laughlin (Landscape by the Sea, 1926, bought before 1941; Potato, 1928, bought in 1932; Nocturne, 1938 bought in 1939); Albert Eugene Gallatin (Dog barking at the Moon, 1926 bought in 1929; Painting, Fratellini, Three Personnages, 1927, bought in 1928; Object, 1932, bought in 1936 and Painting, 1933, bought in 1935); Saidie A. May (Persons attracted by the form of a mountain, 1936, bought in 1938, Portrait I, 1938, bought in 1938) and Louise & Walter Arensberg (The Hermitage, 1924, bought before 1934 and Nude, 1926, bought in 1936). In any 363 Robson, Anne Deirdre The market for modern art in New York in the nineteen Forties and nineteen fifties - a structural and historical Survey. Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. at University College London, 1988. p.222 134 case, none of these great collectors, clients of Pierre Matisse, said 'present' when the Constellations were exhibited in January 1945. More significant is the absence in the list of buyers of the Constellations of the main art critics, who were also early collectors of Miró's work, such as James Thrall Soby (1906-1979), owner among others of the important Portrait of Mistress Mills in 1750 of 1929 (bought in November of 1943); Collage of 1934, (bought in 1935); Still life and old Shoe of 1937 (bought in 1944); Self-portrait I, 1937 and Portrait IV, 1938 (bought in 1944). We can not forget that Soby, at the time of Miró's attempt to place the Constellations at MoMA, was a member of the Board of Trustees (1942-1979), advisor to the Committee on the Museum Collections (1940-1967), and Chairman of the Committee (1944-1945 and 1950-1967). In the interval he was Vicechairman. For the rest, Soby was then Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA (from 27.10.1943 to 1.01.1945). Soby, lover and collector of Miró, declined undoubtedly to acquire the Constellations for both the MoMA and himself, despite their low price and that precisely in that same period he was buying much more expensive works of the painter –earlier ones. The same goes for James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986), organizer of Miró's 1941 retrospective at MoMA, owner of, among other oil paintings, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, 1925, and Seated Woman, 1932 (bought in the 30s), who took over from Soby as Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of MoMA between 1945 and 1946 and who was one of the most influential people in the museum in those years. And he did not buy aither any gouache of the series. When MoMA recovered in 1993 the Constellations for what was probably the most important retrospective exhibition of Joan Miró ever made, the role of the museum, or rather the absence of action of the same in the episode of the Constellations was carefully hidden. Carolyn Lanchner, then responsible for the Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture and who signs the voluminous exhibition catalog with a long essay of 73 pages in two or four columns, devotes much space to the paintings that precede the Constellations while these, true protagonists of the exhibition (they also illustrate the cover of the catalog), were only described in a few paragraphs based on long quotes by André Breton. As we have already seen, Lilian Tone, who made the catalog and the documentation for the exhibition, prepared an interesting text in which she described the story of the series of gouaches. But this short essay is omitted from the catalog of the exhibition, the museum only including it in its Autumn Bulletin of 1993. But even this story, corrected by Lanchner and almost hidden in the bulletin instead of the catalog, ignores the question of the refusal of the museum to exhibit and acquire the Constellations, limiting itself to recording the letter of Paulo Duarte to Philip L. Goodwin offering the gouaches, and to point out that the MoMA could not cope with the cost of shipping to New York 364. Among those who bought Constellations gouaches, but in the secondary market long after the exhibition, when they were already famous and expensive, and apart from 'Lallie' Barnes, only a collector, the couple formed by the Mr. and Mrs. Lee A. Ault had purchased a Miró oil painting before 1945 (Portrait of Ramón Sunyer, 1918, 364 Tone 1993, p.5 135 bought before 1940) and they bought another one in 1948 (Personages and Mountains 1936). Although to our knowledge, and as we shall see later, the true buyer of that tempera was not the Ault couple, but Hildegard Von Steinwehr. The couple formed by Jacques and Natasha Gelman, who acquired a Constellations gouache, had bought before that, but in the 1950s, at least two oil paintings by Joan Miró: Landscape 1927 and Two personnages 1935. They also acquired oil in 1987 Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona 1919. But it again happens that the purchase of the gouache –Toward the Rainbow, the one that Pierre gave to his lover and later wife Patricia Matta– took place in 1968, 23 years after the exhibition in New York . We see then that the buyers of the gouaches at the time of the exhibition of 1945 or immediately afterwards did not belong to the category of great collectors to whom Pierre Matisse usually sold, but to a new class of more modest collectors. In fact they are typical of the 40s, when the economic boom that produced Second World War brought a new upper middle class to the art world. The most accurate description of this new class of collectors was provided by James Thrall Soby in a famous article published in the prestigious Saturday Review of Literature in 1946, which began precisely by describing this new type of clients of art galleries: “A basic difference between the picture buyer and the collector is that one acquires a work of art for an empty wall space, the other buys for himself. In this country hundreds of people who thought themselves in the first category now find themselves in the second. Many Americans are today acquiring more pictures than they need for household decoration; many are becoming collectors, often despite themselves. Their purchases vary greatly in kind, number and price, but most of them are buying works by living American artists, one or two a year, at somewhere between $250 and $1,500 per item.” 365. This new type of collectors, which Soby describes as individuals with an income of between $ 7,500 and $ 25,000 per year, revolutionized the art world in the United States and greatly facilitated the development of its museums. The category has been studied in detail since the 40s in specialized journals such as Art News, and later by historians. Soby's reference to the fact that they were the ones who started buying works by living American artists leads us to another work by Deirdre Robson, dedicated precisely to the market of the so-called Abstract Expressionists in those years. Robson points out that in the second half of the 40s there were two million households in the United States with incomes between $ 5,000 and $ 10,000 per year, and a further 650,000 households with incomes over $ 10,000. Among the new early collectors of Abstract Expressionists, which has always been said to have been heavily influenced by Miró's Constellations, Robson quotes several buyers of Miró's gouaches, such as 'Lallie' Barnes and Dwight Ripley366. 365 366 Soby 1946, p.42 Robson 1988. pp. 215-221 136 7. The journey of the Constellations since 1945 In the following pages we will try to describe what was the fate of each of the gouaches of the series. The interest of doing so is on the one hand documentary, given that so far the chain of museums or collectors who have owned them, who are their current owners, what is their estimated value, etc. has not been published. Knowing who were the buyers also helps us to discern how they were perceived in the New York art scene in 1945, endorsing in our view the thesis we developed on the undervaluation of the series and its classification by Pierre Matisse and MoMA as ‘minors works for women’, which led to the museum's refusal to exhibit them. As we have pointed out in previous chapters, the only census published so far is the one made by Lilian Tone in 1993 for the catalog of Miró's centennial exhibition at MoMA. Tone, now curator at the New York museum, has explained to us that she was then a young student in practice fascinated by the Constellations, and apart from the catalog entries she made the aforementioned little essay about the gouaches' trip from Spain to the United States. Before Tone, Pierre Matisse had published a list of owners in the brief catalog of the exhibition in 1959 in which he launched the portfolio of pochoir reproductions, where he ignored the usual practice of not naming the owners of the works. The list was reproduced later by the editor of Yale French Studies at the end of an article by Professor Renée Riese Hubert, in a special issue of 1964367. The information coincides with that contained in the first North American edition of Jacques Dupin's monograph. To carry out the exercise today is also necessary because, as we have already pointed out, the official archives, both of the Pierre Matisse gallery and of the museums in which they have finally landed or where they have been exhibited on occasion, allude, when referring to the owners, to names that do not tell us anything about who the real customers were, because they often correspond to the husbands of the real buyers of the temperas. These women are in some cases extremely strong persons, with a singular track record and whose contribution to society has sometimes been obscured by the simple fact of being known by the name of their husbands. 7. The journey of the Constellations since 1945 367 Riese 1964, pp-52-59 137 We now proceed to a description of the investigation results we have been able to achieve, assuming that, in some cases, all the unknowns facts have not been cleared, especially as regards the current owners, who for the most part now wish to remain anonymous. The main museums of the world know who they are, but the information is confidential and under no circumstances will they make it public. In the compilation that follows, made in chronological order of the production of the temperas, we describe the title of the gouache in English and the original title in French that Miró wrote and dated by hand with a small drawing on the back. We then summarize the history that Lilian Tone gave us about its successive owners until 1993. Then we correct that information to explain who the real buyers were and what their profile was, continuing eventually the chain of owners since then. 1. Sunrise (Le Lever du soleil) Varengeville, January 21, 1940. Gouache and oil on paper. This piece was not sold in the exhibition of 1945, and according to Lilian Tone, the gouache was bought by Dwight Ripley before 1958, later going to Georges Bernier and, in 1965 to the 1993 owner, not named. Miró would have made a sketch for this tempera on December 7, 1938. It is a gouache (white) on watercolor (black) of 33 x 41 cm with characters very similar to the Constellations series. In November 2014 it was still on sale at the Andipa Gallery in London with the same title as that of the 1940 tempera. The title had been inscribed by Miró himself on the back of the paper (Joan Miró. / “Le lever du soleil”/7/XII/1938). 138 This gouache was thus one of the two bought by British linguist and botanist Harry Dwight Dillon Ripley, grandson of the founder of the Union Pacific Railroad and cousin of the ornithologist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Sidney Dillon Ripley. In 1943 he moved with his life partner Rupert Charles Barneby to New York, where he financed the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, in which he exhibited his drawings several times. The versatile Ripley, who spoke 15 languages, wrote in 1947 a poem in Catalan entitled En regardant Le Lever du Soleil de Joan Miró. The painter will return the detail dedicating him (with a good greeting to Dwight Ripley, affectionately, Miró) a drawing with colored wax pencils dated November 21, 1961 and made on letterhead from the Gladstone Hotel in New York. The drawing is preserved in the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, in the Dwight Ripley papers related to Joan Miró (Ref. 1827). Sunrise remained in 1958 in his property according to Matisse's listings. And it also appears in his hands in the list of Yale French Studies of 1963. The gouache was later purchased by Rosamond and Georges Bernier. Rosamond Rosenbaum, Peggy Riley when she married Lewis A. Riley Jr., retained the name Bernier after marrying in 1975 in her third marriage art critic John Russell, author of books on Pierre Matisse, Picasso and Miró. Peggy was an Jewish-American adventurer and journalist who lived in Mexico and then became editor of Vogue magazine, which sent her to Paris as chief correspondent in Europe. There she participated with second husband Georges in the adventure of L'Œil magazine, for which she interviewed Miró on several occasions, and founded in 1962 the art gallery of the same name. She became friends with many painters and artists, including Miró and Picasso, for whom she carried out a very important commission that led to the creation of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. For this intervention –to to track down the works of Picasso's youth in Barcelona– the journalist received in 1999 from the Spanish government the Lazo de Dama of the Order of Isabel la Católica. France was more generous with her, and made her Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. After her marriage to Russell, Rosamond returned to the United States, where she did until her death in 2016 extensive work as a lecturer, writer and art critic. Georges Bernier was a French journalist of Russian Jewish origin, friend of all the Surrealists, who went into exile in New York during the 139 war, becoming a dealer there. After returning to France, he directed L'Œil Paris magazine from 1955 to 1970. But Sunrise did not stay long in the hands of the Berniers, since in 1965 it was acquired by an American collector, not identified by Tone and who kept it until at least 1993. But we have found out who the mysterious collector was, since the tempera appeared in 2010 as a possession of the Toledo Museum of Art, from a donation dated in 1996. The collector who donated the gouache to the museum was Thomas T. Solley (1924-2006), grandson of Evan Frost Lilly, a member of the family that founded the pharmaceutical multinational Eli Lilly & Co. in 1876. Thomas served in the US Army during the Second World War, and when he returned he studied architecture. After working for ten years for Eli Lilly, in 1961 he created his own studio, while studying art history at Indiana University, obtaining a master's degree in 1966 and specializing in surrealism and modern art. Hence probably his purchase of the gouache. In 1971 he was appointed director of the Indiana University Art Museum. 2. The Escape Ladder (L'Échelle de l'évasion) Varengeville, January 31, 1940. Gouache, watercolor and ink on paper. According to the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery consulted by Lilian Tone, the gouache appeared as the property of Mrs. Helen Acheson in December 1957, and passed to MoMA in 1978. The first buyer was therefore Helen Scherer, who appears registered in the gallery with the name of her second husband, the banker George Acheson, who died in March 1957. This unparalleled collector is one of the main benefactors of the Museum of Modern Art of New York, which thanks to the bequest left in her name –Helen had been preparing with curator Dorothy C. Miller this bequest since the death of her husband– could immediately have this gouache (Acquisition No. 743.1978) to add to the one it already had since 1945 thanks to the bequest of Lillie Bliss, and some paintings of exceptional quality, such as Landscape, by Auguste Herbin; Girl at the Piano, by Jacques Villon, Girl with a Bow, by Marie Laurencin, or Four Bedouins with an Overloaded Camel, by Jean Dubuffet. Thanks to Helen's bequest, the museum was also able to acquire later the magnificent painting Hope II, by Gustav Klimt, Balthus's Girl with Red and Green Jacket; woodcuts by Kandinsky; Monument, sculpture by Joan Miró or Stack, by Donald Judd. 140 Helen Scherer had married in 1922 cardiologist Theodore Bame Barringer Jr of the New York Hospital. But the allopathic doctor died prematurely in 1927. The then widow of Barringer soon met a singular banker, also much older than her as her previous husband. It was George Acheson, who had started working when he was not yet 20 years old in one of the most important private banks of the time, Brown Brothers & Co in New York, where he spent almost three decades of his life, a part of which as representative in Paris, where he entered the artistic environment of the decade that preceded the First World War. In 1919, he joined the Fifth Avenue Bank, where the clients he had brought gave him to the position of Vice President two years later, and member of the board of directors in 1931. His knowledge of the French language made Pierre Matisse contact him as soon as he arrived in New York in 1925, making him the reference banker of the Valentine Dudensing gallery first and later also of Pierre's gallery, located a stone's throw from George's bank. The banker went along with Pierre on summers to Paris, and bought paintings directly from the dealers from whom the gallerist also acquired work, such as Leonce Rosenberg, Paul's brother. When he married Helen Scherer in July 1929, he did it in the mayor's office of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, on Rue Bonaparte, in the heart of the Latin Quarter and two steps from the main galleries and Picasso’s studio. Helen was the companion needed to turn the professional relationship between Pierre and George into a personal friendship, which the new Mrs. Acheson established with both Teeny Sattler and later with Patricia Kane. It was the Achesons, for example, who brought Marc Chagall, a newcomer as an exile to New York in 1941, to Pierre’s gallery, with which the Russian painter worked until his death. Helen continued her husband's hobby, personally bought this gouache and continued to buy works of art after George's death in 1957, many of them in the Pierre Matisse gallery, which was responsible for assessing Helen's bequest to MoMA upon her death. 3. People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails (Personnages dans la nuit guidés par les traces phosphorescentes des escargots) Varengeville, February 12, 1940. Gouache on paper (37.9 x 45.7 cm). According to Tone, it was acquired at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in February 1945 by New York lawyer Louis E. Stern, passing to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1963. Actually the buyer, or at least the inspiration for the purchase was his wife Irene Hudson, director of the Milch 141 Galleries in New York. Louis E. Stern was a Jewish lawyer, born in 1886 in Balta, in Soviet Bessarabia, and specialized in representing foreign companies in the United States. Married to the gallerist in 1932, the couple collected 19th and 20th century art until Louis's death in 1962. When Marc Chagall arrived in 1941 to New York without speaking English, George and Helen Acheson sent him to Stern, who spoke Russian and Yiddish as the painter. Louis and Irene became friends with Marc and Ida and acted as de facto representatives of the painter on numerous issues. Hence the significant amount of works of this painter in thier important collection, which was dispersed to the death of Stern between the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA in New York. People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails remained in September 1962 in the hands of the Stern Foundation, which in 1963 accepted its permanent exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, within the Louis E. Stern Collection. This work has been little seen outside of Philadelphia. Stern did not consent to its being exhibited at the Berggruen gallery in Paris or the New York gallery in 1959, and maintained a correspondence dispute with Pierre Matisse because of the excessive time the copying of the gouache in pochoir took. 4. Women on the Beach (Femmes sur la plage) Varengeville, February 15, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper (38.1 x 45.7 cm). According to Lilian Tone, this tempera was not sold and remained in the Pierre Matisse gallery until 1968, when it was acquired by the couple formed by Jacques and Natasha Gelman along with another gouache of the series: Toward the Rainbow. In reality, the buyer was Natasha, since in everything that refers to art it was her who decided and bought, and the couple’s 142 collection should indeed be called the Natasha Zahalkaha collection. Jacques Gelman was a film producer of Jewish origin born in St. Petersburg. His parents settled in France, where he began working as a photographer in film studios. In 1939 he fled to Mexico, where without getting a visa to the United States, he teamed up with Mario Moreno Cantinflas to produce his films. In December of that year he saw an attractive young woman reading a French newspaper on the terrace of a café. It was Natasha, A Jew born in Prostejov (Bohemia) and educated in Austria and Switzerland. She was fond of art and after getting married in 1941 she introduced Jacques to the Mexican artistic milieu, and especially to painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who made two portraits of Natasha. When Jacques Gelman died in 1986, Natasha continued to acquire works to ‘fill in gaps’ in her collection, acquiring new paintings by Miró, Picasso, Léger, Max Ernst and Dubuffet. It was also Natasha who organized the exhibition of her collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1990, and before passing away in 1998 she bequeathed her collection of European paintings, worth 300 million dollars to the Met. The gouache is exhibited since then in that museum as part of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (Accession Number: 1999.363.52) 143 5. Woman With Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars (Femme à la blonde aisselle coiffant sa chevelure à la lueur des étoiles) Varengeville, March 5, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper (37.9 x 45.8 cm). According to Tone, in the count of December 1958 it appears as acquired by Dwight Ripley (see Sunrise). It was later purchased by Mrs. Samuel S. White of Ardmore, Philadelphia, in whose possession it appears on the 1963 listing. The gouache then passed to E.V. Thaw & Co., Inc. in New York and, according to Tone, again returned to the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. In January 1966 it was acquired in the gallery by The Cleveland Museum of Art, which still owns it within its Contemporary Collection (ID Number: 1965.2). The museum, however, does not mention Pierre Matisse, referring instead to Thaw & Co. as seller. Nor does any of the 1965-1966 correspondence regarding this gouache appear in the archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery. The person who actually bought the gouache from Ripley was the painter Vera Roberta McEntire (1888-1966), a pupil of modernist painter Arthur Beecher Carles at the 144 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). Vera was the daughter of the prestigious lawyer Walter Francis McEntire, of St Louis, Missouri, descendant of one of the main families of Quakers that colonized Philadelphia in the 17th century. She was always linked to the world of art and hosted illustrious visitors, such as Henri Matisse, Man Ray and Jules Pascin. In 1915 she married Samuel Stockton White III (1876-1952) a millionaire heir to the S. White White Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia, the pioneer of artificial dentures in the United States. The only thing that interested Samuel was bodybuilding and sports. Traveling in Paris at the age of 25, his sculptural body had attracted the attention of Auguste Rodin, who used him as a model for the two versions of the statue The American Athlete, in 1901 and 1904. Samuel also posed for Rembrandt Bugatti, son of furniture and jewelery designer Carlo Bugatti and brother of car builder Ettore Bugatti. Back in the United States, he joined his father's company. Given the fortune of her husband, Vera introduced Samuel to the world of collecting and asked him to help her emulate John Quinn and Albert C. Barnes. In fact, Vera's first purchase was Braque's Basket of Fish (1910), acquired in the sale of the Quinn collection of 1926, in which Pierre Matisse made his first major operation. Upon the death of Vera, the gouache was excluded –probably by her heirs– from the donation to the Philadelphia Museum of Art of 300 works and objects from the couple’s collection, which included works by Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Braque and Brancusi. And it was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art. 6. Morning Star (L'étoile matinale) Varengeville, March 16, 1940. Tempera, gouache, egg, oil and pastel on paper. It was given by Miró to his wife Pilar Juncosa, who offered it on November 4, 1986 to the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona. 145 7. Wounded Personage (Personnage blessé) Varengeville, March 27, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Following Tone, according to a list of June 1958 it appears as acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Zeisler of Chicago, in whose possession it remained in 1963. Actually it is also a purchase by an exceptional woman. The real buyer was Claire Block, better known as Claire Zeisler (1902-1991) because of her second marriage, and was a great American plastic artist who created the textile sculptures and was a pupil of Alexander Archipenko. Married in 1921 –with only 18 years– to rich heir Harold Florsheim (Florsheim shoes), Claire bought works by Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Picasso and other European artists. After divorcing the shoemaker, Claire remarried in 1946 to Conan Doyle expert and writer Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler –unrelated to collector and MOMA board member Richard S. Zeisler. It was while being married to Ernst that Claire bought the gouache. The painting was later sold to gallerist Richard L. Feigen & Co. of 34 East 69th Street, New York, who later sold it to Galleria Galatea in Turin, which sold it to Count C. Cicogna of Milan. This last collector sold it to the Alex Reid & Lefevre gallery in London, which in 1979 sold it to a private collector in San Francisco. 146 8. Woman and Birds (Femme et oiseaux) Varengeville, April 13, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to the research carried out by Lilian Tone of MoMA in 1993 368, the painting was acquired at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1946 by Mr. and Mrs. Lee Addison Ault, of New Canaan, New York. The next owner, as early as 1948, was Mrs. George W. Helm, of East Hampton, New York, passing in April 1958 to Mrs. Rolf Tjeder of New York. The next buyers were, in 1964, Mr. and Mrs. Jan Mitchell, from New York, then going to the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Helm. It then went on to another unidentified private collection, until sold to the Thomas Ammann Fine Arts Gallery in Zurich, where it was acquired by Mrs. Gustavo Cisneros of Caracas, Venezuela in 1987. But we do not believe that the first gouache buyers were Lee Addison Ault and his wife Dorothy Perin Smith. Lee was a journalist from a family of entrepreneurs engaged in the dye industry (Ault & Wiborg Company). But he liked art and on his return from the Pacific War he founded The Quadrangle Press, which published luxurious monographs of painters. One of them was in 1948 the book by Clement Greenberg Joan Miró, with a preface by Ernst Hemingway. In fact, the American habit of not naming people when they belong to the female sex unnecessarily complicated the documentation. We have established that there were not so many changes of ownership of the painting. Because Mrs. George. W. Helm was none other than Hildegard Von Steinwehr Ault, older sister of Lee Addison Ault, who according to Matisse's records would have bought the gouache in 1946. In our understanding, what actually happened is that Lee Ault acquired the Constellation on behalf of of his sister – formally, and for some legal reason, possibly a divorce procedure. Hildegard was the daughter of Hildegard Von Steinwehr and Lee Brownell 368 Lanchner 1993 p. 417 147 Ault, heir to the dye firm. When her father died in 1918, at the age of 32, and Hildegard only 11, the two main factories of the company were sold to Europe’s CibaGeigy and Sandoz. The fortune that Hildegard made then increased when in 1928 his grandfather Levi A. Ault, founder of the company, sold the rest of the business for the sum of 14 million dollars (about $ 200 million today). Hildegard was then married to Buckner Ashby Wallingford, III, and it is as Mrs. Wallingford that Pierre Matisse had known her since 1932 as a collector and later a friend of the family. And the series continues: Mrs. Rolf Tjeder of New York, who owned the tempera in 1958 was none other than ineffable collector Hildegard, who had divorced and remarried. She also had works by Henri Matisse, Tanguy, Miró, Calder, Tamayo, Picasso, Dubuffet, etc., all acquired from Pierre Matisse. Hildegard died in 1968 and the gouache then passed to Michael Hardin Helm, son of Hildegard and her second husband George Washington Helm, Jr. As for Jan Mitchell, it seems evident that Tone was wrong and his acquisition of the painting was subsequent to the purchase by Michael Helm. Jan Mitchell was, like many art collectors and dealers, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Libau (now Liepaja) in Russian Latvia. Fled to the United States, he took over the prestigious New York restaurants Lüchow's and Longchamps. His marriage to art dealer Ellin Hobbins, also an Ashkenazi Jew fleeing Germany, made him interested in collecting. The purchase may have been made in 1967, when Mitchell sold his restaurants. But as his wife's collector interest was more focused on pre-Columbian objects, it is not surprising that in front of a good offer she got rid of the piece, in a typical action of concentration towards the core of the collection. The buyer in 1987 was Venezuela’s Patricia ('Patty') Phelps de Cisneros, daughter of ornithologists William H. Phelps, Jr (North American) and Kathleen Deery (Australian). In addition to ornithologists, the Phelps were dedicated to communication, founding in 1953 Radio Caracas Televisión network. In 1970, Cuban-born Diego Cisneros, owner of the competitor Venevisión channel, married his son Gustavo A. Cisneros Rendiles with Patricia, and while he was engaged in his father’s business empire, she has managed to build one of the largest collections Latin American Art in the world. Patricia belongs to MoMA’s Board of Trustees since 1992, to the Tate Modern Council, and to the Reina Sofía Museum Foundation in Madrid, and also maintains close ties with the Prado 148 Museum, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Berggruen Museum in Berlin, etc. But after holding the gouache for thirty years, Patricia also decided to sell. The transaction was handled by Sotheby’s, which auctioned it in its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 21 June 2017. Lot 45 Femme et Oiseaux had an estimated price tag of $ 30 million, which was thought to be too high in the art world, since the most recent sale of a Constellation only fetched $5.6m, but in the end it sold for 24,6 GBP or nearly $ 34 million) 9. Woman in the Night (Femme dans la nuit) Varengeville, April 27, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Tone, the gouache was acquired on January 20, 1945 by Alexina Matisse who sold it on an unspecified date to Liechtenstein's "World Arts Establishment" –perhaps a simple postbox in Vaduz– which later sold it to a private collector in the U.S. From there it went to the Matthiesen Fine Art Limited gallery of Duke Street, St. James's London, which sold it to the Maeght Gallery in Paris. The gallery then sold it to David Lloyd Kreeger of Washington, DC. In October 1976, it moved to the Richard L. Feigen & Co. gallery at 34 East 69th Street, New York, which sold it in the same month to Acquavella Galleries of 18 E 79th Street, next to Central Park. In 1978 it was sold to a gallery called Cofinearte in Switzerland. The following year it was acquired bt Art Advisory, S.A., to return on to Galerie Maeght in Paris, which sold it on June 16, 1980 to the Margulies family. Actually, Alexina ‘Teeny’ Sattler, Pierre's wife since 1929, did not acquire the gouache, but it was given to her by the gallerist. Teeny divorced Pierre in 1949 because of his infidelity with Patricia Kane, the wife of painter Roberto Matta, who had also received a Constellation as a gift. Teeny Sattler established herself after her 149 divorce as an art broker before marrying Marcel Duchamp in 1954. As for the subsequent transactions that Tone cites, they seem too many and go through some completely unknown galleries, which suggests a financial setup to hide operations to the treasury or money laundering. In any case, the work was still in the hands of Teeny in 1963 and finally fell in the hands of Miami Jewish property developer Martin Z. Margulies, within his Margulies Family Collection, the private one that he keeps in his luxurious apartment at Key Biscoyne, a private island in front of Miami, and not in the public one exhibited on the campus of Florida International University, known as the Warehouse Museum, a former industrial center of Miami. 10. Acrobatic Dancers (Danseuses acrobates) Varengeville, May 14, 1940. Watercolor on paper. Acquired in 1944, before being exhibited by the Pierre Matisse gallery, by Philip Goodwin, the architect through whom Miró tried to place the Constellations series at MoMA in New York in an operation we have discussed extensively in this book. It was part of the Goodwin Succession in February 1958 and that same year it went to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. 150 11. The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain (Le Chant du rossignol à minuit et la pluie matinale) Palma de Mallorca, September 4, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Lilian Tone's research for MoMA, it was acquired by Mrs. Herbert C. Morris, of Mount Airy, Philadelphia. It passed to Perls Galleries in New York in 1979, which would still have in its possession in 1993. The buyer was in fact Willavene Sober, a reputed collector whose paintings ended in good measure at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Pierre Matisse sent the gouache to Willavene on January 22, 1945, that is, before the exhibition was closed on the 19th of February, which indicates once again the crush felt by the collector for this work. Willavene was married to Herbert Cameron Morris, a modest egg seller who, with $ 23,000 from his wife's father, Edward K. Sober, founded the Tasty Baking confectionery in Boston in 1914. Willavene was involved in the business and personally gave the name to the new product that made the company's fortune: the Tastykake that is still selling today. Herbert was not involved in the collector activities of his wife, who acted on her own, made purchases in her own name and was a regular customer of Pierre Matisse, who sold her from 1935 to 1958 works by Miró, Tanguy, Matta, Chagall, Rouault, Laurencin and Siqueiros. She also had works by Degas, Pissarro and ToulouseLautrec in her collection. A part of this collection was sold at the Sotheby's auction Contemporary Art in May 1986, nine months after her death. In any case, according to the MoMA, the owner since 1979 would be the Perls Galleries of New York. But the Perls gallery, founded by the German Jews Klaus and Frank Perls in 1935, was closed in 1997. It could also be a MoMA error here, and that the gouache never actually left Willavene's family since the Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography published in 1998 by Helene E. Roberts, indicates that the gouache was is in the private collection of H. Cameron Morris Jr., of Osterville, Massachusetts, one of the two sons of Willavene. 151 12. On the 13th, the Ladder Brushed the Firmament (Le 13 l'échelle a frôlé le firmament) Palma de Mallorca, October 14, 1940. gouache and oil wash on paper. As Tone points out, it was acquired in January or February of 1945 by Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd of Washingtron D.C. And it remained in 1993 at the H. Gates Lloyd Collection. According to the archives of the gallery Pierre Matisse, the buyer of this gouache would have been Mary Wingate Lloyd (Mrs. Horatio Gates) 369. This seems to us a considerable error, derived from an identification mistak, since Mary Wingate Lloyd, a prestigious horticulturist and wife of banker Horatio Gates Lloyd, Jr., died in 1934. Actually the buyer was her daughter-in-law Eleanor Biddle 'Lallie 'Barnes (19061985), founder of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and another of the great collectors and patrons of twentieth-century art in the United States. Daughter of a prestigious lawyer and Republican politician of Philadelphia, John Hampton Barnes, she married in 1927 young banker Horatio Gates Lloyd, son of Mary Helen and Horatio Jr. The young financier was a partner of the bank Drexel Burnham Lambert and in 1950 he joined to the CIA, which he left in 1964 after holding the position of Deputy Director. Lallie's conversion to modern art came on a boat trip back from Europe in the late 1930s, when the couple coincided with James Johnson Sweeney, a friend of Horatio's since school. The MoMA curator, who was preparing books and exhibitions of Miró and Piet Mondrian Mondrian, convinced Lallie that she should abandon his impulse to collect post-impressionists and embrace the new art he and MoMA promoted. The first thing that the collector did was to get hold of a Mondrian, which hung up presiding over the dining room of her Linden mansion on Darby Road in Haverford, next to Philadelphia. 369 PMGA 117.13 Subseries: Lloyd, Mary Wingate [Mrs. Horatio Gates] 1938–1975 152 While her husband was involved in complex investment banking operations or administering American espionage, Lallie set out to explore the art world with the help of Sweeney and to collect on her own behalf and without her husband being involved in any operation. She bought works by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning when few knew them, and filled her house with Mondrians Mondrian, Brancusis, Klees and Calders. She bought from Pierre Matisse works by Braque, Matisse, Matta and Giacometti. Before acquiring the gouache On the 13th, the Ladder Brushed the Firmament, she had bought in 1941 Miró's 1939 painting Persons Magnetized by the Stars Walking on the Music of a Furrowed Landscape, work that she immediately lent for the MoMA exhibition that same year. Lallie was one of the first to buy Dubuffet in the United States. But she soon went on to buy works by American artists, such as Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Tony Caro and Sam Francis. Lallie died in 1985, when the gouache passed into the hands of her husband Horatio. After his death in November of 1993, and by express will of the collector, her life collection was divided and sold in auctions in benefit of her children Horatio, Wingate, Mary and Prudence and her 18 grandchildren. Sotheby's was responsible for dispersing the collection, in a famous auction held on May 4 and 5, 1994 in New York. Before dying, the collector had ceded some works to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, of which board she had been a member, and to other museums. The name of the current owner of this gouache is not public. Eleanor Biddle 'Lallie 'Barnes 153 13. Nocturne Palma de Mallorca, November 2, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to the research of Lilian Tone, laconically reflected in the catalog of the exhibition of 1993 370, the piece was acquired in 1945 by Stephen C. Clark of New York. In the list of May 1958, prior to being sent to Paris for reproduction, it was owned by Mrs. Cable Senior, also from New York. Tone goes on to indicate that it was auctioned by Sotheby's on March 23, 1983 (lot 52) passing afterwards to the owner at that time (1993) whom Tone does not identify, although we have managed to do so. Stephen Carlton Clark (1882-1960), first purchaser of gouache according to Lilian Tone, is a personality of the art world in the first half of the 20th century. Born in 1882 in Cooperstown, New York, he was the grandson of Edward Clark, who had founded the Singer Sewing Machine Company in 1851 371, with factories in the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Turkey, etc. But their interests went far beyond sewing machines. For example, his family was behind the Manhattan real estate boom at the beginning of the 20th century. A member of the MoMA Board of Trustees since its foundation in 1929, he became its Chairman since the inauguration of the new building in 1939, remaining in office until 1946. It was he who chose the architects who built the museum, and he was also the person who dismissed the director, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Stephen did not buy his first painting by a French artist until 1920, a Monet, and may have done so simply to imitate his brother Robert Sterling Clark, but over the years he built one of the main collections of art in the United States in the twentieth century. However, that collection, distributed today in different museums –mainly the Yale 370 Lanchner 1993, p. 419 See Fox Weber, Nicholas The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud, Alfred A. Knopf, Nueva York, 2007 371 154 University Art Gallery, the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York– never included the Nocturne gouache. This tempera was the only one of the 23 of the series that did not make the trip to Paris in 1958 and could not therefore be made in pochoir by Daniel Jacomet, and was thus left out of the Miró/Breton portfolio of 1959 .The incertitude surrounding this, the most original and difficult to admire Constellation, has led experts to confuse it with Morning Star. For example, JH Mathews, one of the leading experts in Surrealism, points out in his work Languages of Surrealism 372 that if Nocturne was not reproduced by Jacomet in 1958 it was because Miró had given it to his wife. This error is then repeated by other authors 373. No one has ever explained the absence in Paris of the gouache that had been bought by Stephen C. Clark, but in fact the name of the person who had bought it was not known until, 33 years after his death, Lilian Tone published it in her discreet note included in the catalog of the MoMA exhibition in 1993. The reason is that Pierre Matisse deliberately omitted it in his 1959 catalog, noting that “This gouache has not been reproduced in color: the original gouache which was included in the exhibition of 1945 was unavailable for reproduction”374. In addition, the listing of Yale French Studies of 1963, in which the gouache appears as property of Clark, had a very limited circulation. The detailed archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery include many documents about his client Stephen Clark, from Valentine Dudensing's 1927 letters on purchases, including one in which Valentine tells his partner Matisse that Clark had returned a Picasso “because of the total refusal of Mrs. Clark's to hang the work at her home” 375. But they do not include Miró's gouache among the pieces acquired by Clark. Although two entries in the folder about Stephen Clark of the gallery put Tone on the track. The first is a note of 1958, two years before the tycoon's death, indicating laconically: "Procedures so that Pierre Matisse can borrow Nocturne by Miró for the publication of the Constellations” 376. Tone certainly consulted the document and thus could indicate in the exhibition catalog that after Clark, who acquired it, the owner “In May 1958 (was) Mrs. Cable Senior of New York”. Thus Pierre Matisse had located the owner of the painting in his 1958 search, but was asked to keep the name secret and could not have it lent for reproduction in Paris and be included it in the celebrated portfolio. The owner had to have a very powerful reason to refuse to lend the gouache. It should be noted that this was Mattisse’s only failure. Despite covering all the shipping and insurance costs and offering the owners not only the prestige of several exhibitions for the gouaches and a copy of the portfolio with the reproductions with 372 Mathews, J. H., Languages of Surrealism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia MO, 1986, p. 82 373 See Pierce, Gillian B. Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum. Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York 2012, p. 185 374 Exhibition catalog Constellations by Joan Miró, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1959 p.3 375 PMGA 89.37 Correspondence, 1930 376 PMGA 113.21 Subseries: Clark, Stephen Carlton (1882–1960) 1940–1958 155 their name registered in it, Matisse could not recover Nocturne. A collector refused in a letter, but in the end the tempera traveled to Paris. The affair left perhaps a bad after taste in Pierre Matisse's, for although he keeps no trace of the sale of gouache to Stephen Clark, he kept in files indiscreet references to Mrs. Cable Senior in 1958 and, as we shall see later, another one in 1962 that links Nocturne to the collector. The person in charge of revealing the secret and explaining the mystery of the gouache, whether deliberately or simply by inadvertence, is Miró himself when he was more than eighty years old in a conversation with Georges Raillard, whom he had met a lot during his time as Director of the Institut Français de Barcelona between 1964 and 1969. According to Raillard, the talks took place between November and December 1975, plus an addition in May 1977. Miró does not explain that it is Nocturne, but it is evident that he refers to this gouache, because when Raillard tells him that he has always wondered why in the Bretón/Miró portfolio there were only 22, and not 23 gouaches, Miró responds: “Yes, it's a curious story. Pierre Matisse had sold one of the gouaches to a man who gave it to his mistress. If that had been known, he would have had problems. Only twenty-two were published so that the gift was not discovered.” 377 In short, crossing the information of the archives of the gallery, according to Miró the mogul Stephen Carlton Clark had in 1945 a lover for whom he bought the gouache, as others give a ring or a necklace. Lilian Tone strengthens this revelation from Miró to Raillard in her 1993 catalog, and establishes Clark's evident link with the gouache Nocturne378. But the matter remains there, without anyone having dug to establish the relationship between the question of the lover and the millionaire. Because Clark, unlike his brother Robert, was a man of unquestionable moral strength, whom no one would have imagined had lovers. Precisely for reasons of morality Stephen had with his brother Robert Sterling, a serious physical and legal confrontation. Robert, five years older than Stephen, was a globe-trotter who participated in the colonial adventures of President Teddy Roosevelt –which led him to intervene in the 1998 Spanish-American War in the Philippines and in the war against the Boxer rebellion in China in 1900-1901. But in 1910 the wealthy Robert had already settled in 377 378 Raillard 1998, p. 109 Tone 1993, p. 6 156 Paris and started buying Impressionist and modern art to decorate his mansion and please his companion, an actress of the Comédie Française named Francine Clary (her real name was Francine Juliette Modzelewska). In 1919 he married her, and when he tried to make her legal heir, he stumbled upon his brother Stephen, who ran the family businesses in Robert's absence, and who claimed that an illegitimate daughter of a tailor, who in her turn had an illegitimate daughter of a previous relationship, could not inherit the immense family fortune. Robert showed up in New York and the two brothers, unable to agree, engaged in a fist fight which was followed by a long legal dispute that Robert won and kept them separated and without any contact from 1923 until death. If the morally strict Stephen Clark had a mistress, this was one of the things that were kept in absolute secrecy. His distinguished wife Susan Vanderpoel Hun, descendant of the Dutch families Vanderpoel and Hun, arrived in New York in the seventeenth century, should never know, at least officially. The issue of the furtive purchase of the gouache –without any trace in the archives of the gallery– remained in the most absolute secrecy until 33 years after the death of Stephen, in which Tone reveals who had been the buyer of the gouache. We also know, thanks to the second of the entries in the archives of the Pierre Matisse gallery to which we referred earlier, that on February 2, 1962 a Miss. Mary Misson “asked the gallerist for an estimate of the value –for insurance purposes– of Nocturne” 379. We have not found any reference to the hidden life of Stephen Clark, we do not know anything about the mysterious Mrs. Cable Senior, and the only thing we have found out about Ms. Mary Misson is that there were many Missons in Cooperstown, some of whom worked directly for and with the Clarks. We also know that in October 1944, three months before the Constellations exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, a Miss Mary Misson was listed as the secretary of the museum's military program (MoMA Armed Services Program) in which Stephen (then Chairman of the Board) appeared as a member along with René D'Harnoncourt, James T. Soby and the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.380. But above all we have found out that those two female names have something in common and that in addition links them both to Stephen C. Clark, since upon the tycoon's death in September of 1960, Clark left in his will a legacy of $ 25,000 to Mrs. Susan Cable Senior and another one of the same amount to Mary-Katherine Misson. These are considerable amounts, equivalent to $ 200,000 in 2014, taking inflation into account. It is noteworthy that in his will, whose elements were published in great detail by the local newspaper of Cooperstown, The Otsego Farmer 381, legacies of various amounts appeared, up to a total of $ 11,675,000, more than half of which went to the local hospital. The institutions and individuals favored were identified (a cousin, president of the Committee of ..., etc.), except seven donations of $ 25,000 to ladies about whom only the name was indicated. 379 PMGA 19.19. Correspondence, 1960–1964 Press Release “Museum of Modern Art establishes Art Center for War Veterans”, MoMA New York 10.30.1944 381 The Otsego Farmer, Cooperstown, Nueva York, 09.29.1960, p. 3 380 157 The mystery about this gouache will cobntinue after the death of Stephen Clark. One might think that Misson had also been Clark's lover, and that they had maintained the relationship for a long time. Or that in reality she was the true recipient of the gouache, given the proximity between her work with Clark (October 1944) and the sale of the Constellation (January 1945). It could also happen that Mary-Katherine Misson acted in 1962 in her request of information to the Pierre Matisse Gallery on behalf of the Clark family, ascertaining the value of the painting to buy it from Susan Cable and thus prevent it being known that it had been acquired by Stephen for his lover. But this would not explain the important legacy that Misson received. In any case, what needed to be done to keep the secret was to hold the gouache for a while or sell it to someone who would commit to do the same, and then whitewash it in a public sale. And indeed, the seller waited more than 20 years, because it only went publicly on sale, and on the other side of the Atlantic, on March 23, 1983 at Sotheby's in London. The painting bore lot number 52 and was listed as an anonymous sale, that is, “owned by a distinguished collector”, who did not mind getting rid of it for a surprisingly small amount. The buyer of the gouache on that occasion, not identified by Tone, was collector Stanley Joseph Seeger Jr., an American heir who lived a dissipated life in Europe most of his life (including a period in the Canary Islands, where he settled in 1967 after the Colonels’coup d'etat in Greece). His fortune came from his mother, the imposing Helen Buchanan Seeger –in whose memory Stravinsky composed his last great work, the Requiem Canticles. Helen was the daughter of William Buchanan, a timber tycoon in South Arkansas and northern Louisiana... and oil in Texas. In 1979, Stanley inherited $ 50 million when his widowed father sold his grandfather's business, and the first thing he did was take his 25-year-old English lover, whom he had just met, and take him by private jet to Greece. Upon returning to London, he bought the house of millionaire Paul Getty in Surrey, Sutton Place, in which Henry VIII had his first sexual contact with Anne Boleyn. And from there on he started buying art. Seeger paid for Nocturne only $ 361,000 in 1983. And he had no problem selling it –along with Francis Bacon's Triptych Studies of the Human Body– at a special Sotheby's sale of his collection in May 2001: The eye of a collector: works from the collection of Stanley J. Seeger. The works were paraded around the world –Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris and Zurich– before the auction in New York. The Lot Nocturne, No. 41 of Sale No. 7647, was valued between 2.5 and 3 million dollars, and sold for $ 5,615,750, including expenses. Also featured in that sale, togegher with several works by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Dubuffet, Tapies, etc., Miró's 1927 oil painting Deux figures sous la lune, the same size as the gouache, which was sold for just $ 467,750. 158 The purchaser of the tempera in 2001, according to Sotheby's, was C. & M. Art of New York. Actually it was Robert Mnuchin, a banker, Goldman Sachs partner, who retired from finance in 1992 and created together with James Corcoran –a Santa Monica gallerist– an art gallery in his own home, a mansion located in 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan. The gallery was called C. & M. Arts, name that became L. & M. Arts when in 2005 Robert replaced Corcoran by the young and beautiful Dominique Lévy, former expert at Christie's. In 2012, when the two partners split up, Mnuchin joined another young beauty, Sukanya Rajaratnam, and the gallery was renamed the Mnuchin Gallery. The former banker bought the gouache no doubt for a client who wished to remain anonymous, as both he and his associate at the time were experts in discrete transactions, with clients such as hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, owner of Picasso's The dream , for which he paid 155 million dollars in 2013. Mnuchin does not have Nocturne for sale in his gallery, which does not even have Miró among the list of artists he sells, which includes Picasso, Matisse, Bacon etc. Nocturne was not lent to any exhibition until 1988, five years after its sale at Sotheby's. 14. The Poetess (La Poétesse) Palma de Mallorca, December 31, 1940. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Tone only indicates in the catalog of the exhibition that the owner in 1993, whom she does not identify, had acquired it from Pierre Matisse in 1946. We can however state that the buyers of this gouache, but also of the one entitled Awakening in the Early Morning were the couple formed by lawyer Ralph Frederick Colin (1900-1985) and Irene Georgia Talmey (1906-1994), in all likelihood at her initiative. Irene, best known in the art world as Georgia Talmey, was the daughter of hat dealer George Nathan Talmey and graduated in 1928 from the prestigious Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. This institution, which had since 1879 its own Museum of Art, with works by Degas, Corot, Courbet, Cézanne, Monet and Seurat, in addition to many North American artists, was one of the first to have a Chair of Art History. 159 As for her husband Ralph, he entered New York’s City College at the age of 13 to study law and for two years was the editor of the Columbia Law Review. Upon his graduation in 1921, he joined the firm Rosenman, Colin, Freund, Lewis & Cohen. His cultural interest was focused, before marrying Irene, on the theater, sharing with playwright and Nobel Literature Prize laureate Eugene O'Neill the direction of the Greenwich Village Theater, later to direct the Actor's Theater and the Broadway Theater Alliance. At age 24, he joined the Board of Directors of the Philiharmonic Society of New York. When Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was founded in 1928, Ralph Colin became its legal advisor, and served on its board of directors until 1969. But when in 1931 he married Irene, who was only 25 years old, Ralph's interest went to art. Since their wedding, the Colin-Talmeys began to collect, and in 1954 Ralph became part of the MoMA Board. But his most famous contribution to the art world was to found the Art Dealers Association of America in 1962. What led him to this was that the Internal Revenue Service asked Congress to abolish the law that made donations or legacies to museums tax-deductible. The legislation had allowed some magnates to earn millions by donating false but highly valued works to alleged museums that were really tax fraud machines. The fraudster donated a false work of art to a local museum and deducted from his taxes the amount declared, certified by an unscrupulous gallerist. It was a net gain. In order to avoid the elimination of the tariff reduction, which was of interest both to the main museums, such as the MoMA, legitimate galleries and to the wealthy good faith collectors, Colin federated the main dealers and launched a war to death against counterfeiting. In his campaign, for example, he personally identified as fake a Picasso painting deposited in the Bass Museum in Miami, founded in 1963 with the donation of 500 works, including fake El Greco, Frans Hals and Botticelli's, offered by collectors Johan and Johanna Bass, Austrian Jews fled to New York. Colin bet for the falsity of Picasso's painting despite of the fact that it was included in the Christian Zervos catalogue raisonné. Warned about the issue, the painter certified that Colin was right 382. Another anecdote told about Colin refers to his intervention in a lawsuit between Heinz Berggruen, and Peggy Guggenheim, who acquired from the German dealer an important work by Fernand Léger. After being sent to Venice, the collector began to complain about the price, asking that it be reduced, refusing to pay the agreed amount. Berggruen sought the help of his friend Ralph, who managed to block Peggy's accounts in New York, forcing her to pay. Ralph F. Colin died in 1985 and his wife Georgia Talmey survived him until November 1994. Unlike Awakening in the Early Morning, which was sold immediately after the death of her husband, Georgia wanted to keep this gouache. But when she passed away, her sons Ralph and Pamela immediately sold an important part of their collection through Christie's. At Auction No. 8154 (Important Modern Works of Art From The Collection of Mr. And Mrs. Ralph F. Colin) held in New York on Wednesday, May 10, 1995, The Poetess was sold for $ 4,732,500. And it is now in the hands of an unknown private collector. 382 Cummings, Paul Oral history interview with Ralph F. Colin, 08.15.1969, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 160 15. Awakening in the Early Morning (Le Réveil au petit jour) Palma de Mallorca, January 27, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Tone does not indicate in her 1993 contribution who was the buyer of this work, limiting herself to saying that until that date it had remained in possession of the 1946 buyer. But we can say that together with The Poetess, this gouache was acquired by Georgia Talmey and Ralph Fredrick Colin. After the death of the lawyer in 1985, and unlike the other gouache, Georgia put it on sale through the Acquavella Contemporary Art, 161 Inc. gallery, of 18 East 79th Street, New York. The gallery, which still exists, was founded by Nicholas Acquavella in 1921, specializing in works of the Italian Renaissance. But in 1960 William R. Acquavella joined the management of the company, and reoriented it towards art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, catapulting it to economic success. In 1984, when Ralph Colin died, William was the president of the Art Dealers Association of America, the group that Colin had created two decades before, and Georgia Talmey naturally turned to him to sell Awakening in the Early Morning. In 1990, after the death of Pierre Matisse, William partnered with Sotheby's to form Acquavella Modern Art and buy the art works of the Pierre Matisse Gallery warehouse for 143 million dollars. The stock contained some 2,300 works of art, including by Mirós, Chagalls, Giacomettis and Dubuffets. In 1993 the tempera was acquired by the Kimbell Art Foundation, rather specialized in works of art prior to the 19th century, but which in 1984 had decided to buy something from Miró. In that year it acquired the 1918 Portrait of Heriberto Casany, one of the works that Miró had sold to Belgian dealer René Gaffé in the 20s. Pierre Matisse bought it from the Belgian in 1937 and it was sold two years later to Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. An opportunity for Kimbell was presented in 1991: the couple formed by oil tycoon Perry Richardson Bass and Nancy Lee Muse decided to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary by donating one million dollars to each of a total of 50 institutions of all types. As Nancy was a native of Fort Worth, Texas, where the Kimbell Art Foundation is located, this institution was included in the list. With that million dollars, the foundation acquired the gouache in 1993. This 15th work of the Constellations series is now part of the permanent collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (reference APg 1993.05). Three years after buying from Acquavella Awakening in the Early Morning, the museum acquired a monumental Miró sculpture, Woman Addressing the Public, measuring 3.72 by 2.43 meters. 162 16. Toward the Rainbow (Vers l'arc-en-ciel) Palma de Mallorca, March 11, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. This gouache was not sold in the 1945 exhibition, and according to Tone, a 1951 list places it at that time in property of Patricia Matisse, passing in 1968 to the collection of Jacques and Natasha Gelman. Actually, Pierre had given the gouache to Patricia Kane Matta, the wife of painter Sebastián Matta, with whom Matisse had been having an affair for years before his divorce from Teeny Sattler in 1949. Pierre immediately married Patricia, and the fact that Tone cited the date of 1951 is because in that year an exhibition was held in which the gouache was exposed, for which a census of the owners was carried out. Patricia died in 1972, but before that she had returned the painting to the market, being acquired in 1968 by collector Natasha Zahalkaha, the wife of Jacques Gelman, to whom we have already referred when talking about the 4th gouache of the series Women on the Beach. Like this piece, Toward the Rainbow was part of the legacy left by Natasha to the Metropolitan Museum of New York upon her death in 1998. And there it is exhibited since then as part of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection (Accession Number: 1999.363.53). 163 17. Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird (Femmes encerclées par le vol d'un oiseau) Palma de Mallorca, April 26, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Tone, this gouache was acquired from Pierre Matisse by poet André Breton, apparently in the course of the 1945 exhibition (catalog number 16), who sold it later to the person Tone cites as 1993 owner, a private collector. In fact, the painting was acquired 383 by pianist Elisa Bindhoff (not Bindorff, as it is usually written in France), the Chilean that Breton had known in 1943 and for whom he had written months before one of his most successful book of poems, Arcane 17. The case of Elisa, known in the United States and in France as Elisa Breton or Elisa Caro, is another example of the errors induced by the habit or legal norm of attributing to women the name of their husbands. In the first place, there is a repeated typographical error, since the person André Breton married in August 1945 –that is, months after Elisa acquired the gouache– was not Elisa Caro, but Elisa Claro, the name she used since in 1928 she married in Buenos Aires Chilean politician Benjamin Claro Velasco. Her name was not Bindorff when she was single, but Bindhoff. For the rest, when she married Breton, she had been divorced for years from Claro, who had remarried in 1942 Mary Munizaga. 383 Hammond 2000, p. 72. 164 André Breton died in 1966, and from that moment Elisa Bindhoff tried to convert the apartment where the poet had lived since 1922 at number 42 on rue Fontaine, two steps from the Moulin-Rouge, into a museum to pay tribute to his memory. In 1988 a group of Surrealist survivors appealed to President François Mitterrand to ask the state for support for this initiative, which would lead to maintaining the 'ideal palace of surrealism'. The president visited the apartment, but promised nothing to Elisa, and did nothing to move the project forward. In view of the lack of funding, Elisa had to sell Miró's gouache discreetly before dying in the year 2000, because when the contents of the apartment were dispersed in 2003, for the benefit of Aube Elléouët, the daughter of Breton (and painter Jacqueline Lamba), the gouache does not appear listed. The auction held at Hôtel Drouot in Paris in several sessions in the month of April 2003, closed with sales of 46 million euros, including the 2.8 million paid for the Miró oil pàinting Le Piège (The Trap) (1924) but without the Constellation. The gouache was shown in the exhibition La Maison de Verre, André Breton, découvreur, initiateur, at the Musée de Cahors Henri-Martin between September 20 and December 29, 2014. The museum confirmed to us that the owner wanted to remain anonymous. 165 18. Women at the Border of a Lake Irradiated by the Passage of a Swan (Femmes au bord du lac à la surface irisée par le passage d'un cygne) Palma de Mallorca, May 14, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Tone, this work was acquired during the 1945 exhibition (catalog number 17) by Mrs. Stanley Resor, Greenwiich, Connecticut, and then passed to Helen Resor (future Mrs. Gabriel Hauge) and around 1953 to Ann Resor (future Mrs. James Laughlin), of Norfolk, Connecticut. In 1974 it was acquired by the 1993 owner, a private collector. The buyer of 1945 was in fact Helen Bayleff Lansdowne (1886-1964), married to Stanley Burnet Resor, an authentic self-made woman, genius of advertising in the 166 United States who was raised as the daughter of a single mother –her mother had the audacity, in 1890, of leaving her husband taking her children with her. Without university studies, Helen started to work at age 18 as a clerk in chemicals manufacturer Procter and Gamble, a giant of detergents, but she later moved to advertising. With her ability to interpret the wishes of women, which were responsible for most purchases of P & G products in stores and supermarkets, Helen became Vice President of the J. Walter Thompson Co. agency, where she controlled up to two-thirds of its accounts and created some of the most innovative advertising campaigns in history (for example, Pond's) 384 . Helen Bayleff was one of the leading suffragists of her time and fought tirelessly for women's rights, forcing her company and many others to hire female account executives. She was a client of Pierre Matisse from the beginning of the 30s and in her personal collection he had works by Miró, Picasso, Klee, Dali, Balthus and Vieira da Silva. The annotation of Lilian Tone in the sense that the gouache passed to Helen Resor may indicate that Helen Bayleff Lansdowne gave it to her daughter Helen, possibly because of her marriage to Gabriel Hauge in 1948. But then it passed to Ann Clark Resor, her third daughter, who in 1957 married poet James Laurence Laughlin. And from there to its current anonymous owner, unless there have been private sales, so common in the art world. 384 See Sutton, Denise H. Globalizing Ideal Beauty: Women, Advertising, and the Power of Marketing, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2012 167 19. The Migratory Bird (L'Oiseau-migrateur) Palma de Mallorca, May 26, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Tone indicates that it was acquired during or shortly after the 1945 exhibition (Catalog No. 18) by "Mr. and Mrs. William McKim, of Palm Beach, Florida, who sold it to its 1993 owner, a private collector, on a date not determined. The couple of buyers of the gouache in 1945 consisted of collectors Charlotte Bevans (1899-1977) and William (Bill) Lee McKim (18941977) founders of the Society of the Four Arts, a cultural and artistic association created in 1936 in rich Palm Beach, Florida. The McKims were very well connected with MoMA (through their friend Alfred H. Barr.) and the Met and left several works in legacy to museums. Charlotte was a seasoned collector and also bought art on her own, being a client for example of the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery. Charlotte’s collection was sold by Sotheby's in several 1979 auctions, such as the Estate Sale of May 17, 1979, in which the gallerist Richard L. Feigen acquired a drawing of Cezanne (Sous-bois) that the Mckims had purchased from Pierre Matisse and Valentine Dudensing during their association. Parts of their collection were also sold in another auction on October 19, 1979. Photo: 1950 Mr and Mrs Alfred Barr Jr, Mr and Mrs William Lee McKim 168 20. Ciphers and Constellations in Love With a Woman (Chiffres et constellations amoureux d'une femme) Palma de Mallorca, June 12, 1941. Gouache and ink on vellum paper. It was not sold during the 1945 exhibition (catalog number 19) nor in some years. According to Lilian Tone, in a 1957 listing it appears as property of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman, of New York. It was then offered by Mrs. Chapman to The Art Institute of Chicago, where it is currently exhibited. We are here again in a case of ‘usurpation of personality’ prompted by the imposition on wives to adopt their husband's name. The authentic buyer of the gouache was Elizabeth 'Bobsy' Fuller (1893-1980), one of the key figures in the history of modern art in Chicago. Bobsy had been sent to France by her parents after finishing high school and there she learned the language and studied fine arts and literature while residing at the residence for young ladies of Villa Dupont Street in Paris. Upon returning to the United States, she continued her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and participated in numerous feminist initiatives. In 1916 she married the sole heir of an Ohio steel fortune, Charles Barnett "Barney" Goodspeed. The family had founded of the Buckeye Malleable Iron Co., in which they were associated with the grandfather and great-grandfather of the Bush Presidents and also the Rockefellers. Bobsy made her suffragist activities compatible with other artistic ones. Thus, together with other women, she created the Arts Club of Chicago, which she presided after 1932. The 169 club aimed at raising awareness of new art trends and hosted one of Picasso's first exhibitions in the United States, as well as the first Miró exhibition in 1934. During the 1920s and 1930s, Bobsy and Barney maintained an active social life in Chicago, in the case of Bobsy promoting the visual arts and in Barney's, charity in favor of the Presbyterian church and the university. Elisabeth often traveled to France, where she became friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, writers and art collectors. There she personally met Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Duchamp, Dali and Derain and even recorded them in 16 mm films attending the lectures she gave in the French capital. And those she met in France were invited to visit Chicago, many of them staying at her home, like Stein and Toklas. In 1947 Barney Goodspeed died, and Bobsy donated to the Art Institute of Chicago the Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler by Picasso (1910, Zervos IIa.227) which was part of the first sale of goods confiscated from the gallerist during the First World War –for having German nationality– and that Elisabeth had bought in 1934. In 1950, Bobsy married another millionaire, in this case Gilbert Whipple Chapman, of New York, president of the Yale & Towne Manufacturing Company, that is, the locks. Since moving to New York, and without neglecting her close relationship with the Art Institute of Chicago, Bobsy Fuller –now as Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman but without any involvement of Gilbert– had close ties with MoMA. For example, she formed part of the organizing committee for the 30th Anniversary celebrations that David Rockefeller presided over. Upon her death in 1979, Bobsy left MoMA a bequest with which the museum acquired, among other items, a collection of lithographs by Picasso (The decomposition of the bull, 1945) to complete its collection. Besides this original gouache 385, the Art Institute of Chicago also has a complete portfolio of the 1959 edition, but not the one that corresponded to Bobsy Fuller for lending the original, since it was donated in 1975 by 'Mrs. Walter P. Paepcke' , that is, by 'Pussy' Nitze 386. The gouache has not traveled much since Bobsy Fuller gave it away in 1953 to the Art Institute – not after 1957, as Tone points out. Bobsy, Stein; Fanny Butcher & husband, Richard Bokum; Alice Roullier; Toklas; and Thornton Wilder 385 386 Art Institute of Chicago, Cat. No. 1953.338. Art Institute of Chicago, Cat. No. 1975.168.1 8. Forcing Matisse: the chimera of the exhibition in Paris (1945-1948) 170 21. The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers (Le Bel oiseau déchiffrant l'inconnu au couple d'amoureux) Montroig, July 23, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. This painting was acquired (through Lillie P. Bliss’ bequest) by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in January 1945, during the Pierre Matisse gallery exhibition (catalog number 20). Lizzie 'Lillie' Plummer Bliss (1864-1931) was one of the most important figures in the art world on the East Coast of the United States in the first half of the 20th century and the true 'mother' of the MoMA permanent collection. Born in 1864, daughter of Cornelius Newton Bliss, a Massachusetts wholesaler –and politician–, Lillie began collecting very early and was the main contributor of works for the famous exhibition of the Armory Show in New York in 1913, the first exhibition of modern art in the country. Lillie bought nonstop since the death of her father in 1911 works by Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Redon, Gauguin, Seurat and Daumier. Intimate friend of Abby Rockefeller, with whom she had founded in 1911 a women's club in New York, the birth of MoMA was due to the fact that the Metropolitan Museum refused to exhibit modern works, so in May 1929, Abigail Greene 'Abby' Aldrich –known as Abby Aldrich Rockefeller since her marriage to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.–, Lillie Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan and Anson Conger Goodyear met for lunch to create a new museum. Upon her death in 1931, and to the surprise of the museum, Lillie bequeathed her entire collection to MoMA. There were 150 works of art, including paintings by Picasso, Matisse, 171 Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Modigliani, and they constituted the basis on which the MoMA permanent collection was built when the museum had just been born. Lillie knew that she was going to die from cancer and had time to prepare her will, which included a masterly formula: she granted MoMA the possibility of selling one by one all the works of her collection –except two Cezanne and one Daumier– to acquire other pieces to complete or accompany the evolution of the art gallery. The only condition was that MoMa provided itself with a fund that would guarantee the permanence of the collection. The museum took three years to collect the one million dollars that would constitute the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest with which the Miró gouache was acquired in 1945. The Rockefellers contributed a third of the amount. The instrument invented by Lillie, allowed MoMA, for example, to acquire Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1939 through the previous sale of a Degas painting contributed by Lillie for $ 18,000 and another $ 10,000 that the legacy put into the operation. Or to acquire The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. The ‘daring ladies’, Lillie in the centre 172 22. The Rose Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and of Birds (Le Crépuscule rose caresse le sexe des femmes et des oiseaux) Montroig, August 14, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. According to Tone, this painting was acquired during the 1945 exhibition by Elizabeth L. Payne Card of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, who later sold it to its 1993 owner. To the confusion originated by the practice of attributing to women the name of their husbands, two typographical errors committed by Lilian Tone are added here. There is no Elizabeth L. Payne Card, and the acquirer was undoubtedly collector and great protector of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Elizabeth Mason Paine, also known as Elizabeth Metcalf, Elizabeth Card or her full name Elizabeth Mason Paine Metcalf Card (1896 1992), since at the death of her first husband in 1951 and after marrying Thomas Card, she retained the name of the first, also adding the second. Elizabeth Paine belonged to one of the most prominent families of Massachusetts, descendant of one of the 41 signatories of the Mayflower Compact or first statute of the pilgrims, signed on November 11, 1620 before descending ashore. In Europe, the Paine traced their genealogy to William the Conqueror and Charlemagne, while in the United States, Elizabeth descended directly from lawyer Robert Treat Paine, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence of the country, acting as Massachusetts representative. Her father was Robert Treat Paine the 2nd, great-great-grandson of the 173 previous Robert and distinguished art collector, already a buyer in the historic Armory Show of 1913 (International Exhibition of Modern Art). He was a client of the most prestigious dealers, like Georges Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg, Valentine Dudensing and Pierre Matisse himself, who sold him a Renoir in 1931, a Corot in 1933 and a Picasso in 1937. Elizabeth Paine was one of the main patrons of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to whom she gave fifteenth-century tapestries, drawings by ancient masters, French porcelain and paintings by French impressionists and postimpressionists, including Manet, Degas, van Gogh and Cezanne. Still in her twenties, Elizabeth married a man 33 years older than her, Thomas Newell Metcalf, discoverer and publisher of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan's 'father', in the popular weekly The All-Story Magazine he edited. And she managed to attract him to the art world that she had frequented with her father. Together they founded in 1936 the Boston Museum of Modern Art –now Institute of Contemporary Art– created at MoMA’s image, and that same year they welcomed Salvador and Gala Dalí, who came dressed as sharks to their Modern Art Ball, held to raise funds for the museum. In 1944 she placed her husband, who was already 72 years old, as director of the museum. After his death in 1944, Elizabeth remarried another Thomas, this time Card, which is why she appears with that name at the time of the purchase of the gouache. And she continued to collect and donate works, especially to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that his father sponsored. Although The Rose Dusk Caresses the Sex of Women and of Birds traveled to Paris to be reproduced by Jacomet, it was never lent for any exhibition until the one of the Centenary of the birth of Miró in the MoMA in 1993 (catalog number 177) or after this one. 23. The Passage of the Divine Bird (Le Passage de l'oiseau divin (El paso del pájaro divino) Montroig, September 12, 1941. Gouache and oil wash on paper. Tone explained that this painting was not sold at the 1945 exhibition, but Pierre Matisse subsequently sold it to Elizabeth Paepcke of Aspen, Colorado, who sold it in May 1974 to a private collector, its 1993 owner. The buyer was Elizabeth 'Pussy' Nitze (1902-1994), sister of Paul Nitze, secretary of the United States Navy and promoter of the arms race of the 70s and 80s with his false alarms about alleged Soviet weapons of mass destruction. Pussy was the daughter of an academic at the University of Chicago, where she studied fine arts and music. Despite having gone down in 174 history for having discovered in 1939 the ski slopes of Aspen, Colorado, and having made her rich husband Walter Paepcke invest millions in developing the station, including the creation of the Aspen Institute, in what Pussy Nitze focused was on 20th century art. She was responsible for the conversion of her husband's cardboard factory, the Container Corporation of America, into a design leader. For this she personally made the first plans, chose the designs and, after rejecting her husband's offer to become the company's art director, had an executive of the J. Walter Thomson advertising agency, where Helen Bayleff worked, appointed to the position. In any case, Pussy imposed the incorporation of European designs, especially of the German Bauhaus school, to all CCA advertising and hired artists such as Fernand Léger and Man Ray. Pussy was also an unparalleled collector, often buying in Pierre Matisse's gallery, of which she was a customer since 1937, without any intervention from her husband, and she collaborated assiduously with the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as helping to found the Museum of Contemporary Art of the city. The Toledo Museum of Art acquired the gouache in 1996 with money from the bequest of Edward Drummond Libbey, a glass magnate who had founded the museum in 1901. It did so shortly after receiving as a donation – from Thomas T. Solley– another gouache from the series: Sunrise. But it has not been able to expand the collection. Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke just after wedding in 1922 175 8. Forcing Matisse: the chimera of the exhibition in Paris (1945-1948) The effort of Joan Miró to make a great exhibition in Paris is not only a reaction to the failure of the MoMA exhibition, but is part of the strategy of his clan (Prats, Gomis, Sert) to put pressure on Pierre Matisse before negotiating a new, more remunerative contract. To be at the expense of what the New York dealer could do to relaunch the painter in the United States, was not the same as achieving an important success in Paris without his help. The aim was to demonstrate to the gallerist that Miró was in a position to relaunch his career in Europe regardless of what Matisse did. And that this should be reflected in the economic conditions of the new contract. The first reference we have found to the plan of Miró and his advisers Prats and Gomis to hold a large retrospective exhibition of his war work, is Miró's letter to Paulo Duarte of May 15, 1944, written when they still trust the MoMA exhibition with the Constellations, the ceramics and the Barcelona series will be carried out. In their exhultation, they foresee another one in Europe to cover all his war work, an exhibition that will never take place either: “Thus, with the paintings from1941 and 1942, jumping to the most recent works of 1944, you can do something great importance, leaving the parenthesis of what was done in 1943 and part of 1944, which since it is all very representative and numerous it makes it impossible to select it, we could leave everything for a subsequent large block exhibition” 387. The following mention we have found appears in the letter of March 26, 1945, also to Paulo Duarte, in which Miró shows his disappointment for not having received news of Pierre Matisse on the Constellations exhibition in January and thanks him for his efforts to try, without success, to organize the MoMA exhibition. He communicates laconically that “It is very possible that next winter he will make a great exhibition in Paris” 388. It seems that it is in that same month of March when the encounter that blows the spark ignitig the imagination of Miró occurs. To understand what it is about we draw from another unpublished letter that we have found 389. It is dated in Barcelona four weeks later, on April 22, 1945, and is addressed to Dr. Henri Laugier, at that time Director General of Cultural, Scientific and Technical Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is a reminder of Miró to Laugier that he had written to him several weeks ago through Philippe Rebeyrol: “I suppose that the letter that I entrusted to Mr. Rebeyrol, of the French Institute and Consulate some weeks ago, has been delivered to you. As I said, I am entirely at your disposal to organize an exhibition of my works in Paris, and I would also like to tell you how honored I feel for your proposal. I also told him that I have a lot of material to do it.” In short, the idea of the exhibition in France comes from the Institut Français in 387 Reus 2004, pp. 751-753 Reus 2004, pp. 764-765 389 Sold by Ketterer Kunst auction house in Sale No. 385 Rare Books, 11.21. 2011, Hamburg, Lot No. 755. 388 176 Barcelona, where they have suggested to the painter that he write directly to Laugier to indicate his interest and offer his full collaboration. But Laugier has not reacted. Without apparently having received confirmation that Laugier has launched the initiative, Miró does not hesitate to give Pierre Matisse detailed explanations of the plan. In his letter of May 13, 1945, and in order to rescue from his hands the Constellations gouaches not yet sold, Miró informs him that: “I have been proposed to make a great exhibition in Paris next winter of all the work done during the war. As it is not a simple artistic event, but a fact of a humanistic scope, to show the work done in circumstances in which they wanted, and still want in my country, to trample and murder the things that we most appreciate in the world, it is essential that the gouaches, lithographs and ceramics that you have exhibited are also shown in Paris. To send the material to Paris, it will be the French Embassy in Washington that will take care of everything and write to you in due time to formally ask you.” 390. As we can see, Miró shows the power of his contacts. This time it will be the Quai d'Orsay itself that will be in charge, says Miró, of carrying out the transfer by diplomatic bag. To show Matisse that it is not a bluff and see who he is dealing with now, he adds: “I hope this letter will reach you. If you wish to write me, do so by sending the letter to my name and address but by diplomatic pouch, either to the attention of the General Consul of France in Barcelona or through Dr. Laugier, to the Direction Générale des Rélations Culturelles, 16 rue Lord Byron Paris 8e”. He is telling his dealer that his main contact in Paris, and so close as to accede to act as mailbox for the painter's correspondence, is Henri Laugier himself, the man who had commissioned Raoul Dufy to paint 'La fée Électricité' for the International Exhibition of 1937; the one who in 1939 had been the first general director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the first scientific institution in France; the one who had organized during the war the expatriation of French scientists to the United States in cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation and that at the time Miró writes to Matisse had just been appointed head of the new Directorate General for Cultural Affairs on the Quai d'Orsay 391. And Laugier is not only a great personality of the new French administration, of sciences and culture, but he has been for twenty years the secret love of Marie Cuttoli, the businesswoman, gallerist and collector without whom you can not understand art in the France of the twentieth century. Intimate friend of Picasso, Juan Gris, Léger, Chagall, Dufy, Henri Laurens, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, etc. Miró says to whoever wants to hear him that Laugier is the initiator of the idea of exhibition. But the only reliable fact is that the idea comes after a Miró meeting with Rebeyrol, whom he identifies as an official of the French Institute of Barcelona. Miró provides more details of the plan in another letter of the same date, May 13, 1945 to Christian and Yvonne Zervos. The object is to request their collaboration in the plan to celebrate the great exhibition in Paris: “My friend Mr. Rebeyrol will go to see you in my name and will talk about the proposal that Dr. Laugier has made me to organize a large exhibition of my work done during the war next winter in Paris. To organize it, 390 PMGA 18.35 See Cremieux-Brilhac, Jean-Louis Henri Laugier en son siècle, Cahiers pour l’histoire de la recherche, CNRS Editions, Paris 1995 391 177 I will take the liberty of asking for your advice and your help. As I told you, I worked tremendously during this period. You had to take action in one way or another or shoot yourself in the head and I had no choice: I worked on entirely new aspects of my work –50 large lithographs, ceramics, sculptures. In total I have about 400 works more or less –drawings, watercolors, pastels, paintings– of all formats, from the smallest to the largest. As you can see, I have enough material to make a very important show” 392. A fully accelerated Miró will remind his New York dealer on June 18, 1945 of the plans of the great exhibition in Paris: “I have been officially offered to make a great exhibition of my works made during the war, which will take place in Paris next Autumn. I may now avail myself of the opportunity to send a batch of large canvases. In order to achieve the aim that all my work done during those years is represented, it will be essential to also exhibit some gouaches, lithographs and ceramics. The Embassy of France in the United States will be in charge of all this, and will cntact you to arrange the details. They will contact you from Washington” 393. In view of the absence of Dr. Laugier's reply to his letters of the end of March and of April 22 about the dream of a great exhibition, Miró writes on June 18, 1945 to the collector (and friend of Laugier) Marie Cuttoli : “During these years I have worked a lot, it was the only way not to sink and stay erect in the middle of this horrible tragedy. I hope you have seen the exhibition I did in New York at the beginning of the year. I suppose you will also be aware of the great exhibition that I will do in Paris next autumn” 394. The painter wants to remind the collector that he has work available and tell Laugier's lover that he hopes that he will go ahead with the plan of the exhibition. 1950s Picasso with Henri Laugier and Marie Cuttoli But evidently, in view of the alleged origin of the initiative, the question of the exhibition had to be discussed with the Quai d'Orsay. Within the Directorate of Cultural Affairs that manages the teaching of French abroad, Philippe Rebeyrol was the person Miró considered to be the messenger between him and Dr. Henri Laugier. Rebeyrol was then a young former soldier who escaped from a German prison in 1942, at the age of 25 and, recently graduated, was offered to become an assistant to Pierre Deffontaines, director of the French Institute of Barcelona, who was dismissed the following year by the Vichy authorities. Philippe then went to work –from an office in the British consulate– to send to 392 Reus 2004 pp.768-770 Reus 2004 pp.771-774 394 Reus 2004 pp.774-775 393 178 England French soldiers who crossed the Spanish border, coordinating the action in Algiers with the forces of General de Gaulle. Henri Laugier had arrived in the Algerian capital in 1943, back from the United States. Child friend Roland Barthes – for whom he will find a first job as a librarian at the French Institute in Bucharest– Rebeyrol was not the right person to organize the exhibition that Miró wanted. This official, who months after his contact with Miró was sent to Romania to organize the resumption of teaching of French and later became an ambassador in several countries, was a man of action and literature and was not a man of art or museums. But Miró did not know this when he met him during his Barcelona period of, and therefore he concentrated all his efforts to collaborate with him. The correspondence that follows demonstrates the difficulties involved in trying to make an exhibition with an organization that does not have among its powers to orchestrate them. On June 19, 1945, a day after writing to Marie Cuttoli, a desperate Miró addresses himself to Rebeyrol, who had sent him a letter on May 30: “I have reflected a lot on the exhibition of my works made during the war that should take place after the holidays. I believe that we must disregard the date that best suits me personally and that I must make an appearance in Paris as soon as possible. Even in the event that the important paintings that I am now working on are not finished, in my opinion we would have to sacrifice that rather than delay my exhibition” 395. Miró is nervous and wants the exhibition to be done by all means in the fall, only three months ahead. He tries in any case to convince his interlocutor that he has enough material for the showcase: “Otherwise, as you know, I now have enough material: Paintings, gouaches, watercolors, drawings, pastels, lithographs, ceramics and sculptures. In total some 400 pieces with which you can make an important exhibition. We had the intention of making a first shipment with the batch of large canvases together with the material of the French pavilion of the Barcelona Fair, but there have been difficulties that have prevented this”. Miró refers to the XII Barcelona International Trade Fair, which had just been inaugurated, and the difficulties probably had to do with the fact that the French pavilion at the fair was under the responsibility of the Minister of Economy and Finance René Pleven. He belonged to the Union démocratique et socialiste de la Résistance (UDSR), a left party to which Education Minister René Capitant also belonged and wchich was in strong opposition to the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) of right-wing Catholic Georges Bidault who headed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first provisional government of General de Gaulle after the liberation, in which all parties, including the communists, were represented. Miró's men also belonged to the cultural framework of the Quai d'Orsay, always viewed with suspicion by the Ministry of Education, in charge of museums, and by the Economy ministry, in charge of the trade fairs. Such ministerial confrontation, in addition to being common in all administrations it was in this case reinforced by a clear political antagonism. Capitant was not going to tolerate Bidault imposing a large exhibition in whose genesis his ministry had no role. And the officials of Pleven’s Ministry of the 395 Reus 2004, pp. 775-779 179 Economy of were not going to allow those of the Institut Français in Barcelona to smuggle works of art in the boxes of material coming from the fair. In view of the difficulties he has encountered in the management of the exhibition by the French Institute in Barcelona, Miró addresses himself Rebeyrol, who is back in Paris, entrusting him with the most technical questions and hoping that he will find the solution. The painter once again shows signs of impatience and lack of understanding of how an exhibition is made, since he seems to estimate that it is a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who will examine the art works to be presented and decide how to make the exhibition. He also asks the diplomat about technical issues of packing and shipping the material, which obviously is not among the competences of Rebeyrol, who in the best case should limit his actions to try to sell the exhibition to the Réunion des Musées Nationaux directed by communist Jean Cassou. It could be possible that for crafty Joan Prats, the Parisian exhibition was no more than a smokescreen through which to surreptitiously sneak out of Spain –and of New York– a significant amount of Miró's work under the protective mantle of the Quai d'Orsay and place it in Paris, where the first movements of restoration of the art market after the war are already taking place. We already saw that Miró stresses the importance of Rebeyrol having in Paris all the paintings, ceramics and sculptures: “For the exhibition, it will be necessary to make a choice naturally, but this selection I think it is imperative that it be done in Paris, where all the material in its entirety must, in my opinion, be sent. The same applies to framing, which in addition to facilitating packaging, will allow it to be done by the specialists who have always taken care of framing my works. As for the glass, in any case, what we could do is have it sent from Barcelona once the selection has been made and the framers have taken the exact dimensions”. The painter then takes care in his letter to Rebeyrol of underlining the importance of getting his New York gallerist send the Constellations to be part of the Paris exhibition: “Another important issue that needs to be addressed is to bring from New York as much as possible of what I exhibited in the Pierre Matisse gallery: gouaches 1940-1941; lithographs of 1944 and ceramics. It is of the highest importance that all my work done during the war be represented in this exhibition, without any omission, since it is not only an aesthetic fact but above all a human fact”. To understand how the operation has been organized, we must keep in mind that in the letter from Miró to Rebeyrol of the Quai d'Orsay, the painter says that “I keep Mr. Deffontaine (sic) and Mr. Matet informed of what I am writing and we will have to hope that everything will be arranged in the best way”. Miró refers to the director of the Institut Français in Barcelona Pierre Deffontaines and the deputy director of the center, philosopher Maurice Matet. Deffontaines was a prestigious geographer and with strong ties with Brazil, which makes us suppose that Miró has also made contact with him through Paulo Duarte. In 1939 he was appointed Director of the Institut Français in the Catalan capital, a post he retains until 1964, save the period 1943-1944 in which, having been dismissed by the Vichy authorities, he created a parallel and unofficial Institute. The people Prats and Miró entrust the management of their exhibition in Paris are officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a young diplomat, a 180 geographer and a philosopher. The result, as we shall see, is that the exhibition will never be held. But the painter is undeterred. Two months after writing to Rebeyrol and without having any reliable news yet, Miró continues to think that both he and Laugier are working actively on the project. In a letter to Pierre Loeb dated August 30, 1945, he repeats: “Monsieur Rebeyrol and Docteur Laugier want to do a big exhibition of my work in Paris soon, which I consider a great honor. I have already asked Zervos and Pierre Matisse –and now I ask you as well– to come to an agreement with our friends, since I want to stay out of this completely. Monsieur Rebeyrol will give you my perspective on the question” 396. When he sees Rebeyrol again in January 1946, during a visit of the diplomat to Barcelona before leaving for Bucharest, which we know of from a letter from the painter to Pierre Loeb on January 27, Miró continues to dream of the chimerical great exhibition of Paris, but still speaks of Rebeyrol, without saying at any time whether he has discussed the exhibition with Bernard Dorival, assistant curator of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, who visited him and would actually be with whom he would have to plan it. Miró believes he has established a very close relationship with Rebeyrol, although he should have tried to promote it with Jean Cassou's team. In any case, this is what Miró says to Loeb in his letter: “Mr. Rebeyrol will also tell you about my ideas for the exhibition of my works that should take place in Paris and the very great difficulties which I should necessarily confront now if I tried to ship all my work of these years. I have the clear impression that things here are going to change very soon and the difficulties that I face now are going to become facilities.” Miró referred to the package of small reforms with which the Franco regime tried to face the unfavorable perspective in which the defeat of the axis powers placed it in the world. In July 1945 a new government was formed. In September the fascist arm salute was abolished; in October the regime announced a pardon for crimes committed during the Civil War and a referendum law; and in March 1946 a new electoral law was passed. Miró knows that the preparation of the exhibition will take a long time, so he says to Pierre Loeb: “It will be necessary that this exhibition that we contemplate be presented very well, which requires time... I insist on telling you that this exhibition has to have a great impact. I insist on my idea of quality, in these moments you can not do anything that is mediocre, you have to invest yourself thoroughly and play hard. I doubt that a sufficiently spacious gallery could be found in Paris to exhibit all these works, many of which are very large. Speaking of the idea that things are going to change here, we have to think about the possibilities we will have then to find very large venues, that a private gallery could not offer us. In short, you have to take a big hit or limit yourself for the moment to make a small exhibition that simply marks my presence. In any case never never halftone or mediocre things.” And he offers his former gallerist the 'commercial side' of the exhibition 397. We can say again that Miró and his advisers Prats and Gomis have been wrong. Laugier, of whose real involvement in the project we have no proof whatsoever, was a 396 397 Rowell 1992 p.p. 197-198 Reus 2004 pp. 785-788 181 man turned abroad, whose mission at that time was to project French culture out of the country, not to bring foreign culture to France. In addition, Rebeyrol will disappear when he was appointed director of the French Institute of Bucharest in the course of 1946. For the idea of exhibition to come to fruition, the initiative had to be taken by communist hispanist Jean Cassou, friend of Picasso, who had just been named Head Curator of the National Museums of France and Director of the National Museum of Modern Art. Another even more bulky error of the Miró clan in Barcelona is to present to the Quai d'Orsay the planned Paris exhibition as an act of resistance. Miró tells Zervos in his letter of May 13 that he explained to Rebeyrol that the show had a humanistic character: “As I told Mr. Rebeyrol, this exhibition should not be considered as a simple artistic act, but as a fact of humanistic scope, because it is work done during this terrible period in which they wanted to deny all value of the spirit and annihilate everything that man considers as more precious and worthy in life”. In his presentation of the idea to Pierre Matisse in his letter of the same date, the painter goes even further, insisting that the purpose is “to show the work done in circumstances in which they wanted, and still want in my country, trample and murder the things we most appreciate in the world”. And he repeats the militant style in his letter of January 1946 to Pierre Loeb. Prats and his people understand undoubtedly that this militant, anti-fascist character is the one that should be adduced before the French Institute of Barcelona, whose prorepublican trajectory is well known. But it escapes them that since September 1944 the foreign minister, and therefore boss of Laugier and Rebeyrol, is Georges Bidault, a right-wing Catholic, visceral anti-Communist who did not see in the Franco regime an enemy, but an ally in the the crusade against communism he guessed was going to spread throughout the western world. In fact, Bidault was, since the liberation, the main defender of a thaw in relations with the Franco dictatorship as soon as the opportunity presented itself. When the very Catholic Robert Schuman, celebrated 'father of Europe' today in the process of beatification, reaches the presidency of the French government in November 1947, one of his main objectives is to reopen the border with Spain. To achieve this, his Foreign Minister Georges Bidault entrusts aristocrat and army man Pierre de Chevigné, who had been de Gaulle's military representative in Washington and is imbued with the anti-communist philosophy of the Truman administration, to begin discreet negotiations with the Spanish minister of Foreign Affairs Alberto Martín Artajo, negotiations that are launched on January 22, 1948 398. A month later the circulation of passengers and goods between the two countries was restored. A year later, when Bidault is president of the French government, with Schuman as foreign minister, an official report 'alerts' the government that the association of former Spanish resistance members “and the Spanish Communist Party are so closely linked that they can be confused. Their bosses 398 See Dulphy Anne, La politique espagnole de la france (1945-1955), Vingtième Siècle, revue d'histoire, Vol. 68 No. 1, Paris 2000 pp. 29-42. See also Martínez Lillo, Pedro Antonio La normalización de las relaciones diplomáticas hispano-francesas después de la IIª Guerra Mundial (septiembre de 1950 - enero de 1951), Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez Vol. 29 No. 3 , Madrid 1993 pp. 307-325 182 ... include the most significant names of communist militants, fully dependent from the Kominform in France” 399. The result is that on September 7, 1950, the government decreed the banning of the Communist Party of Spain in France and the arrest and deportation of its leaders. Only in mainland France 268 Spanish communist leaders are arrested, and in total 300 are expelled from the territory, 142 of them to Algeria and Corsica, 43 to the Soviet Union and the rest to Eastern Europe. A great favor to General Franco. Bidault would join in 1962 the extreme right organization OAS, and had to go into exile, and in 1972 participated in the creation of the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Education minister René Capitant, a leftist, was on the other hand the candidate managed to defeat Le Pen in the fight for a deputy seat in Paris between 1962 and 1968. In view of the background of Georges Bidault, it is not surprising that he did not show interest, or boycotted Miró's exhibition initiative that the painter and his environment present as an anti-Franco exhibition. In fact, in the archives of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, which keep the documentation not only of the exhibitions made, but also of the plans that were never came to fruition, there is no exhibition project by Miró in 1945, although there are other failed plans for exhibitions scheduled for that year, such as Salon de la Renaissance française; Henri le Sidaner; Retrospective de Prins; René Jean Clot; La France d'Outremer dans la guerre; Retrospective de peinture américaine and, most significantly, Œuvres d'artistes espagnols amis de la France. What seems to indicate that the plan did not even come to be formulated as a proposal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to that of National Education. In fact, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux –under the authority of antifascist René Capitant –only organized an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 (Amédée de la Patellière, peintures, 29 September to 10 November) and three in 1946: the famous Art et Résistance, organized by the Association of French Snipers and Partisans between February 15 and March 15 (which had to have all museum staff fully busy in the fall/winter of 1945); La tapisserie française du Moyen-Age à nos jours, from June to October and the Exposition internationale d'art moderne in November. The first Parisian exhibition of Miró in the postwar period took place in the modest Galerie Vendôme between March 27 and April 28, 1945, but what was exposed there were 23 works made before the war and that were in the market in the city. In November, Germaine Hugnet, the wife of surrealist poet and friend of Picasso Georges Hugnet, organized another one in La Peau de Chagrin gallery, but in this case it was only of graphic work. In short, the inadequate efforts of Miró and Joan Prats through the Quai d'Orsay will not bear any fruit, and the National Museums of France will not organize their first 399 See Denoyer, Aurélie L’opération Boléro-Paprika : origines et conséquences. Les réfugiés politiques espagnols : de l’expulsion à leur installation en RDA, en Résonances françaises de la guerre d'Espagne, Editions d'Albret, Nérac, France 2012, p.p. 295-312 9. Ultimatum to his dealers (1945) 183 retrospective of Joan Miró until 1962, and of course coordinated by Jean Cassou (Joan Miró, Musée National d'Art Moderne, June to November 1962). Meanwhile, Miró's entire presence in Paris from 1945 to that date was limited to individual or collective exhibitions in private galleries: Vendôme, Altarriba, Denise René and Jeanne Bucher in 1945; Charpentier and Lucien Reyman in 1946; Galerie du Luxembourg and Maeght in 1947; Nina Dausset and Maeght in 1948; Maeght in 1950, 1951, 1953 and 1956; Berggruen in 1958 and 1959; and finally Maeght in 1960 and 1961. 184 3rd PART: ECONOMIC SUCCESS AT SIXTY 9. Ultimatum to his dealers (1945) Faced with the failure of his strategy of 1941-44 to get other sales channels parallel to Matisse and to hold two major exhibitions of his war work in New York and Paris, and despite feeling undoubtedly irritated to find that despite of the sales success of the Constellations exhibition he has not seen in 1945 a penny, Miró will not be discouraged, but on the contrary, he will send a crack to the art market, threatening his dealers with retiring to the countryside in Montroig and stop marketing his work if they do not agree to invest in him in a serious and professional way and pay sums of money that have nothing to do with what he had been receiving until then. The ultimatum that he launches to his dealers has been forging in the years 1941-1944 but it breaks out in the summer of 1945. Miró had already warned Matisse in June 1944 of where his plans were going, of how he felt, but at that time he still believed that his strategy of bypassing him could be successful. The Constellations leave those days from Lisbon to New York and Matisse has not been informed by Miró, but the gallerist is already aware of the maneuver. That is why in his letter of June 17, perhaps to prepare him for what is coming, the painter announces that he is fully aware of the key role that his painting must play and that at the age of fifty-one he has to place a strong bet, to be or not to be. And he adds that it is therefore legitimate for him to contemplate things in an objective way. In short, what he conveys is that regardless of his relationships with his friends, there is only one way to see the situation, which is the one transmitted to him by the Prats, Gomis, Artigas clan in Barcelona. He wants to keep his works and not send them to Matisse, to bet heavily in order to finally achieve the status he believes to deserve.400. Miró does not go any further in this June 1944 letter. But eleven months later, the cup of his patience has been filled. His strategy of bypassing his gallerist has collapsed and he has no choice but to surrender to Matisse returning to the fold or pose an ultimatum: either the dealer accepts his conditions or the artist will stop selling his paintings, 400 PMGA 18.34. Russell 1999 p.251, Umland 1993 p. 336 & Reus 2004, p.753-755 185 retiring to live in the countryside. Miró announces in his letter of June 18, 1945 that he is willing to “bet everything for everything”: either he manages to live at 52 as Picasso, Braque or Matisse did at his age, or he manages to cancel his debts selling a building inherited from his mother and retiring to Montroig to work but without selling his work absolutely to anyone, so that it will go unnoticed. And he adds to make himself understood a phrase that summarizes his feeling of humiliation: “The mediocre life of a little man is forever ruled out by me” 401. Treating him like a 'little man' is over. He knows that Matisse is going to feel offended, because he continues to excuse himself from speaking to him in that tone, which he justifies by the hard existence he has led in recent years. And then he points out that he must now contemplate his life in a clear and courageous way and become worthy of his time. Miró no doubt feels that he finds himself at a crossroads not unlike the one he faced 25 years ago, when he decided to go to Paris. Then, when he told his friend Enric Ricart of his imperious desire to flee from “these dirty and stinking waters of Barcelona”, he had considered his age and his situation and the two possibilities that remained open to him, pointing out in a letter: “Meanwhile I am taking stock of the situation, as I force myself to do from time to time: A. I am 26 years old; B. Of the small capital that I earned as a clerk I only have 25 or 30 pesetas left (the capital was spent on paintings and a study); lately I have been forced to admit that my 'fortune' was running out and I asked, with great disgust on my part, that my mother give me some money. D. If I stay in Barcelona I do not see any other solution than to do any crap to be able to paint and earn the money I need”402. One of the aims of the letter of June 18, 1945 is to warn his dealer that, without a contract with him since 1940, he is going to place in Paris –and therefore in the market– a lot of large paintings, which constitutes the greatest fear of gallerist. But to get what he wants from Matisse, Miró has to apologize for his attempt to bypass him a year earlier. The painter had not yet given explanations, hiding behind an alleged failure of the postal service. In the letter of June 18, Miró goes somewhere further, but not without first reminding Matisse of what the gallerist owes to him: “On what you tells me about being the first European artist to have exhibited in America, this was an objective that I intended to achieve and that has been achieved. Your gallery can be proud to have been the first to have organized this exhibition, which is a major achievement. I was very upset by the fact that the letter referring to the sending of my works, which I entrusted to Duarte, was not delivered to you. My silence would have constituted a sin of discourtesy towards you. In your letter you talked about the gouaches that belonged to you. As I have already told you, I keep all our correspondence in a dossier, and it will therefore be very easy to specify exactly, when I see you, everything that concerns our affairs.” It is the first direct recognition that more than half of the Constellations legally belong to the gallerist. Miró, before raising the main theme that motivates his letter, sends a message of sympathy in relation to the mother and the stepsister of the gallerist: “We were very sorry to learn what happened to your mother and Marguerite and we are happy to 401 402 PMGA 18.35. Umland 1993 p. 337. Reus 2004 pp. 771-774 Epistolari 2009, p. 144 186 know at the same time that all ended well. I received a letter from your father, which seems to be doing well.” He refers here to the episode of April 1944, in which Henri Matisse's wife, Amélie, and the painter's daughter –not of his wife, but of model Caroline Joblau– were arrested by the Gestapo for participating in resistance activities. His wife spent six months in a German prison, while Marguerite, wife of critic and Matisse biographer Georges Duthuit, managed to escape from the train that was transporting her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and was hidden by the resistance until liberation. And then Miró turns to asking for money from Matisse: “As I find myself in an increasingly embarrassing economic situation because of the death of my mother, which forced us to divide her fortune between my sister and me, and on the other hand my expenses that increase significantly due to the increase in the cost of living with a wife and a daughter, I ask you to take all the necessary steps so that, from the money that you have cashed-in from the sale of my paintings, you send me regularly every month through telegraphic draft as much money as possible, as a family aid, and I speak of a minimum of $ 300 per month. It would be even better if you could send me a check by secure means. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm forced to do it.” Note that Miró does not have any contractual basis to ask the gallerist to send him money. He mentions money that has come from the sale of his paintings but in fact he has not sent any work since 1939. Thus Matisse does not have any of Miró's paintings after that date, except the Constellations. And he only has ten gouaches in deposit on which Miró can expect to receive a remuneration. Five of them had been sold, from which the gallerist could cashin between 2,000 and 2,500 dollars. But of the 50% of the total amount that would correspond to Miró and Prats, Matisse would have to deduct all shipping, insurance and tariff costs. In short, the dealer did not owe anything to Miró in June 1945. Portrait of Pierre Matisse by Balthus Miró tackles next the issue of his demand to renew the contract on entirely new bases: “As for what you tell me about not doing anything with other dealers before we see each other, I'm willing to do it, but always to the extent possible and taking into account the unforeseen events of life and the more or less cruel shocks that it may still reserve for me. Time passes and I no longer have the strength to content myself with stopping the blows. I must march on the basis of concrete facts because the phraseology of proposals and projects will not get me out of trouble”. Miró needs to place himself at the levell of the great masters of twentieth century painting, which in his case was not evident in 1945, even if he had read Clement Greenberg's review in The Nation the 187 previous year –eight months before he saw the Constellations– in which the critic pointed out: “Miró belongs among the living masters. He is the one new figure since the last war to have contributed importantly to the great painting tradition of our own day –that which runs from Cezanne through fauvism and cubism. During the last ten years his work has maintained a very high level with a consistency that neither Picasso nor Matisse has equalled. Painting as great as his trascends and fuses every particular emotion; it is as heroic or tragic as it is comic”403. Miró, who has already turned 52 years old, has a blind confidence in himself: “I am fully determined to bet everything for everything. Either I can live as the men of the previous generation did at my age –Picasso, Matisse, Braque– or I manage to find a way to cancel my debts, what I would achieve selling a property, and with what I would have left I would go to live in Montroig, where I would continue to work with the same passion and enthusiasm with which I have always worked –which constitutes a necessity for me and the reason for my existence– but completely ending all trade with anyone, so that no one will ever hear about me or my work. The mediocre life of a little man is now discarded from my conceptions. I'm sorry to speak to you in this tone, but life has been hard enough for me in recent years for me to act otherwise. I must contemplate my future in a clear and courageous way and be worthy of my time” 404 . Miró is saying that he prefers to stop marketing his work rather than continue to sell it at prices as ridiculous as those paid by the dealer in his last contract of 1939, which we recall was 320 dollars a month for the entirety of his work. The painter now points out that these economic conditions belong to the past and are far from what he expects to obtain as compensation for his work in 1945. Either Matisse agrees to substantially raise his offer, or Miró will stop selling. Pierre Matisse fits the blow and tries to buy time, answering Miró in two telegrams, the first undated telling him that he has received his letter and that he will be in Paris in August, and the second one dated August 10 indicating that “I have already done what is necessary”, asking for patience until they see themselves “in two weeks” and begging him “if it were possible” not to send any canvas to Paris, that is, to the supposedly great exhibition and, by extension, to the market. Matisse is nervous. He does not really know what's going on in Paris, what happened to Pierre Loeb, Louis Carré, and other dealers, but he does know that several American gallerists, like Sam Kootz, want to travel to Europe and start buying works by painters from the continent. He also knows that in the 1940s he has lost the quasi-monopoly he exercised over the painters of the European avant-garde in the United States. 'Peggy' Guggenheim, niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, had opened after marrying Max Ernst in 1941 the The Art of This Century gallery at 30 West 57th Street, practically next to his. Peggy arrived in New York after two decades in Europe and loaded with dozens of paintings bought – especially in her last weeks in Marseilles– to Jews like her who wanted to rush out of France. For his part, Paul Rosenberg had established another gallery, also in 1941, at 403 Greenberg, Clement Review of exhibitions of Joan Miró and Andre Masson. The Nation, Volume 158 No 21, 05.20.1944 Russell, p. 251 404 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp.771-774 188 79 East 57th Street, a few steps from Matisse. And among the European diaspora in New York anyone who had art or contacts to get it had become a dealer. Too much competition, thinks Pierre Matisse, who has realized that Miró's idea of a large exhibition in Paris in the autumn is a chimera and wants to avoid that suddenly appear in the Parisian market a good number of works of the painter on whom has no rights anymore. Besides, he has confidence in Miró's potential and does not want to let him go. Note that the gallerist's fear is justified. Miró, if he returned to settle in Paris, could use the Picasso method, which since the 1920s has left behind the unrewarding procedure of global sales of all his production to market his work selling little by little, small groups of paintings to dealers who knock on his door, like Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paul Rosenberg, Louis Carré or Pierre Loeb himself. Picasso is also the proof that American dealers can come to Europe to buy directly from painters, as the episode by Sam Kootz attests. But in Barcelona there are no buyers, and Miró does not have at that time the economic means to settle in Paris. His only income comes from the maternal inheritance, and the Spanish authorities do not allow the purchase of foreign currency. His only dealer in Paris is out of the game when he needs him imperatively, not only to have an outlet for his work in Europe, but also to frighten Matisse and obtain better conditions from the New York gallerist. Pierre Loeb's difficulties in recovering his gallery make things difficult for Miró too. What had happened to the dealer was that, affected by the Aryanization laws of occupied France, he had been forced to transfer his Galerie Pierre at number 2 of the rue des Beaux-Arts in 1941 to his colleague, the dealer Georges Aubry. As happened on many occasions –for example, the purchase of major printing press L'Union by lithographic printer Fernand Mourlot– in that forced arrangement there was a tacit agreement that provided for the return of the establishment when the circumstances that forced the transfer were over, this is, when the German occupation ended. But in 1944, upon the return of the Jewish art dealer from his exile in Cuba, Aubry refused to comply with the pact. Faced with the difficulty of recovering the gallery, Loeb shared his tribulations with Picasso and the painter, always solidarious with those persecuted by Nazism, called Aubry and announced laconically: “Pierre has returned and retakes the gallery.” And so it was done. In 1945, no gallerist could afford to contradict Picasso. 405. Miró gets news from Pierre Loeb a month after writing to Matisse, thanks to two letters from the gallerist dated July 27 and July 31, 1945, in which he asks for his collaboration to restore the prestige of Galerie Pierre he has just recovered. On August 30, before seeing Pierre Matisse (“I am expecting him any day”) Miró writes to Loeb to assure him of his good disposition: “You can absolutely count on me. I will be happy to lend whatever help I can to getting your old gallery started again; and I’m sure that you will manage very quickly”. First he offers all, but then the painter makes it clear that their relationship can not be the same as before the war: “You understand, 405 Information provided by Albert Loeb, son of Pierre, in interview dated 02.27.2009. Cited by Polack, Emmanuelle La Galerie Pierre au prisme des lois de Vichy, exhibition catalog L’Art en Guerre : France 1938-1947, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012. 189 of course, that I cannot tell you what my terms would be, since everything has been entirely disrupted and I have no idea what things are worth nowadays. The only thing I know for sure is that here, like everywhere else, prices have changed and gone up. As far as you and I are concerned, this should be a matter of mutual trust”. Before explaining what his economic situation is and what his conditions will be, Miró asks him to accept that a new epoch opens up in modern art in which he has an essential role to play: “For many years, I’ve known that you have an open mind and that I cannot ask you to get rid of all preconceived ideas on the subject of painting. I also know that you are not one of those people who thinks that painting stopped with our forebears; their discoveries were brilliant nd their works were wonderful, but the horizon always remains infinitely open, and we too are marching forward, always forward.” Once established what is the panorama that opens before him, Miró must explain to his former dealer why he can not accept a simple restoration of the status quo ante, and does so in terms similar to those used with Matisse: “These past years have been very hard for me. Luckily, the war ended when it did –just at the moment when I had spent the last money I had left, when I had nearly exhausted all my resources. During these tragic years, I have continued working every day, and this has helped me keep my balance –my work has kept me on my feet; otherwise I would have gone under; it would have been a catastrophe”. Next, Miró goes on to explain to Loeb what his aspirations are, warning him that he does it “in the same terms I used recently with Pierre Matisse”. It is about letting him know that he is negotiating with both of them and that he has posed the same scenario to both of them. He does so trying to get the message clearly expressed and separating the sentences into different paragraphs: “I am 52 years old, and I must look at things very seriously, in a clear and precise manner, with full awareness of the responsibilities I have in life –which I cannot avoid. There are only two paths available that are worthy of me: a) make a financial arrangement similar to the ones made by artists of my age during the last generation –there is no reason for it to be otherwise. b) sell some property to pay off my debts and with the money that is left retire to the country, where I would continue to work with the same passion and enthusiasm I have always worked with –which is my reason for living– but in total isolation and silence. What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman. Mediocrity does not have the right to exist”. As we can see, Miró has excluded in the letter to Loeb the comparison with Picasso, Braque or Matisse, which he possibly reconsidered as exaggerated in view of his works’ market value of the moment. In addition, he knows that Loeb has always worked with other painters, buying them directly, and that in a contract he can not pay the same as in the occasional purchase of work from the artist on the basis of an existing real demand. But he reinforces the message by adding that there is no excuse for him to be less than them. And again assumes that the recipient of the letter will feel 190 insulted: “Think about this, my friend. Perhaps my language is overly brutal –but times like this are not for beating around the bush.” Next, Miró goes on to inform Loeb about the old project of the exhibition in Paris, of which he does not speak now as an exhibition of the autumn but for which he asks for the gallerist's help and offers him a commercial participation: “Assuming it works out, we will try to arrange for you and Matisse to handle the commercial end –and for the name Gallerie Pierre, which has already had such an important history, to play a significant moral role”. And he ends by reiterating the importance of acting quickly, reminding him that in a few days he will see Pierre Matisse: “Allow me to tell you that I believe –from what I feel in the air– that this is the precise moment when my work should be launched in a truly serious way. Obviously you cannot commit yourself now, since you have not seen the work I have done during the past few years. As soon as I get back to Barcelona, I will take care of organizing my trip to Paris and sending all the material there. Pierre Matisse has cabled me, saying that he will come to see me soon. I am expecting him any day. He can talk to you about me and all the things I will be showing him, and you will have a better idea of what is involved. He also asked me to tell you how happy he will be to resume his old association with you” 406. Once launched the summer of 1945 defiance, Miró is waiting for the result, which in reality will be mitigated and will not crystallize in monetary terms for the overwhelmed Miró until 1948. As Margit Rowell points out, the economic situation of Miró in August from 1945 was “extremely precarious” 407. It is true that the following year he will achieve important concessions and a 'salary increase' from Matisse, but it will take a year to have that formally documented. With regard to cash, the first monthly transfers will not arrive until the beginning of 1947. And to receive a large sum ($ 17,500 in partial payment of his production from 1942 to 1946) Matisse does not commit to pay until the end of 1947, a timetable that, as we will see, he will not fulfill either. In addition, Pierre Loeb will not be in a position to respond to his demand, so that the improvement of his situation in the art market in Europe must wait four more years until he signs with Aimé Maeght in 1948 and the contract begins to produce economic results, which does not happen until the beginning of 1949. In the end, the great exhibition that Miró planned since 1944 in MoMA and later in Paris was reduced to the modest Maeght 1948 show of 39 rather small paintings and 49 ceramics. With his letters to Matisse and Loeb on June 18 and August 30, 1945, the painter has laid the foundations of what he understands should be their economic relationship from that moment on. He only has to wait, and theoretically little time, because he expects Matisse in Barcelona at the end of August or the first days of September and Loeb is aware of the situation and will undoubtedly meet Matisse before he comes to Spain. But a new setback shakes Miró at that moment. Pierre Matisse does not appear in Barcelona as he had announced in his telegram of August 10. In a letter sent by Miró from Montroig on September 14, 1945, the painter asks Matisse “How are the Paris friends going? I hope you have talked at length with Pierre 406 407 Rowell 1992, p.p. 197-198 Rowell 1992 p. 196 191 and Zervos.” On October 3 Miró wrote again to Matisse, this time a postcard sent from Barcelona, in which he said “I am awaiting your visit to guide me and make a decision about my future”. And again he wrote on October 8, 1945: “I have always promised to wait for you before making a decision, and that what I would most like would be to continue with you and with Pierre Löeb as in the past, on new bases naturally. I have received several offers from dealers, very serious, from Paris and New York and I have always responded politely non-committal saying that I still did not have any commercial project for the future” 408. Miró looks forward to Pierre Matisse as a godsend, but the dealer makes a risky decision. In Paris he sees his sister Marguerite, who upon hearing that Pierre has difficulty in getting money to the painter, suggests an extremely risky plan. From her time in the maquis she is used to organizing the crossing of borders, and she proposes her brother to cross the Spanish border illegally through Andorra taking the amount of money he needs hidden in a tooth paste tube. As Pierre Matisse will tell years later to Vogue journalist Rosamond Bernier 409, the dealer came into contact in the French town of Foix, near the Andorra border, with a doctor who in turn put him in contact with a specialized passeur. The dealer had introduced – according to his own statements– three thousand dollars in bills in a toothpaste tube and then crossed traversing the mountains and avoiding border controls. Once in Andorra, continuing with Matisse's story, he went to a hotel, where a detachment of gendarmes immediately appeared, interrogated and beat him, easily finding the tube of toothpaste. After laughing at him for using such an old trick, they took away the $ 3,000, which he said they kept, and escorted him to the French border. On October 23, Pierre wrote a letter to his father from Foix, where he awaited his appearance before a judge. He was then sent to the prison in Toulouse and finally released. As Matisse told Barnier, when he was finally able to see Miró, he told him what had happened. The painter gave him an intense look as if he thought he was crazy and told him that nobody would have thought of doing something like that. And it did not seem that the episode reported by the dealer placed Matisse in a more favorable position before the eyes of Miró, who avoided recalling the matter. For him, the way to get him money was a Matisse problem, and he probably found the dealer's story implausible. The truth is that it is hard to believe the story at face value. On the one hand, Matisse says that they left Foix one morning heading to the mountains until they reached the capital of the principality on foot. The problem is that Foix is 100 km away by road from Andorra la Vieja, 60 km in a straight line on the map, which means that even if they made part of the journey by car, in the Pyrenees Mountains it is a trip of several days which in October requires professional equipment. For the rest, his statement that the gendarmes kept the money contradicts his being accused of currency trading. And it also seems very difficult to get thirty hundred-dollar bills into a tube of toothpaste. This episode gives us a new proof of the fragility of the testimony of the elderly Miró, the main source of information for his Catalan biographers. According to his 408 PMGA 18.35. Reus 2004 pp. 783-784 The story, not revealed by Rosamond Bernier in her 1991 book, is however mentioned by her husband. See Russell 1999, pp. 253-255. 409 192 statements to Lluis Permanyer, the protagonist of the adventure would not have been Pierre Matisse, but his half sister Marguerite: “Once released ... Miró asked her if she was not crazy and reprimanded her for his imprudence” 410. In January 1946, Miró had not heard from Pierre Loeb for five months, and as we have seen he needed, to make sure that his strategy was going to work, having a European foot before committing himself to Matisse for the American foot. Taking advantage of a short trip to Barcelona by Philippe Rebeyrol, the painter send him a letter again insisting on his demands for a new commercial and artistic relationship. We also learned from this letter of January 27, 1946 that Bernard Dorival, deputy curator of the Musée National d'Art Moderne and therefore number two of Jean Cassou, has visited Miró in Barcelona. Miró informs Loeb that “at the beginning of next week I will have the opportunity to send to Paris –through unofficial channels– a recent painting that Dorival chose for the Perpignan museum” 411. Miró takes the opportunity to point out to Loeb that, in spite of not having any contract with him, he considers him as intermediary in that sale to the French State: “Be kind enough to go and see him (Dorival) and agree with him about the price; I fully authorize you to take the decisions you deem necessary and to set yourself the value of this painting. Also keep the money, which I will need when I arrive in Paris.” Miró at old age will pretend however before Permanyer that this great canvas (La Course de Taureaux, 114 x 144 cm) would have been given away and not sold to the French State 412. The painter will also tell Rosamond Bernier in 1980 that this work, the only one that French museums would have for decades, would have been a gift by him 413. Dupin, however, attributes to Jean Cassou the initiative of the purchase, which he presents as a favor done to the painter at a time when he had no buyers for his work. Although it is likely that finally the national museums of France never paid the price demanded by Loeb, because in the archives of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it is exposed today, it appears as “donation of the artist and Pierre Loeb” dated 1947 414. Pierre Loeb with Joan Miró in 1947 In his letter of January 27, Miró 410 Permanyer 2003, p. 143 Reus 2004 pp. 785-788 412 Permanyer 2003, p. 143 413 Bernier 1991. p.148 414 See Miro. La collection du centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, París 1999, p. XVIII ; Collection Art moderne, Musée national d'art moderne, París, 2006 p. 462 411 193 reminds Loeb that he expects to be treated with the dignity he deserves: “never half measures or mediocre things. You know me enough not to interpret what I just said as a feeling of personal vanity on my part”. In case the dealer takes his description as a way to belittle him and his gallery, Miró adds: “I also want to tell you once again that you should not see in all this a preconceived idea of going over your head. I absolutely want this exhibition to be organized by you, by Pierre Matisse and by Zervos and I want you to take care of the commercial side. I am also convinced that no second intention will bring us apart and that, speaking man to man, loyally and sincerely, any agreement will be possible.” And he also asks Loeb to pay bills for him: “I have attached an invoice from Argus de la Presse. Could you be kind enough to pay it on my behalf and put the amount in my account?” Loeb would not have done what Miró asked him for, since he asked Christian Zervos for the same favor three months later. A few days after writing to Loeb, Miró sent a new letter to Pierre Matisse on February 3, 1946 –replying to his letter of January 17 from Paris– in which after making a quick indirect reference to the episode in Andorra, he confirmed his satisfaction at the fact that the two gallerists have reached an agreement on the sharing of their contract with the painter. Frustrated by the inability of the Quai d'Orsay to bring the works destined for the Paris exhibition out of Spain, Miró also accepts that it is Matisse himself who will take care of it: “We agree, I will wait until your return around the 10th of March to go to Paris and I will not do anything about sending paintings. This, on the other hand, entails great difficulties and it is infinitely preferable that you personally come here to take care of it yourself, since you have much more experience than I in these things and you will know how to cope better.” 415. Miró sees himself closer than ever to the exit of the tunnel: his New York dealer has made a great effort, although failed, to bring him money; Matisse and Loeb have agreed; and he thinks he has managed to bypass both to organize a large retrospective in a major museum in Paris. What is missing now is to close the operation with the dealer who now has the economic capacity to lead the initiative and buy his war work; bringing the paintings out of Spain; receiving payment for that work and start collecting high monthly payments for future work. But for all this to happen, he needs Matisse to come to Barcelona to see the work and discuss prices and modalities of the new contract. That is why the painter is impatient about the gallerist's visit: “Be kind enough to keep me informed of the exact date of your next trip so that I can organize myself. I also ask you to send me catalogs of my paintings on a regular basis. The annoying thing is that I am forced to sell them at very low prices here”. It is surely a reference to the unfavorable exchange rate practiced at that time by the Franco regime. In fact, if Spanish exports could not take off at the time of the autarky (1939-1950) it was because Franco's exchange rate policy implied an overvaluation of the peseta for reasons of prestige. The national currency was then pegged to the British Pound, so for the few hundred dollars – the 'catalogs'– that Matisse would send him on account of the future contract, what Miró would receive in pesetas was a real misery. It was not until 1948 that the regime established a system of multiple exchange rates, which did not solve either the problems of the painter. From the reference to the low price of the catalogs we deduce that Miró's arrangement through Joaquim Gomis or Paco Sert to 415 PMGA 18.36. Reus 2004 pp. 788-790 194 exchange currencies on the black market does not work at that time. If Matisse comes, he can nevertheless provide him with dollar bills, which were valued in Barcelona far above the official price. As he had said a few days earlier to Pierre Loeb, Miró needs that personal encounter with his dealer to conclude an agreement: “I was pleased to learn that you have reached an agreement with Pierre regarding the resumption of commercial relations.... I must point out that I am very optimistic about this”. But things get complicated. In March, Miró wrote again to Matisse requesting news of his planned visit. Spring passes, summer arrives and Matisse still does not come. Who shows up in mid-July 1946 is not Pierre, but his wife and collaborator at the gallery Alexina (Teeny), sent by her husband to review in detail the painter's studio and assess the works of 1941-1945 deposited there. In the end it is good news for Miró, because with Teeny –whom he had met in Paris in the 20s when she was studying sculpture with Constantin Brâncusi in the Grande Chaumière school– relations are more personal. She can discuss professional issues with full competence, but the pricing and conditions rest for Pierre. Alexina will take to Matisse a complete vision of what Miró has in his studio and of the aspirations of the artist. Miró is over the moon and writes to Matisse on July 20, when Teeny leaves: “You cannot imagine, my dear Pierre, with what emotions I set eyes on Teeny again. It brought back the old times. She will tell you what happened, and what we talked about, but above all I felt, as I hope you also do, that if we work together on a human basis and in mutual understanding, it will be easy for us to collaborate. There are great obstacles to be surmounted, but I hope that we shall overcome them. We didn’t waste our time, I can assure you ! Allow me to offer you compliments of every sort in respect of Teeny, You have in Teeny an excellent partner, and one who is as intelligent as she is sensitive” 416. Although Pierre Matisse did not show up himself, because of the difficulty of obtaining a visa –Alexina Sattler was American and it was easier for her– the reunion had finally taken place. With the Andorran episode and the visit of Teeny, the painter had obtained the proofs he needed about the seriousness of Pierre's intentions. Miró was euphoric and tells his dealer that he is ready and full of energy for the time when the international art market returns to normal. And he informs him of his projects: making a cartoon film –Walt Disney had already produced Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi and was preparing a short film with Dalí– painting murals; make multiple sculptures; make tapestries; illustrate books, etc. With the information provided by Teeny, Pierre is in a position to make a final offer to Miró, as the painter had hoped for years. And the dealer acts quickly, making the painter a proposition he can not refuse. The result of years of negotiations, of tug-ofwar between the painter and the gallerist is reflected in the contract offer signed by Pierre Matisse in Paris on July 25 and by Miró in Barcelona five days later, on July 30, 1946 417. 416 PMGA 18.36. Russell 1999, p. 255 Letter/contract proposal from P. Matisse to Miró dated 07. 25.1946. PMGA 18.36. Reus 2004, p.p. 790-797. 417 195 As we will see, in this agreement, which takes the form of a letter-final proposal by Matisse that Miró accepts and signs without discussion, all pending issues that the painter discussed with Teeny are tackled. The gallerist adopts a serious business tone, announcing that as a follow-up to his wife's visit to Barcelona, and after a thorough examination of the lists of works and photographs that she has taken with her, he has made a final decision, in the form of a firm but non-negotiable offer to purchase of all the paintings, gouaches, watercolors, drawings and sculptures that constitute his war work (1942-1946). The dealer begins by indicating the works that he will cede to the painter, in order to satisfy his desire to constitute a work reserve. From 1946, he leaves an oil painting of 146 by 114 cm, another of 65 by 54 and another of 25 by 25 cm, as well as two gouaches and copies numbered 4-8 of eight sculptures in progress. But he reminds him that he should send to New York two paintings of 146 by 114, one of 145 by 22, one of 106 by 44 and another of 65 by 51 cm, as well as numbers 1-2-3 of the sculptures not yet finished. He adds that to compensate that he is only going to leave him a small number of paintings from 1944, he has decided to give him a total of six large canvases of 1945 of a size between 146 by 114 and 195 by 130 cm, together with a gouache of 100 by 11 cm and three watercolors between 21 by 18 and 45 by 20 cm. But he adds that Miro must send two gouaches of 100 by 11 cm, as well as seven gouaches on canvas between 86 by 10 cm and 49 by 25 cm, all of that year. From 1944, year of great production of the painter Matisse only leaves him a painting of 227 by 20 and three small ones of between 22 by 16 and 35 by 27 cm, along with three paintings on fiber cement difficult to transport, fifteen gouaches on canvas and the Barcelona series of 250 lithographs that were sent with the Constellations –Matisse has not sold a single one. From 1943 he only left Miró three pieces, from 1942 17 works and from 1935 two. But let's see how much money Miró was supposed to receive: for all the works that Teeny has seen in the Barcelona study, including those that, rolled up, she has personally taken with her –it is understood that they date from 1940 onwards since those produced until the end of that year legally belong to him– Matisse offers Miró an amount of thirty-five thousand dollars net for him, the equivalent of about 425,000 $ of 2016 taking into account the accumulated inflation in the last seven decades. It was a quantity that Miró had not seen in his life and that turns him green with envy, to the point of accepting the gallerist's offer without arguing. Although the money will take time to arrive, since Matisse offers to pay a first half a year and a half later (in 1947) and the second half even later (in the course of 1948). To see the first peseta, Miró will still have to wait six months, and much more to receive the promised amounts, because he never ceased to have difficulties to receive the remittances. The troubles he went through to receive Matisse's payments are documented in Miró's letters to his informal 'representative' in the US, Josep Lluis Sert, for example, on 07.12.48: “He had to have sent me this money for a while now. given, but he didn’t do it... Be exacting, because even though he might currently be in crisis, I do not care, it compensates for all for the time when things were going well for him” 418. Or the one of 08.15. 48, in which he confirms that has not received any money yet: “In Paris I agreed with Pierre in that as 418 Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p. 113 196 soon as he arrived to N.Y. he would give you the pending catalogs ... If he has not yet done so, please I ask you not to stop insisting, because I'm not taking more nonsense” 419 . But the painter has managed to raise his monthly emolument from the few hundred dollars that he was paid –or not– in his previous contract up to the 1,250 dollars a month that Matisse now offers (about $ 15,250 in 2014) for three quarters of his production. When Miró begins to see real money arrive, as he had never seen before, he takes the necessary measures to be able to benefit again from the black market exchange rate. In February 1948 he passed through Geneva on his trip to Paris and informed his bank that he had ordered Pierre Matisse to send him half of his monthly stipend there. In New York, and with the help of Josep Lluis Sert, he opens a new checking account. He did not trust the one he had until then, opened by Pierre Matisse, and in which he was supposed to deposit the money. Now Sert will be responsible for collecting the cash from the gallerist and depositing the amounts himself in the bank, informing immediately his Barcelona brother, who will be in charge of communicating it to Miró. And the painter agrees with the architect a new communication code for sending black money through informal channels. The code is based on the one he already had with Pierre Matisse, that is, when Miró asked for a catalog, this meant that Sert had to send him a hundred dollars. From 1948, the painter may request catalogs, but also engravings, each equivalent to one thousand dollars 420. The system began to roll quickly and successfully for Miró, especially since Aimé Maeght enters the scene. On October 14, 1948 Miró writes to Sert: “Before leaving Barcelona I received your cable announcing that you had received 3 engravings and 5 catalogs for your office. Pierre has sent me a cable confirming it and announcing that by the 12th of this month he will send you the rest of the order (I suppose there will be 1 engraving and 5 catalogs) that I ask you to claim from him”421. Evidently he is not talking about engravings, but about collecting $ 5,000 in two installments from Pierre Matisse, money that Sert will transform through his brother into many more pesetas than the official exchange would provide. The fact that Pierre Matisse only offers to acquire three quarters of Miró's production does not indicate that he wants to share the production of the Spaniard with another gallerist, but that he knows that Miró will always want to keep production, theoretically to feed official exhibitions without depending on the always problematic shipments of canvases from New York, which Matisse has always obstructed. But Matisse takes precautions and imposes strict control of Miró's work, noting that the $ 1,250 stipend will only be paid “for each month spent in his studio doing a regular job”, thus discounting the time the painter spends on trips or making decorations or other commissions. As an example of the distribution proposed, he indicates that sculptures will be limited from now on to eight copies, of which the numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 correspond to him. Copies 4 and 8 –the ugliest numbers–will be for Miró, who will be free to sell them at prices agreed between the two. 419 Juncosa, , Patricia 2008, p. 117 Letter from Miró to Sert of 03.02.1948. Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p.p. 100-103 421 Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p. 121. 420 197 It is important to note that Matisse's offer –which Miró finds very generous in view of his economic misfortune– is valid for a period of two years starting January 1947 with the option of renewing for another two years. This means that he only agrees to pay him some 15,000 dollars a year for two years. That is the bait he offers the Spaniard to accept to sell almost all of his production of previous years for the equivalent of two years of production. Obviously, it is a matter of seizing the spoils of the painter's war work with the lure of a fixed income of a level that he had not seen in his life. In addition, the dealer, fed up with the ill-fated influence of the painter's friends, who had pushed him to try to bypass him in 1944, explicitly forbade Miró in the contract to discuss the new proposal with Prats and Gomis. To understand what the operation meant for Pierre Matisse, it is enough to keep track of one of the paintings he acquired then. For example, the canvas titled Woman dreaming of escape (Femme rêvant de l'évasion) 422, dated on theback 1.2.1945, 146 by 114 cm, was shown to the public for the first time at the Joan Miró exhibition, held at the New York gallery from May 13 to June 13, 1947, in which catalog it was reproduced. But Matisse took time to sell it, so it continued in the gallery stores until it was acquired in 1964 by the couple formed by Miriam Gottesman, daughter of paper and banking magnate Samuel Gottesman and Ira David Wallach, who after marrying Miriam entered the company of his father-in-law, Gottesman & Company, which he would preside until his death. Well, after the death of Miriam in 2012, this work was sold at the Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on February 5, 2013 for the coquettish sum of 8,441,250 pounds sterling (13 million dollars). Besides, Matisse also imposes more conditions on the painter: if he wants to make engravings, he must reserve three-fourths of the –numerous– artist copies (épreuves d'artiste). Miró will not be able to make more than one pochoir a year, in short editions and with a dry stamp to avoid that they can pass for original work. The gallerist himself will skip this rule in the future, since he will edit Miró's pochoirs in his exhibition catalogs, that he will sell at a good price. Another condition is that apart from not being paid for the time spent traveling or making commissions, he will take a 30% commission when they come through the gallerist, a percentage that will drop to 10% if Matisse had not intervened. The painter must in any case consult him “before discussing or signing any proposal”. As for the work that the gallerist leaves with the painter, both from his war work and later, Matisse knows that the Spaniard will at some point want to sell on his own paintings to collectors with whom he has established contact and expressly forbids any sales in the contract. If Miró wanted to sell something anyway, he must grant his dealer a right of first refusal on these works for the entire duration of the contract. If the 1946 contract with Pierre Matisse provides Miró, for the first time in his life, enough income to have the comfortable lifestyle he wants, we can say without fear of making mistakes that the real liberation of Miró, the true leap to economic success, only comes from the hand of Aimé Maeght, with whom he signs in 1948. In his 422 Dupin, Jacques & Lelong-Mainaud, Ariane Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 2001, vol. III, No. 744, p. 68. Not to be confused with the painting of the same title, painted 18 days later, sized 130 x 162 cm, Fundación Miró, Barcelona. 198 relationship with dealers, Miró did not stop suffering until well past his 50 years of age the fate of the young painters, the same that Picasso had suffered until his twenty-fifth anniversary. The dealers' technique was well shot. From the outset you have to have a base capital to build a stock of paintings that you do not need to sell immediately. You need to identify young painters with potential and buy them the maximum possible of production at the lowest possible price. And you have to sell with a dropper, which is not difficult if you put a high price of paintings of painters whose only credential is to have been sponsored by the gallerist. Collectors who buy from the beginning will be guided both by their personal taste and by relying on the advice of their investment advisor, the dealer. In parallel, and as the painter becomes renowned, you have to lend paintings from your stock for exhibitions in public museums. The message to the painter is always the same: “You have to persevere and you will see that over time the value of your paintings will rise and I will be able to pay you more, but now you see that nothing is sold. In the meantime, I'm killing myself to get museums expose your œuvre.” In this way, and especially if there is an exclusivity contract, the vast majority of painters' work is accumulated in the hands of their dealers, who acquired them for next to nothing and sell them when the painters are older and the works reach very high prices in the market. Picasso managed to avoid that trap. Given his early success, the Spaniard had a non conflictive relationship with dealers. He could control and dominate them because the demand for his paintings was always greater than the number of works he was willing to sell. When he arrived in Paris at the age of 19, and after selling drawings to merchant Eugène Soulié, his first dealer was Pere Mañach, but two years later, in 1902, he was already exhibiting in the gallery of the Alsatian Jewess Berthe Weill, the discoverer of Matisse. At 27, Picasso is already selling to Weill, Vollard and DanielHenry Kahnweiler. And in 1918, at the age of 37, he concluded an agreement with Jews Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein to represent him all over the world. Picasso had met Kahnweiler in 1907 and had signed his first contract with him five years later, precisely because he offered him 1,000 francs –some $ 4,560 in 2016– for a painting of 81 by 65 cm, far more than what Vollard paid him. But first world war brought the first conflict: the dealer has to go into exile, the stock of his gallery is confiscated –and sold in auction– and what is worse, he owed then 20,000 francs to Picasso. It is not until Kahnweiler reimburses the sum to the painter in 1923 that he agrees to give him some business, but only the commercialization of lithographs. Rosenberg, for his part, had promised to buy him a constant volume of works and could choose from those that Picasso showed him, and remained his main buyer until in 1940 he moved to the United States, fleeing the Nazis. Kahnweiler managed to buy paintings little by little and tried to approach the painter, who continues selling directly to Rosenberg, Carré and Loeb. The war of 1939-1945 physically separates them, since the dealer hides and 'sells' his gallery to his stepdaughter Louise, who was not listed as an Israelite. When he returns to Paris and the artist begins to make lithographs with Mourlot, he renews Kahnweiler's exclusive marketing of his graphic work, but in painting he refuses to sell at the prices offered by the dealer, and when he starts selling in 1947, after the success of Kootz's exhibition in New York, he puts him in competition with Rosenberg, Louis Carré and other dealers, selling with a dropper and not without a dose of humiliation that involves long waits until Picasso agrees to 199 receive him. Françoise Gilot recalls that Picasso often summoned Kahnweiler and Carré at the same time and forced them to wait in their anteroom before seeing them one by one, in order to put them in competition, get better prices for his paintings and remind them that the true boss was him, who could decide not to sell them anything because he had other dealers in France and abroad 423. Unfortunately for him, Miró was not so lucky. 423 Orozco 2015, pp.191 and following. 10. The third man (Maeght) or late life opulence (1948-) 200 10. The third man (Maeght) or late life opulence (1948-) While negotiating his contract with Pierre Matisse, Miró is still looking for a gallerist in Europe who lives up to the expectations he has set. He has time to do so, because the contract of July 1946 for 75% of his production will expire in December 1948, leaving him enough room to negotiate new conditions and a distribution of his work between Matisse and the new gallerist. For the painter, Matisse was “an honest man, but too cautious and without energy” 424. He distrusts established merchants, with whom he has had no pleasant experiences. He would like to find someone new, someone whose main concern would be to sell today and not accumulate work for tomorrow, someone who also treats him as he believes he deserves. And he will find thar person in Aimé Maeght, an adventurous and daring man thirteen years younger than him. The gallerist was a member of a family displaced by the First World War. With a lithograph engraver diploma in his pocket, he moved to Cannes in 1927, where, benefiting from the status of war orphan, he got a job at the Robaudy printing company. There he receives the first compliments from an important painter: Pierre Bonnard. Five years later, his wife Marguerite opened a small radio and built-in radio cabinet’s shop that she decorated with some pictures of painter friends. When the Second World War broke out, there were no more radios to sell and all that was left were the paintings. Little by little young painters put more pictures to sell. In 1940 Marguerite had the audacity to show up at Bonnard's house to offer to sell his works. When the painter tells her what he asks for them, the young woman considers the price unreasonable, but agrees to take one and try to sell it at the demanded price, and she manages to sell it. When Aimé sees that selling expensive paintings works, he gets involved in the business, dedicating himself to travel to Paris to obtain works that are sold in haste in those turbulent days. Vendors could be Jewish collectors or dealers who wanted to escape from France and needed cash, established merchants who – unlike Maeght because of his status as a displaced person– had no safe conduct to go to and from the Vichy zone, or fans with contacts who take advantage of the art business at war, like Christian Zervos 425. Buyers were rich refugees in the sunny French Riviera or dealers who had cash and saw the opportunity to get hold of works which price they expect will go up a lot. Maeght is an ace of public relations and has a political nose. Through Bonnard he meets Matisse, whose wife and daughter were arrested by the Gestapo for acts of resistance. Maeght will also pretend after the liberation to have been very close to Jean Moulin, the myth of the French resistance. Moulin, who had a business in Nice similar to that of Maeght, can not contradict him because he was killed in July 1943, being 424 Permanyer 2003, p. 143 See a description of some of these activities in the book by Zervos’ adopted daughter: Szczupak-Thomas, Yvette Un diamant brut, Vézelay-Paris 1938-1950, Éditions Métailié, Paris 2008 425 201 replaced as head of the non-communist resistance... by Georges Bidault. When the occupation ends, the dealer has a unique obsession: to settle in Paris, where he is convinced that with his stock of works, his sales techniques and his new concept of art gallery will surpass all the dealers of the capital. His idea is to unite the work of publisher with that of gallerist, in order to give his trade publicity and an intellectual aura; enhancing the new figures of art and poetry and attract the great names of painting. He counts for it on the collaboration of two young people: Jacques Gardies and Jacques Kober, who launch a collection of texts. But the dealer still needs an establishment in Paris. The opportunity presents itself in October 1944. Maeght accompanies an old Pierre Bonnard to Paris to help him recover his paintings that are impounded by justice in the framework of the actions against dealer André Schoeller for his dubious activities during the occupation. Maeght then takes advantage of Schoeller's difficulties and obtains the transmission of the rental contract for a large space on rue de Téhéran, near the elegant Boulevard Haussmann. Once settled in Paris, preparations begin for the launch of his gallery, which opens on December 6, 1945, with a modest exhibition by Henri Matisse. Soon he launched the publishing house, with three publications: Pierre à Feu as a collection, Les Mains Éblouies to accompany the exhibitions of young painters and, above all, Derrière le miroir, which is a catalog with original lithographs of the main exhibitions of the gallery. The lithographs were made by printer Fernand Mourlot, the man who had recovered Picasso for the technique in November 1945. This is a revolutionary novelty introduced by Maeght, who had a greater commercial and media sense than the other gallerists: for each exhibition, Maeght asks the artists to make original lithographs, printed by Mourlot, which will be published in a large catalog (28 by 38 cm), in current and luxury editions, the latter signed by the painter. Since they have original graphic work, these catalogs are sold by the publisher at a good price to collectors who could not afford to buy the exposed oil paintings, and they will later reach prices of tens of thousands of dollars in auctions. But if it was relatively easy to obtain some paintings by great painters in the French Riviera, it is not easy to attract those same painters in Paris, where they have all worked for decades with established gallerists. Except Matisse's first and a small exhibition by Georges Braque in June 1947, the first regular exhibitions, which take place as of December 1946, are therefore of less known painters than the Maeghts had treated in Cannes, like brothers Geer and Bram Van Velde, André Marchand, Rigaud, Jean Signovert, Berry, Jean Villeri, Jean Peyrissac, Étienne Béothy and Germaine Richier. According to the Maeghts, the first meeting between the gallerist and Joan Miró took place in 1940: “Joan Miró and Aimé Maeght meet when Miró moves in with Braque in Varengeville” 426. The claim is daring and erroneous. On other occasions they said that the meeting took place in 1946 in Paris, to prepare an exhibition. The same date is cited by Mourlot in his first memoirs, Souvenirs et Portraits d'artistes, published in 1972, in which he states that the Catalan painter returned to Paris in 1946 and began to 426 Maeght, Jules, Exhibition catalog Miró en son jardin, Fundación Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, 2009 p.3 202 make lithographs in his workshop in Rue Chabrol 427. In his second memoirs, Mourlot corrects the shot, although he insists that he met Miró in 1946, when he “had already made some lithographs”. He adds that the first lithograph that the painter does in his workshop is through Aimée Maeght, who sent him to the printer in 1947 to prepare a lithograph for a book published by Maeght on the occasion of the exhibition Le surréalisme en 1947 promoted by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp and inaugurated on July 7 428. In fact, both the first contact with Mourlot in 1946 and his visit to the workshop in 1947 are clearly impossible. On one hand, there is no record of Miró's trip to Paris in 1946, and we also have proof that in that year the border with Spain was closed. If he had gone to Paris as Mourlot claims, Miró could have personally discussed with Pierre Matisse the details of his contract. On the other hand, Miró is in New York from February to November 1947, so he could not be in Paris preparing the lithographs or have met neither Mourlot nor Maeght. It is true that the book published by Maeght on the occasion of the exhibition –the cover of its luxury edition was a rubber female breast designed by Marcel Duchamp with the inscription: Please touch– has a lithograph by Miró as frontispiece (Mourlot 56), and that the painter also made another lithograph for the poster announcing the exhibition (Mourlot 57). But the fact that neither of the two lithographs was printed in a signed edition, as Maeght would always do, proves that Miró's first visit to the printer took place later. Chromist Charles Sorlier will confirm in his memoirs that the painter visited Mourlot's workshop for the first time in 1948 to execute a poster 429. Actually we can say that he came first, always in 1948, to make the lithographs of Album 13 and prepare the ones in his major livre d’artiste book Parler Seul, published by Maeght. Photographer Herbert List left a good evidence of this first visit: a long series of photographs of the painter and Jean Celestin, preparing stones and reviewing proofs of the two lithographs. Later, Miró came back for the preparation of the Derrière Le Miroir catalog of his first exhibition at the Maeght Gallery, inaugurated on November 1948 430 . Miró himself, with his usual bad memory, does not help clarify when did he meet the Paris gallerist for the first time. But it is not difficult to guess when and how the encounter and the “crush” between the two occur. We know that on the occasion of the preparation of the failed exhibition in Paris there is an epistolary contact between the painter and the gallery. We also know that on February 11, 1948 Miró traveled to Geneva, ostensibly to prepare the book À Toute Épreuve with publisher Gérald Cramer, and possibly also to discuss with his bankers how to manage the flow of liquidity that he began to receive of Pierre Matisse and that under no circumstances he wants to come to Spain through legal channels. On Wednesday the 18th he arrives in Paris, where he stays in Hotel Pont Royal on rue du Bac, just in front of what will be the headquarters of the Galerie Maeght on the rive gauche. Maeght has set a trap for him. He brings him to Paris, no doubt paying the trip himself, and pretends it is only to 427 Mourlot 1973 (The De Luxe edition with original lithographs had appeared a year earlier) Mourlot, 1979, p.p. 143-145. 429 Sorlier 1985, p. 188. 430 Derrière Le Miroir N°14-15, Miró, Maeght, Paris 1948 Texts by Tristan Tzara, Jean Cassou, Raymond Queneau, Paul Éluard & Ernest Hemingway and 7 original lithographs. 428 203 help him make the great exhibition with which Miró dreamed since 1944 and never materialized. Miró has nothing to lose. He has been satisfied with his first epistolary contacts with him, he visits the premises of rue de Teheran and he verifies that Maeght's has nothing to do with any of the galleries he has known. Venues like Maeght's is what he was thinking of when he wrote to Pierre Loeb two years earlier: “I doubt if you could find a sufficiently spacious gallery in Paris to display all these works, many of which are very large." Maeght looks to Miró like an authentic multinational: large premises, numerous employees and bombastic titles for the main collaborators of the dealer, whom he has been robbing from other gallerists by offering them more salary and the dignity of a business card. Critic Louis Gabriel Clayeux of Galerie Louis Carré becomes Artistic Director of Maeght. And poet Jacques Dupin, whom he draws from Cahiers d'Art where, of course, Christian Zervos pays him almost nothing, becomes the Publications Director of the gallery's, a more important post than it seems because the engravings and artist books provide a constant flow of income. Clayeux will be the planner of Miró's main exhibitions in Europe since then, and Dupin, in addition to being the driving force behind the graphic work that provided Miró with endless income for more than thirty years, will become his main biographer. On February 21, three days after arriving in Paris, Miró has already seen Aimé Maeght and writes to Pierre Matisse telling him that the gallerist plans to hold the Paris great exhibition in the summer and that he has discussed the details with him 431. Miró with Picasso during his 1948 visit But Maeght does more than interviewig Miró and introducing him to his collaborators. He wants to dazzle him and invites the painter to come down with him to the French Riviera. There he shows his power and what his painters could enjoy: trips everywhere in Rolls-Royce, stays and meals in the Colombe d'Or of SaintPaul de Vence –Picasso's favorite luxury hotelrestaurant. In addition, the gallerist puts his car at Miró’s disposal so that during this first visit to his fiefs, the painter goes to see Pablo Picasso in Mougins on March 4 and Henri Matisse to Vence on day 5. To Miró appearing before Picasso and Matisse driven in a Rolls has a not insignificant importance. It is not unreasonable to think that Georges Braque, crazy about cars, was led to the dealer precisely for his passion for the beautiful machines. The contract between the two was sealed the day the gallerist offered Braque a Rolls-Royce. Maeght did everything in a big way, as Miró always thought his art had to be treated. When the painter indicated that he wanted to do graphic work, instead of trying to 431 PMGA 18.39. 204 dissuade him as Matisse did, Maeght put him in the hands of Dupin, who made him produce more lithographs and etchings than any other major painter of the twentieth century, an area that Maeght took care of marketing. The same thing happened with artist books and ceramics. The trip had its effect: Miró had decided. Pierre Loeb had informed him on December 12, 1947 that he had broken with Pierre Matisse, so the painter was free to look for a new dealer in Europe. Aimé Maeght will be his gallerist and agent for all of Europe. This meant renegotiating the contract with Matisse, in force until the end of 1948. And it also made it necessary to clarify once and for all the accounts with his dealer in New York who, despite the promises of two years ago, continued to show, for the Spanish painter, a diligence and punctuality in payments that left a lot to be desired. The problem of the exhibition of the war work that Maeght prepares as a welcome gift for Miró is that the painter had sold two years ago the bulk of that work to Pierre Matisse, who despite having promised to send paintings for the great exhibition, sends only a few pieces of relative interest. Matisse does everything possible to sabotage the show. In a letter to José Luis Sert from Paris in October 1948, Miró explains that he has been preparing for a week the 'retrospective' exhibition in Paris, which was due to open on the 20th but “due to the inconceivable negligence of Pierre Matisse, it will not be able to open until November 16, due to the delay in sending the canvases” 432. Matisse sees the Paris exhibition as what it really was, a simple commercial operation by Maeght, and not as Miró presented it: a retrospective level show. Maeght returned the discourtesy when in the exhibition he marked the few paintings sent by Matisse with a red dot, that is, as if he had sold them, instead of indicating that they had been borrowed from the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, where they were actually for sale 433. Of the 88 works that were presented in this great exhibition, in reality there are only 34 'paintings', which accompany 54 ceramics that will remain unsold. Of those 34 paintings, eleven are works on paper (pastels, gouaches, watercolors). The only 23 canvases are oils paintings dated between 1944 and 1946. Nothing between 1939 and 1943. And of course, no sign of the Constellations, which Pierre Matisse refuses once again to send to Paris. Miró also does not preach with the example, because he does not send for the exhibition the gouache he had given to his wife. Of the 23 paintings exhibited, only five have a size exceeding one meter in width or height, they are all from 1945 and come from those that Pierre Matisse had refused 432 433 Juncosa, Patricia 2008, p.121 Russell 1999, p. 270 205 to take and had allowed him to keep to compensate for the fact that he himself kept almost all of the war work, which was the raison d'être of the exhibition. The catalog does not indicate anywhere that it is a retrospective exhibition of the war work of the painter. The cover only mentions Joan Miró, and in the following seven pages, in addition to some simple original lithographs, very similar to those made in those days for the book Parler Seul, 22 short texts by different authors are reproduced, most of them extracted from previous works, and that are grouped in three rubrics: Joan Miró and the incipient interrogation, The return of Miró, The birth of Miró y My cooperation with Miró. There is therefore no great retrospective, but a simple exhibition with five medium-sized paintings, 18 small ones, eleven works on paper and some fifty ceramics. Besides, Miró is forced to accept that the option he has made has consequences. Working with a dealer like Maeght, who only wants to sell and today, being little interested in the long-term construction of the prestige of a painter, is not the same as doing it with one like Pierre Matisse, focused on building the painter without worrying for giving immediate economic results and in each exhibition. Undoubtedly, Matisse does not act in a disinterested way: if he manages to place the paintings in the great museums and among the great collectors, a few decades later what he bought for very little money will be worth a fortune. Or not, as happened to Kahnweiler, who for many years paid a monthly fee to painters who later failed to stand out, like José de Togores. To achieve his dream of a large retrospective exhibition in Paris, Miró would have had to work with an old-fashioned art dealer like Matisse or Pierre Loeb, who would have prepared the exhibition in permanent contact with the top Museums of France, exercising a lobbying job essential for the construction of the prestige of a painter. Maeght and Miró in the 1950s But the person that could provide the income that Miró wanted was none other than Maeght, always on the move, always with new projects of lithographs, artist books, ceramics, exhibitions, etc. Although he did not always pay quickly: Permanyer reports that at the death of the painter, the gallerist “owed him a fortune and the only solution was to go to a lawyer” 434. In fact, what happened was that at the end of the seventies, the economy of the Maeght empire suffered, both for objective reasons –the Pharaonic cost of the Saint Paul de Vence Foundation– and the death in 1977 of its wife Marguerite, who was the one who controlled the impetuous Aimé and brought sanity and business sense to the gallery. To save the ship from wreckig, Aimé was forced to create a partnership with his main collaborator Daniel Lelong, who managed the gallery. At Maeght’s death of there was a 'perfect storm' in which an economic situation that could lead to bankruptcy was combined with a main heir, Adrien Maeght, more interested in luxury cars than in managing the art business; the entry 434 Permanyer 2003, p. 146 206 into the ranks of Sylvie, illegitimate daughter of Aimé, who claimed her part of the inheritance; and finally the ownership of the Foundation/museum that the Maeghts had opened in Saint Paul de Vence, built by Josep Lluis Sert and inaugurated by André Malraux in 1964. The result was that Lelong, associated with Jacques Dupin and Jean Fremon, kept the gallery of Rue de Teheran, while Adrien took over the Rue du Bac venue. The debts were distributed and the ownership of the Foundation remains still subject to disputes in 2015.435 Clayeux, Miró, Sert and Maeght examine scale model of the Maeght Foundation building 435 See Maeght, Françoise (Yoyo), La Saga Maeght, Robert Laffont, 2014 11. Breton jumps on board as the Constellations are reborn (1958) 207 11. Breton jumps on board as the Constellations are reborn (1958) If since 1945 the Constellations had been much talked about in the art world, the true consecration and popularization of the series does not occur until Pierre Matisse reissued it in 1959 in a luxury edition of 345 hand-painted copies. It is these pieces, and not the originals gouaches, that millions of visitors have seen since then in hundreds of museums and exhibition venues around the world. The realization of Matisse's plan to reprint the Constellations in the form of a portfolio of reproductions carefully made by hand from the originals, and not photographs or lithographs, takes place in a period of re-launching of the artist in Europe and the United States. In 1956 a Miró retrospective had taken place at the Palais des BeauxArts in Brussels, an exhibition that was then brought to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1956 an individual exhibition is also held at the Kunsthalle in Basel. From June to August, Maeght exhibits in Paris the ceramics of Miró and Artigas, which display will be transferred to Pierre Matisse’s in New York in December of that year. The graphic work is not forgotten, because 1957 Sala Gaspar de Barcelona exhibits lithographs of the painter, and an itinerant exhibition of his graphic work travels until early 1958 through the German cities of Krefeld, West Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Hannover and Hamburg. The graphic work also reaches MoMA, which in 1958 exposes him along with Braque and Morandi. Henri Matarasso organizes another solo exhibition in Nice in 1957. In 1958, and within the framework of the Universal Exhibition in Brussels, Miró will be one of the best represented artists, with five canvases, including The Harlequin's Carnival. In April 1958, the presentation at the Berggruen gallery in Paris of À toute épreuve. Bois gravés pour un poème de Paul Eluard also took place. Miró had been working on it for ten years for publisher Gerald Cramer and he had carved 233 blocks of wood to achieve 80 woodcuts, printed by Jacques Frélaut. For this presentation, Heinz Berggruen, who will market the book, will make a catalog with a prologue by Douglas Cooper, in phototype and pochoir by Daniel Jacomet and sold by Berggruen , as a cheap alternative to the book of woodcuts. Although already in 1944 or earlier Matisse had shared with Miró his desire to get 'some gouaches' with a view to a publication 436, the first concrete news that we have of the project of making an album with the reproduction of the Constellations are from 1957, which indicates that the plan –which implied very complicated logistics– was executed with an amazing speed. The explanation of that haste and of the considerable effort that the dealer dedicates to the matter can be found in several planes. On the one 436 In his letter to Miró dated 04.06.1944, Matisse reminds him that he had already transmitted this request in several prior letters. PMGA 18.34. Reus 2004 p.751 208 hand it is a commercial operation to make cash. He calculated that he could sell the edition for at least 400 or 500 dollars a piece, that is a total of at least 160,000 or 200,000 dollars for an edition of about 400 copies and that is not counting the 'luxury copies'. It is a considerable amount, equivalent to between 1,350,000 and 1,700,000 dollars in 2015 and exceeding his gallery’s normal annual turnover. The success that the series had found in the previous decade showed that a reissue of temperas, if it could be done with exquisite care, had a very large sales potential and could be placed even to large collectors who had not been interested in the series in 1945 –he sold portfolios to many important collectors, such as the founder of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Joseph Randall Shapiro, as well as to the millionaire wi, dow of Yves Tanguy. He also knew that the popularity that the series had acquired and their dispersion in private collections made it almost impossible for any museum to gather them all in an exhibit. There was therefore a considerable sales potential in museums around the world. He also knew that, unlike in original works, in which the intermediation of other galleries presented problems, with a porfolio he could sell without problems to dealers from all over the world who would take care of marketing. A second reason to act was that in the mid fifties, when Miró finally achieved the desired economic prosperity, a situation made clear by his acquisition of the Son Abrines and Son Boter estates in Majorca, the painter, very satisfied with Maeght on the European side, raises again the question of the poor economic performance of his arrangement with Matisse. And Miró thought about offering another opportunity to Paul Rosenberg, who was exhausting in New York the stock of paintings stolen from him in 1941 in Bordeaux, a part of which were returned in 1953. After the Miró exhibition at MoMA that year, his paintings were sold quickly to great collectors, such as Louis E. Stern, buyer of the gouache People at Night, Guided by the Phosphorescent Tracks of Snails. Matisse learns of Miró's initiative to contact Rosenberg, whisch he thinks is supported or driven by Aimé Maeght, and demands explanations in a letter of August 9, 1957 to the painter 437, to which Miró responds two weeks later indicating to the gallerist that he is “very dissatisfied” with the way his paintings were being sold in New York 438. The reason for Miró's anger is in the fact that in ten years his dealer has organized one solo exhibition (Miró recent paintings of 1953), and simply continued to sell his stock of previous work acquired with the contract of 1946 or the paintings of his first period that Matisse had acquired in the exhibition of the Galerías Layetanas in Barcelona in1949. Nor can he expect to obtain much income in the United States in the following years, because between 1955 and 1958 Miró practically did not paint, making only ceramics and dedicating himself to the well-paid graphic work that Maeght sold in Paris 439. And without production, Matisse paid nothing. But the New York gallerist does not give in to Miró's criticism. On the one hand he knows that the elderly Rosenberg and his son Alexandre are too busy trying to recover the eighty stolen paintings that have not yet appeared, and will not have time to take care of Miró. Despite the painter's protests, even in 1958 Matisse continues to sell his 437 PMGA 18.62 PMGA 18.57 439 Ribot Martín 2010. p. 200 438 209 savage paintings, leaving aside his recent work, which will not be exhibited until the end of 1961. The art dealer will respond to Miró's criticism two months later with a long letter in which, once again, he expresses his enthusiasm for the work of the painter and defends his handling of the matter, arguing that it is thanks to him that the painter has achieved the success he enjoys in the United States 440. Among the additional reasons the dealer has to launch a Miró initiative in the United States at that time is the fact that Maeght is making a considerable effort to promote Miró. The Parisian dealer gives the painter exactly what he wants: a huge workload and a considerable and fast remuneration for his paintings and sculptures, payments that will also be proportional to the sale prices of his works, an advantage the painter had never enjoyed. Although the sale of paintings, ceramics or sculptures is slow, the painter can always count on the safe and abundant income from the sale of artist books, lithographs and other engravings. Maeght also instructs his employee Jacques Dupin to write the definitive treatise on the painter's work, which will appear in France in 1961, published by Flammarion, and will be immediately issued in the United States by Harry N. Abrams with a mass circulation. The first time that Matisse informs Miró of his plan to reprint the Constellations is precisely the letter of August 1957, whose main purpose is the preparation of Dupin's book. And one last but primordial reason to do something with Miró at that precise moment is that Pierre Matisse has just learned that MoMA is preparing a Miró retrospective exhibition for early 1959, for which James Thrall Soby is writing a book-catalog, although in fact the text will be prepared by William (Bill) Lieberman, Barr's. assistant, founder and head of MoMA’s prints department and friend of the dealer. Matisse wants to match the launch of the Constellations portfolio –and not the exhibition of the savage paintings, which will precede it– with the MoMA exhibition, and on several occasions shows his fear that the work might not be ready by the time of the MoMA exhibition. Pierre Matisse knows that the key to the success of his ambitious Constellations portfolio project is to ensure that the reproductions are as good as the original gouaches. For this, he is willing to make the considerable investment in time and money that implies obtaining that all the owners of the gouaches lend them for a period of several months to be –with a millionaire insurance– sent to France and reproduced with precision. The dealer is fortunate that all the temperas have been sold by him and to people located in or around New York, so the operation will not be too complicated, except in terms of convincing the owners to lend the fragile paintings. Matisse could have chosen to reproduce the Constellations in lithography, what Fernand Mourlot could have done in Paris even from color photographs made in the United States, as rumours said he did in some occasions to produce lithographs passed as originals. But the gallerist wanted a much more reliable reproduction, handmade with thick gouache colors, exactly the same as Miró used in 1940-1941. In order for the colors to coincide with total fidelity, it was necessary that the workshop where they were to be reproduced had the originals at hand and thus made sure that the choice of each tone was appropriate. 440 Letter to Miró dated 10.02.1957. PMGA 18.57 210 But the final coloration by hand did not solve the whole problem of reproducing the Constellations, because these had been carried out in three stages. As we have seen, Miró had painted the original series in 1940-1941 wetting the brushes used in a previous painting in turpentine and rubbing them against the white sheets of a paper notebook, thus making a background for each wash. He then went on to draw, with charcoal shapes, figures, stars, etc. And finally he completed them coloring with tempera. Pierre Matisse, who knew how the gouaches had been painted, is aware that there is a perfectly adjusted method to reproduce them, because it combines a preparation of the paper to give it a certain roughness and then print the background or main lines using the necessary colors, and finally finish by hand gouache paint made by expert hands. This is the procedure that Daniel Jacomet has developed since the 1920s, mainly to reproduce old documents or drawings by the great painters. The first of the two stages of the Jacomet process was a background impression by means of collotype, that used a glass plate with a water-repellent gelatin layer treated with dichromate to make it sensitive to light. After baking in an oven, this layer was sensitized in contact with a negative plate. The parts of the layer which have been exposed to light are tanned and the gelatin loses its impermeability, while those protected from light will be swollen with moisture. The glass plate is then washed to remove the dichromate, and moistened. It is then ready for the press run. Once the base was printed, Jacomet employees would proceed to complete the reproduction using the pochoir process, using templates cutting with a steel sheet a zinc foil just one tenth of a milimiter thick. For each pochoir plate, several templates were used. These stencils were then placed on paper and painted by hand with gouache. Hand movements with the pompom at the Jacomet atelier The pochoir method had been chosen by the gallerist's father, Henri Matisse, to make the majestic livre d’artiste Jazz, published in 1947 by Tériade. In this case, easier to make given the much larger size of the gouaches decoupés of the fauve painter, the work was executed by book illustration specialist of the first half of the 20th century, Edmond Vairel. But for the Constellations a much more delicate work was needed, in which the 211 preparation of the papers was combined with collotype, the ideal selection of the gouache colors to be used –which Vairel could have also made– and a meticulousness that only Daniel Jacomet’s workers could provide. The main reason why Pierre Matisse chose Jacomet must be found in another personality that enters the scene: Heinz Berggruen. , The German Jewish gallerist had met Pierre during his exile in New York, and in the early 1950s tried to convert his small bookshop in the Île de Saint Louis in Paris into an important gallery, for which he had the complicity of Picasso, always solidarious with Jews persecuted by Nazism and interested in having new dealers that limited his dependence on Kahnweiler or Carré. Matisse also wanted to avoid at all costs that Aimé Maeght had any intervention in the Constellations-bis operation. In fact the idea was to annoy him by making a Miró exhibition in Paris without Maeght and without him participating in the benefits that it would generate, just as the new Miró gallerist had boycotted the sales of works owned by Matisse in the 1948 exhibition. In addition, Matisse needed an associate in Europe to manage the complicated operation at this side of the Atlantic. And the clever Berggruen , seized the opportunity, obtaining not only the honor of hosting the only Constellations exhibition ever made in Europe, but huge profits through the sale of numerous copies of the Miró-Breton portfolio and another backroom operation to which we will refer later. Matisse was also attracted to the idea of the Parisian exhibition taking place in the new Berggruen Gallery in the Latin Quarter, to which Heinz had moved in 1950, and which was located at 70 Rue de l'Université, less than 300 meters from the new gallery Maeght had opened in 1956 at 42 of the Rue du Bac (the still surviving Galerie Maeght). Daniel Jacomet was not a stranger or a newcomer. The Parisian printer had already made, in 1920, the splendid Picasso pochoirs for Le Tricorne, the book published by Paul Rosenberg that reproduced the 32 sets and figurines by the painter for the representation of The Three-Cornered Hat by Manuel de Falla, released with Diaghilev's choreography at the Alhambra Theater in London in 1919. But the reason why he was chosen for the Constellations operation is that since 1952 he had been working with Berggruen, doing in phototype and pochoir the illustrations of the interior of the small catalogs of the gallerist's exhibitions. These, with a Mourlot lithograph on the cover, were sold to visitors and today reach high prices in the art market. His first works were the catalogs or plaquettes for the exhibitions of Paul Klee (24 Gravures) and Henri Matisse (Gravures récentes), both in 1952. The following year, and in view of the enthusiasm of Berggruen, and small collectors, Jacomet repeated the feat with Arp, Braque, Matisse and Seuphor. In 1954 he made the catalogs of the exhibitions by Kandinsky, Picasso and Matisse in the Berggruen Gallery with the same technique of pochoir on phototype. In 1955 Klee, Laurens, Marini and Arp came again, and in 1956 Picasso, Severini and Ernst. In 1957, when Pierre Matisse decided to launch the reissue of the Constellations, the collaboration between Jacomet and Berggruen, had intensified with the catalogs of the exhibitions by Dora Maar, Julio González, Moore, Magnelli, Soulages and Poliakoff. The following year, when Matisse offers to Berggruen , to be associated for the operation, Jacomet realizes for him the catalogs of the Joan Miro exhibition Bois gravés pour un poème of Paul Eluard as well as those of Henri Matisse and Hamaguchi, and he will make also the facsimile of the Carnet Catalán de Picasso, also for Berggruen,. That 212 same year of 1958, Jacomet will print the impressive portfolio Mes dessins d'Antibes by Picasso, but his main task that year, and the one that will occupy his employees, will be the reissue of the Constellations. The Jacomet workshop in 1958 For MoMA curator Lilian Tone, the pochoirs that Daniel Jacomet made, reproducing with great fidelity too the drawings and titles that Miró recorded on the back of each original gouache, were of such a high quality that “excluding their slight difference in size from the originals, they are virtually indistinguishable” from those Miró painted 441. Of course, the small difference in size was deliberate, so that a pochoir could not pass for an original gouache. These had dimensions of 45.7 x 38.1 cm, while the pochoirs measured 43.2 x 35.6 cm, that is 2.5 cm smaller in height and width. Both the painter and Matisse will be so satisfied with the work done that in the following years Jacomet will make the magnificent pochoirs for the luxury editions of the catalogs of the exhibitions Miró 1959-1960 (1961), Cartons 1959-1965 (1965), and Oiseau Solaire Oiseau Lunaire Étincelles (1967), pieces that today are quoted at thousands of dollars. Jacomet will also reproduce in pochoir paintings for the exhibition catalogs in the Pierre Matisse Gallery by Yves Tanguy (1963), Chagall (1968) and Dubuffet. But the Parisian printer will not be as patient as Miró when it comes to not receiving payments for his work, and the collaboration with the New York gallerist will end after numerous protests by Jacomet for 441 Tone 1993, p. 6 213 unpaid bills and delays in sending the funds 442. Jacomet will nonetheless continue to work with other European publishers until the 1990s. Once Berggruen, decided that Jacomet will be responsible for reproducing the Constellations temperas and convinced Pierre Matisse that the choice is appropriate, the gallerist must launch the complicated operation. The first thing he does is to contact the owners of the sold gouaches one by one and to organize directly with Jacomet the insurance for the shipment of the originals, which he does in the course of 1957. Some owners saise some objections about lending their gouaches, despite the gallerist's offer to give them in return a copy of the valuable portfolio and the guarantee that the publication will only increase the fame and value of the original gouaches. At the end of the year, Matisse has already obtained the last pieces, from the hands of Dwight Ripley and Philip Goodwin. He tells Miró of his plan, the painter answering in a letter of September 6, 1957 in which, apart from conveying some ideas about what he understands will be a 'book', he reiterates to the gallerist owner his great dissatisfaction with the cash flow that comes from New York. Matisse answers him four weeks later –October 3– with details about the publishing plan 443. At the end of January 1958, when the paintings had already been sent to Paris, the gallerist informed the painter that he had spoken with Breton to prepare a text to accompany the gouaches 444. And an excited Miró has finally in February the opportunity to see for the first time the complete set of the Constellations –except Nocturne– since he said goodbye to the series in 1944. Jacques Dupin, who needed to see and photograph the paintings for his book, was alerted by Jacomet, and as soon as the temperas arrived, he warned the painter, who rushed to Paris and went to the workshop accompanied by his biographer, of which visit Dupin gave an account to Matisse in a letter of February 26, 1958 445. Miró wants to control as much as possible the reissue of the series and decides to return to Paris to talk about the project with André Breton, which he does in May. It is the wrapper, because the essential part of the project, that is, the preparation of the reproductions of the gouaches by hand in the workshops of Jacomet continues separately. The printer must decide with the help of the painter what part or 'phase' of each gouache will be reproduced in a phototype and where the hand coloring will superimpose the phototype. The operation is delicate and has to be repeated for each of the 22 gouaches, some of which have more than a dozen colors. As all critics have pointed out, the result is extraordinary, but as in all manual labor some barely perceptible errors slip. For example, to paint the sclera of the eyes of the Bel oiseau déchiffrant l'inconnu au couple d'amoureux, instead of painting the outline of the pupil in white, the Jacomet workers apply –at least in some copies– white color in the whole circle of the sclera, thus lowering the intensity of the pupil’s black. This is at least the case of the copy that the author of these lines has in his collection, because the essential characteristic of the pochoirs is that, being made by hand, each one is unique and different from the others. 442 PMGA, folders 176.42, 43 y 44. PMGA 18.57. 444 PMGA 18.57 445 PMGA 18.62 Jacques Dupin 443 214 Berggruen, wants to strengthen his role as leader of the operation in Europe; Matisse worries about the cost of the operation; Miró wants to control it when he noticed that as Raillard would later point out 446, André Bretón is determined to 'appropriate' the series and be the main protagonist of the publication; Jacomet does not want any interference in his decisions and technical work; and new participants join the business. Pierre Matisse is forced to incorporate to the project Fernand Mourlot and Roger Lacourière, the historic printers of Picasso’s lithographs and etchings. The reason is that Miró would not have received a cent for the operation as it was proposed, since copyrights were only applied at that time in a summary manner and the porfolio contained nothing but reproductions. By contributing original engravings, Miró, whose collaboration was required for the marketing of the operation, would also participate in the benefits. The inclusion of 'original work' also served to attract buyers and ensure the inclusion of the new publication in the catalogues raisonnées of original graphic work. For the rest, including original graphic work allowed a separation in categories of the copies of the edition. This hierarchy allowed Matisse to modulate the prices of the porfolios based on the content, modulation that, without much justification in our view, remains in the auction prices at Sotheby's or Christie's decades later. The gallerist therefore incorporates two etchings and two lithographs by Miró into the portfolio. Matisse gives Breton on August 22, 1958 details of his final plans for the album447. but Miró, in his efforts to control the process, continues to come up with suggestions, including some in a letter to Matisse dated August 25 448. The gallerist takes advantage of his annual summer stay in France to meet Berggruen,, Jacomet and Breton and tie all the ends. In October, back in New York, he puts in writing the terms of the agreement with Berggruen to distribute the costs and benefits of the operation and set the terms of the January 1959 exhibition of the Constellations original gouaches in Galerie Berggruen. This aspect had not been communicated to the owners of the temperas, who were forced to wait even longer to recover them. The Matisse/Berggruen , relationship is at its best, and after agreeing on all the details, including the number and distribution of copies of the portfolio, the remuneration of Breton, the payments and role of Jacomet and the work assigned to Mourlot and Lacourière 449, the two will also agree to exchange future exhibitions in Paris and New York, for which Berggruen, will prepare the catalogs, with Mourlot lithographs on the cover and Jacomet pochoirs inside. Knowing the painter's susceptibility, Pierre Matisse takes the trouble to explain in detail to Miró the agreements he has reached with Berggruen, in relation to the exhibition and the edition and distribution of the album 450. But the gallerist starts to get nervous. The reason is that James Thrall Soby is preparing, with the help of Jacques Dupin and Maeght in France, Miró's retrospective in MoMA for February 1959. Miró will attend the show taking advantage of his trip to Washington to collect 446 Raillard 1976. pp 52-60 PMGA 18.59 448 PMGA 18.57 449 PMGA 93.25 Berggruen 450 Letter to Miró dated 10. 13.58. PMGA 18.57 447 215 the Guggenheim award from the hands of President Dwight Eisenhower. He was scorted at the ceremony by Franco’s Ambassador to the U.S. Matisse wants the exhibition to precede his with the temperas and launching of the Constellations portfolio. An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art heats the atmosphere, puts the name of Miró in the press and facilitates sales in the next exhibition of his gallery. Matisse was already preparing the MoMA exhibition of with Soby and Bill Lieberman –the thirty-year-old specialist in graphic work that will organize it– since the end of '57. But the proximity of dates between the exhibitions of Paris at the Berggruen Gallery and those of New York in MoMA and the Pierre Matisse gallery implies the album must be ready, a close coordination and impeccable logistics, to allow the quick transfer of the works. Finally, the exhibition chain will not be the one that Pierre Matisse had wanted. Because of André Breton, the one at Berggruen gallery will take place between January 20 and March, at first only with the gouaches and at the end just with the portfolios. But without all the gouaches, since some owners, fed up with waiting, had demanded the return of four of them before the opening of the Paris exhibition 451. Another group of gouaches will leave in February for MoMAs Joan Miró exhibition, inaugurated on March 18 and that will last until May 10 in New York, to then go to Los Angeles (from June to July). And a last part, including those which remain unsold, will be exhibited in the Constellations exhibition that Matisse organizes in his gallery between March 17 and April 11 to sell the Miró/Breton album. And while Soby goes ahead with his plans, of which Bill Lieberman has informed the gallerist, on October 25, 1958 Matisse writes to Miró signalling his concern about the absence of news from Breton –for the text– or from Jacomet –for the reproductions 452 . Miró can not give any news to Matisse because he also lacks news from Breton, but takes the opportunity to provide, no doubt belatedly, new suggestions for the realization of the album 453. Breton will finally write to the painter on November 4, 1958 regarding the preface that he prepares for the portfolio454. What Breton does not 451 Tone 1993, p. 6 Letters to Miró dated 10.25.58 and to Jacques Dupin dated 10. 31.58, PMGA 18.62 Jacques Dupin 453 PMGA 18.57 454 PMGA 18.59 452 216 say, neither to Miró nor to Pierre Matisse, is that until that moment he has done practically nothing of the assignment. In fact he has not begun to work on the preparation of the text until a few days before writing to the painter, and although time was pressing, the manuscript texts of the parallel proses prove that he will not complete the assignment until well into the month of December. The manuscripts of the preface and the Breton poems are kept in the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet at the Sorbonne, and are dated between the months of October and December 1958 455. Miró chooses to forget about the text and focus on the reproductions, working closely with Jacomet to monitor the background preparations and choose the colors accurately to achieve an optimal result, and he informs his New York gallerist of the progress of the printer's work 456. As for the printing proofs of the Breton text, which we assume were all delivered at the same time to the writer by printer Fequet et Baudier, we have found in one of the originals returned by the poet with his handwritten corrections a single date, 27 January 1959, written by someone in the printing press. In the same corrected printing proof, corresponding to the poem that would accompany the gouache Woman in the Night, someone –possibly Marthe Fequet or Albert-Pierre Baudier– has posted an annotation to hurry the workers: “It is urgent. The book will appear soon (in New York and for 150,000 Francs)” 457. In short, while Miró and Jacomet have worked tirelessly to prepare the phototypes and gouaches, Breton has done nothing and the printed texts are not ready and corrected in the printer until January 27, 1959, this is a year after Pierre Matisse asked the poet, eight months after meeting Miró and Jacomet to prepare it ... and seven days after the opening of the Berggruen gallery exhibition on January 20 where they should be presented. Because of Breton, the show must therefore start only with the Miró original gouaches, but without the portfolio it is really about and is for sale there. The abum will not reach the gallery until a month later, when the gouaches have left for the United States. Nor does Breton tell Miró the content of his prose poems to 'illustrate' the Constellations, but simply invites him and Pilar Juncosa to eat on a Saturday in December in his small apartment at 42 Rue Pierre-Fontaine –known as rue Fontaine–, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He also invites his daughter Aube, a friend of hers, and poet Octavio Paz, who was in the French capital to attend a writers’ meeting –and probably to prepare his return as a diplomat to France a few months later. The Mexican Nobel Prize in Literature described in detail the encounter in a text of 1984 458 . After a lunch in which he spoke “of painting and poetry, politics and magic” with Breton’s traditional eloquence and the usual silence of Miró and his wife, who “looked at each other, nervous and smiling” as they waited for the main course of the day, Elisa Breton invited diners to have coffee in the studio. The French poet then proceeded to reveal to the painter the content of his recent work and began to read the text of the prose poems. Miró listened quietly, with his usual air of “amazed child” and when Breton finished reading he just mumbled a few words of thanks, while Pilar Juncosa 455 Fonds André Breton, Constellations. Reference Ms 46020 Letter to Matisse dated 12.20.1958. PMGA Miró 18.57 457 Drouot Sale of the Archives of André Breton on 04.12.2003, Lot 2472. 458 Paz 1984. 456 217 did not open her mouth. Octavio Paz relates that he did not know then what they really thought of Breton's complicated poetic prose, difficult to understand for any French graduate in philology because of its arbitrariness. What Miró could not avoid noticing was that, in writing his parallel proses, Breton had discarded the titles that the painter had inscribed, along with a drawing on the back of the gouaches. In most of Breton's texts 459, the poet seems to try systematically to move away from the spirit that the painter had insinuated. Or to be more generous, we could say that the poet repeats the exercise that Miró had done with the signs and characters, which lead him to other signs. But Breton plays not with Miró’s images as he should, but with his own words, giving these a magical freedom to reproduce, call others to produce a mystery as indecipherable as the gouaches. Miró's drawings thus liberate i Breton a flow of verbal images that develop by themselves giving rise to proses that are not interpretative, but "parallel" to the temperas 460. Definitely, Breton’s texts, which Miró could not understand when the poet recited them, left the painter stunned. The irritation of both Pierre Matisse and Miró with André Breton for his lack of seriousness in the matter of the portfolio is patent. The gallerist and publisher of the album did not get to see the text of until he got the copies to sell, so he could not approve them as he should, or start the copyright process until the 'book' was already on sale. But the way to punish the poet is not to pay him, not to write, to ignore and to annoy him in some other project in which he is involved. The painter imitates the dealer’s technique and chooses to ignore Breton for two months, and Breton writes on February 27, 1959 to Matisse complaining that the portfolio have just been presented at the Berggruen Gallery, but that Miró has not had the slightest gesture towards him, nor answered his messages, which, says Breton, produces him great sadness 461. The commercial operation is particularly advantageous for Pierre Matisse, insofar as all his costs are incurred in French francs, but since he is slow to pay, he does so in a devalued currency, i.e., paying less dollars. In effect, the Franc undergoes two devaluations in 1958, the first of 20% in June and the second of an additional 17.55% in December. It is the moment of the birth of the new Franc, equivalent to 100 old francs. After the devaluations, selling the album in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, etc., and much less in France, is the best option for Matisse because he can not raise the French advertised price, already high, of 150,000 F.F. But the gallerist is confronted with a problem that needs serious coordination with Berggruen,, since any European dealer who has buyers for the Constellations will have an interest in acquiring the porfolio from Berggruen,, given that the price that Matisse estimated at about 400 dollars –for the cheaper copies– were equivalent after the devaluation to almost 200,000 FF (2,000 new francs). Buying Berggruen they saved 25% of the cost. And in fact they had the right to do so, because what the agreement between Heinz and Pierre envisaged is that the Parisian gallery could not sell to American customers, there being no limitation to supply copies to European dealers. Although nothing 459 Published in English in Hammond 2000, p.p. 195-239 Adamowicz, Elza Ceci n'est pas un tableau: les écrits surréalistes sur l'art, Editions l'Age d'Homme, Lausanne 2004, pp. 65, 99 461 PMGA 41.12. Subseries: Artists' manuscript letters. 460 218 prevented the New York dealer either from selling to those same dealers if they were not French. Berggruen , in fact did not deprive himself of selling copies of his quota to whoever requested it, provided he was not American. But the dealer devised a stratagem to increase his income for the series without having to pay anything to Matisse. As we have seen, the gallerist had been publishing catalogs since 1952 in each exhibition he made. These were small plaquettes of 22 by 12 cm and between 15 and 30 pages, with a cover made in lithography by Fernand Mourlot and reproductions of the works for sale made in phototype and pochoir by Daniel Jacomet. The small catalogs, shot to several hundred copies, were not distributed free, but remained in the back room and were given to his best customers with accredited purchases or buyers of a painting in the exhibition. The rest of the copies followed the fate of Picasso, Matisse or Chagall’s posters that Mourlot made, and that were never stuck on any wall. They went to the market, sold by the same dealers as the original graphic work. To give an example, in 1956 Picasso made a beautiful poster in original lithography for the Galerie 65 in Cannes, owned by Gilberte Duclaud. 2,100 copies of the poster were printed, of which at least 100 numbered and signed. And in Cannes there were not enough corners at that time to glue in them so many posters, printed in lithography only to be sold 462. Collectors who could not afford to buy a painting of 100,000 F.F. at the Berggruen exhibitions were willing to pay a few thousand francs for a 'plaquette'. As the catalogs of the Paris exhibition fell within the exclusive responsibility of Berggruen,, he did not have to give an account or answer to Matisse about his initiative. For the case of the Constellations exhibition, where what was on sale was a portfolio with Jacomet reproductions of Miró's gouaches, a difficulty arised. On the one hand it was impossible to further reduce the size of small gouaches of 38 by 46 cm and reproduce them with fidelity by hand. Jacomet had copied them by reducing them slightly, but to reduce them to a size similar to the pochoirs he made for Berggruen, 's plaquettes (22 by 24 cm once opened) was, if not impossible –they would contain millimeter color signs– at least extremely laborious and without doubt quality and clarity would be lost. To overcome the problem and provide an alternative with a market value that would interest potential buyers –and therefore the gallerist– Jacomet proposed to Miró to make a few hundred more copies of the Constellations pochoirs and cut them into three pieces. Each pochoir included in the porfolio had dimensions of 35.6 by 43.2 cm, this is 1,538 square cm of surface, and each double page of the plaquettes had 22 x 23.4 cm, or 514 square cm, this is exactly one third of the pochoir. The idea was to include in each catalog three fragments of complete pochoir, but the edition in the catalog could not compete with the porfolio, because the cut was made in the middle of the side of 43.2 cm and until it reached 23, 4 cm. In this way, of each pochoir of the porfolio what was used was the right part if it was vertical and the top part if it was horizontal, 'discarding' the remaining 13.2 by 43.2 cm. The small pochoirs of the plaquettes, in number of three for each catalog, also corresponded to portions of three 462 Orozco 2015, pp. 188-189 219 different original pochoirs, so that the collectors could not put them together and compose a complete pochoir. What they could do was to buy several catalogs and, if they were lucky, put together two small pochoirs from the same Constellation to form two thirds of an original pochoir. With this condition, Miró gave his approval, Jacomet printed several hundred copies more of the pochoirs and Berggruen , ended up with hundreds of catalogs that included in this case not a reproduction of the works that were proposed for sale in the exhibition, as it was customary, but pieces that were exactly equal to the 'originals' that the expensive portfolio included, only cut in three and mixed. And Berggruen , was even more Machiavellian. Since he had a few hundreds pochoir pieces of 13.2 by 43.2 cm, discarded when cutting the pieces for the plaquettes, he decided to use them, folded in two, to form the invitation card for the opening cocktail of the exhibition. In order to avoid that at some point the three pieces of pochoir could be put together to build a complete one, the invitation card was cut very slightly. It was again, as was the case with the catalogs, the first-and only-time when the invitation card for the vernissage contained a part of the original work that was on sale at the exhibition. When the devaluation of the French Franc took place in December and Matisse limits the sale of the album to Berggruen, because of the price fixed in advance, the copies of the Constellations plaquette increased in value. Heinz did not publicize the fact that this catalog contained fragments of the original pochoirs instead of reproductions and kept the copies for sale to collectors when he had no more copies of the complete album, which did not take long to occur because of the demand of gallerists who tried to buy cheaper than the market price in the United States. The result has been that this plaquette, number 28 of the Berggruen catalog collection, is the only one completely absent from the market, and can only be purchased when it is sold –very rarely– at an auction, coming from a private collection. But let's go back to the portfolio itself. One of the concerns of Pierre Matisse when publishing the Constellations was to control the number of printed copies. It was not enough to have limited numbered copies, because the gallerist knows well the practice of Aimée Maeght, with the complicity of Mourlot and Miró, of printing more artist copy lithographs that those formally edited as reflected in the catalogues raisonnées. The hors commerce (out of trade) or 'HC' copies were distributed to the painter, who had his own sales channels for small quantities of lithographs, and the publisher, who kept and sold them years –or decades as we can see today– after the commercial edition was exhausted. Matisse therefore limits the number of copies of the Miró/Breton Constellations porfolio and warns his associates –especially Mourlot– that, on this occasion, he will not tolerate cheats. 384 copies of the portfolio are printed in total, and we haven’t found in twenty-five years of market surveillance more than a single unnumbered copy. Although we have found loose unnumbered copies of the lithographs that accompanied the pochoirs, which proves, that once again, Miró and Mourlot managed to do business secretly behind the publisher’s back. Pierre Matisse, who did not sell individual lithographs, did not participate in the scam. 220 The 384 copies of the portfolio were distributed as follows. Three hundred and fifty copies constituted the trade edition, separated in five price categories: The most expensive were the first ten albums, numbered from 1 to 10, which in addition to the 22 pochoirs contained an original etching ( Miró Engraver nº 269) printed by Frélaut in black with gray background on 45 by 36 cm Arches vellum paper, that is, practically of the same size as the Jacomet pochoirs (43.2 x 35.6 cm); the same etching printed in black with a green background (Miró Engraver 270) and another proof of the etching printed in black but enhanced by Miró’s own hand with watercolor. We have only had access to one of these specimens, which Miró improved with large green and yellow spots, a 'crown' in violet and two eyes in red and yellow. The ten 'super luxury' copies also carried two lithographs in colors printed by Mourlot on Arches vellum paper 36.1 by 45.1 cm (Miró Lithographs 260261). These first ten porfolios also had a page handwritten by André Breton. Evidently, the five engravings that accompanied the portfolio were numbered and signed by Miró. The following forty copies of the album, numbered 11 to 50, carried, accompanying the 22 pochoirs, a proof of the etching in black, another proof of the same print with the background in color, as well as the two lithographs, the four prints being signed. The next fifty copies of the set, numbered from 51 to 100, were accompanied by the etching printed in black and the two lithographs. The next group of fifty copies of the portfolio, numbered from 101 to 150, no longer carried any etching, but had the two lithographs in colors. And finally, the last two hundred copies, numbered from 151 to 350, had as sole complement to the pochoirs a signed proof of the lithograph in colors bearing the number 261 in the catalogue raisonné. In addition to the 350 copies of the trade edition, Pierre Matisse authorized the printing of exclusively thirty-four out of trade copies. Twenty-two were nominative copies numbered I through XXII and were given as compensation to the owners of the original gouaches who had lent their fragile pieces to be sent to Paris and thus reproduced in pochoir by Jacomet. One of the copies was printed in the name of Pilar Juncosa as owner. According to the catalogue raisonné of Miró's books 463, these copies –free for the recipients– corresponded to the cheaper ones of the trade edition, and therefore they carried only the second lithograph in colors (Dupìn 261) signed by 463 Cramer 1989, pp. 166-167 221 Miró. However, the justification sheet of the Constellations album does not specify that copies out of commerce carry a lithograph or any etching. The remaining nontrade copies of the Miró/Breton album, those marked hors commerce, were the ones that concerned Pierre Matisse most due to the lax habits of Maeght and Mourlot. He thus limited them strictly to twelve copies of the unnumbered porfolio but marked 'HC '. This is an exceptionally low number in this business, and were to be distributed among the collaborators who had allowed the work to be carried out, among which Miró himself; André Breton; Pierre Matisse; Daniel Jacomet; Fernand Mourlot, Jacques Frélaut, owner of the Atelier Lacourière-Frélaut; Marthe Fequet and AlbertPierre Baudier, owners of the Fequet & Baudier printing company; Heinz Berggruen , and probably Jacques Dupin. According to Cramer, these copies of the album would also carry a proof of the second lithograph. To understand how the dealer's income could increase thanks to the gradation of the copies, we would say that the price of 2,000 new francs for the basic copies was not excessively expensive. To compare, we have looked for an example of an artist book from the same period and with a similar price: for the 199 cheapest copies of Jean Cocteau'.s book "Picasso de 1916 à 1961", which contained twenty-four black lithographs by Picasso of very simple facture, the publisher charged in 1962 2,250 francs. But, as happened with the Constellations album, the price of Cocteau's book went up for the most expensive copies: twenty-five copies at 3,250 francs, fifteen at 5,000, ten at 10,000, five at 20,000 and up to 25,000 francs ($ 43,000 of 2016) of a single copy that contained different originals by Cocteau.. In short, if the Éditions du Rocher in Monaco obtained 447,750 new francs for the 199 plain copies, the 56 most exclusive copies provided another 381,000 francs. That is, a total of 828,000 francs in 1962 (more than one million four hundred thousand dollars in 2015). And in the case of the Constellations, there were two hundred cheaper copies as opposed to one hundred and fifty 'specials', ten of which carried among other additional elements besides the pochoirs, an etching colored by hand by Miró. If we are to believe the catalogues raisonnées of engravings and lithographs, the first by Jacques Dupin and edited by Daniel Lelong and the second initiated by Mourlot, then continued by Maeght and finished by Lelong, the prints that accompanied the portfolio would have been printed –with the numeration corresponding to the book– at only fifty copies of the etching with a green background and one hundred of the same black print, plus the ten of the black etching that Miró colored. As for the lithographs, one hundred and fifty copies of the first and three hundred and fifty of the second would have been produced. But more copies of the prints were printed than those admitted by the catalog of illustrated books and lithographs. We must bear in mind that the hors commerce copies were actually formally reserved to the publisher, not the artist. They are a deformation of the concept of 'épreuve d'artiste' that Picasso agreed with Kahnweiler and Mourlot accepted in 1945. In the case of Picasso, and apart from the trade edition that was generally 50 copies, the number of 'e.a.' was limited to 5 plus 1 copy for the printer, although Mourlot printed behind Kahnweiler’s back many more, giving Picasso a dozen and keeping a handful (we estimate that from 3 to 5). Picasso used his to help friends or to finance the Communist Party. But publishers and dealers did not like the arrangement of artist copies, which devalued the commercial edition and from which they obtained no income. For example, Pierre Matisse had the 222 following clause included in his July 25 1946 contract with Miró: “In the event that you made engravings in Paris, or in any other place, we would seek an arrangement, but you commit yourself anyway to reserve me ¾ of the artist's copies, as we did in Paris in 1939”. The publishers then came up with the idea of copies out trade or 'hors commerce', which derives from the publishing world. These were copies for the legal deposit and for the press for which, not being traded, author's rights were not paid. The pretext for introducing the concept in graphic work was that there was also a deposit of prints in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the case of the Constellations, we have found many H.C. copies of the Miró etchings and lithographs in the market, some even without a signature. 223 12. Octogenarian Militantism (1970-1983) While he manages to consolidate his professional relations with Matisse and open a new way of remunerative marketing with Maeght, Miró is still absent from the Spanish art market. He is especially angry about the way he is treated in Barcelona, where the bourgeoisie had received Franco with open arms and is not interested in modern art at all. The group of intellectuals Cobalto 49 organizes an individual exhibition in Galerias Layetanas in 1949, but the effort of Rafael Santos i Torroella, Sebastià Gasch, Joaquim Gomis and Juan Eduardo Cirlot is futile. The exhibition, held from April 23 to May 6, 1949, could not provide any income to the painter, since not a single painting was sold. Actually, as Santos Torroella recalls, the exhibition had been an initiative of his, shortly after meeting Miró, and derived from his idea of publishing a monograph on him after the one he had just brought out about Dalí in a Cobalto Editions collection directed by Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño 464. The text of the book was commissioned to Cirlot, it was made with unusual luxury for the time, and it included two pochoirs reproducing one from 1934 D'Aci and D'Allá (Figures by the Sea) and one from 1936 (Woman and Dog in Front of the Moon). Both were made by the same printer of the original engravings, J. Mateu. Torroella, who in just two years had become very close to the painter, proposed to accompany the edition of the book with an exhibition in homage to Miró at the Layetanas Gallery, which he directed. But the exhibition did not include new work, but 57 early Miró paintings, lent by the friends to whom he had given them, such as Joan Prats, Gomis, Federico Mompou, Rafols, E.C. Ricart, Xavier Vidal de Llobatera etc. It has been said that Joan Prats was his main client, but Miró himself denied it when Raillard tells him in 1975: “Joan Prats was one of the first buyers of your paintings...”, being interrupted by the painter, who states: “...until his death he remained my closest friend. He gave me advice. But he did not buy me anything. At that time people wore hats, and Prats gave them to me continuously. From time to time I gave him a painting ... It was an exchange” 465. 12. Octogenarian Militantism (1970-1983) 464 465 Cirlot 1949 Raillard 1998. p. 137 224 In fact, the Barcelona exhibition of 1949 had an extremely beneficial consequence for American museums. Santos Torroella committed an indiscretion: in the catalog of the exhibition, published as the first issue of magazine Cobalto 49, instead of indicating in each painting the mention 'private collection' that is usually used to protect the anonymity of the owners, he wrote the name of the owner of each of the canvases. Pierre Matisse, who was in Paris, travelled to Barcelona and, annoyed as he was by Aimé Maeght’s joining the Miró business, tracked down the address of each owner, visited them one by one and managed to get hold of the vast majority of paintings 466. It was the purchase of the year for Matisse and one of his best commercial operations. With the works acquired at very low prices he would make in 1951 the The Early Paintings of Joan Miro exhibition, which would supply main museums and North American collections early works of the artist. In spite of the tribute that his friends and Eugenio D'Ors had offered him, Barcelona and Miró still did not reconciliate and the painter decided to leave the Catalan capital, what he did as soon as he had enough money to acquire the Majorca estate. Never again will he reside in the city of Barcelona. Miró was luckier in Madrid, where D'Ors sponsored him in the Salon de los Once in 1949, with important institutional support. Parallel to the myth of the political role of opposition to Franco by the Spanish –and especially Catalan– post-war avant-garde, a fable exposed by authors of diverse political origin, both close to the regime and fierce opponents of the same but who denounce the initial collaborationism of artists such as Oteiza, Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tapies, Modesto Cuixart, etc. 467 another folk tale has been developed that attributes to Joan Miró an anti-Franco political commitment, a determination of 'internal exile' and a silent denunciation of the dictatorship. This vision should be nuanced, taking into account that he chose to return to Majorca, one of the regions with more staunch supporters of the 1936 uprising, only fourteen months after the end of the civil war. According to the same delusion, and using words of his grandson, the painter would have been during the 35 years in which he lived peacefully in Franco's Spain “ignored by the Spanish government, which does not forgive his commitment to freedom during the civil war” 468. Mironian historiography of the last 40 years has been inspired and driven by the establishment that has dominated Catalan politics throughout this era, including of course the tripartite government years between ERC’s ultra nationalists, Pascual Maragall’s PSC social-nationalists and ICV’s national-communists, heirs of the PSUC. Of those 40 years in which, as Professor Francesc de Carreras recalls, “nationalist forces have been pushing for political, social and cultural hegemony within Catalan society” 469. The nationalist establishment has turned Miró and the post-war Catalan artistic avant-garde into champions of democracy and the fight against the Franco 466 Vidal Oliveras, Jaume El tiempo del arte: conversación con Santos Torroella, Kalias. Revista de Arte, nº 17-18 IVAM. Instituto Valencino de Arte Moderno, Valencia, 1997, pp. 86-113 467 See for example Marzo 2006. 468 Punyet Miró, J.& Lolivier-Rahola, 1998 p. 102 469 De Carreras, Francesc La independencia que viene de lejos, El País Opinión, Madrid 05.05.2014 225 regime, a paradigm that has spread throughout the world but that would certainly require a critical review. The myth of the progressive, Catalanist, republican and anti-Francoist Miró is based on dubious premises. Joan Miró was a painter of universal sentiments and ambitions who could not help but feel constricted and trapped in a provincial nationalist environment from which he fled as soon as he could and to which he never wanted to return. It is true that he accepted in his old age the flattery of the nationalists because they helped turn him into what he had always wanted to be: an important personality, an artistic monument in the twentieth century. According to the official nationalist discourse, for Miró the central thing was his devotion to the 'Catalan land'. But the adoration of the countryside in art is not linked to cultural or national issues, but to emotional reasons and the search for the simple, the basic, the 'authentic', liberated precisely from all cultural and mythical supplement, and which occurs especially in times of crisis. For the rest, although born in Barcelona, Miró considered himself as Majorcan as Catalan, as he explained in 1966 to Baltasar Porcel, who reminded him that Pilar was from the island: “Yes, but so am I. I'm half Majorcan. The fact of being born in Barcelona counts little for your roots. My mother was Majorcan” 470. Besides, as Cirlot pointed out, if Miró's art is reminiscent of the paintings of Romanesque churches and Catalan folk art, it is in the same way close to Egyptian and Roman sarcophagi and tablets, Byzantine and Russian icons, or to Celtiberian schematism and the Sumerian aesthetic world 471. It is striking that the artistic and political intellectuals of late-Francoism (1965-1975) – almost all of whom came from Falangism or the Franco bureaucracy– have built a legend of resistance to the Franco regime that has become the paradigm, the mantra repeated non-stop since the return of democracy. As Jorge-Luis Marzo explains “In this voluntary blindness, stories have been devised that are not entirely objective about the postwar avant-garde: heroes subjected to moral pressures and who find in the introspection of matter the refuge of freedom” 472. The Spanish artistic avant-garde, and especially the Catalan one, which in the second half of the twentieth century reaped international successes comparable to those that the precedent one (Picasso, Gris, Miró, etc.) had achieved before 1950, was, independently of its intrinsic value, the product of the inexhaustible activity of the cultural establishment of the first Francoism, driven by people like General Franco ministers Joaquín Ruíz Gimenez, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Alfredo Sánchez Bella and, especially, the curator of exhibitions of the Institute of Hispanic Culture Luis González Robles. If Antoni Tapies, Manolo Millares, Antonio Saura, Jorge Oteiza, Chillida, Modesto Cuixart and many others reached international fame, exhibited in the MoMA, in the Tate Gallery and other first class museums; if the international art dealers, starting with Pierre Matisse himself, exhibited and sold their work to reputable collectors; and 470 Porcel, Baltasar Joan Miró o l’equilibri fantàstic. Serra d’Or Año VII, nº 4, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1966, Cited by Juncosa Vecchierini 2011 p. 111 471 Cirlot 1949 p. 45 472 Marzo 2006 p. 119) 226 if they could, thanks to all of this, enter the first division of the market, it was only because they were promoted by the enlighted artistic establishment of the Franco regime, which wanted to show in passing that in the then reviled Spain creators produced quality art and did not care about politics. This intention coincided with that of the same purpose advocated by the United States political establishment through the great patron of arts, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and MoMA, which was always at the personal and political service of his family 473. MoMA had been founded by his mother Abigail (Abby) Aldrich and funded by his father John Davison Rockefeller Jr. Nelson came to the presidency of MoMA in 1939, when only 30 years old, and his family continued to control the museum’s destiny until well into the 70s. Even in 2016, his 101-year-old brother David Rockefeller was still honorary president, while his son David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller, wife of Nelson's brother John Davison Rockefeller IV, kept their seats in the board. When Nelson left MoMA’s presidency between 1940 and 1946 it was to assume intelligence and propaganda functions in the Roosevelt administration. He then placed John Hay (Jock) Whitney, a man from the Strategic Services Office and also closely linked to its successor the CIA as his successor. Several Rockefeller subordinates in the Office of Inter-American Affairs were later placed in MoMA, as René d'Harnoncourt, head of the art section in the OAI, appointed in 1944 vice president of the museum and five years later, in the middle of the cold war, Director of MoMA. D'Harnoncourt named as executive secretary of the museum another OSS man, Thomas W. Braden, who shortly thereafter joined the CIA as director of the Division of International Organizations, where he was also responsible for recruiting agents in the cultural and artistic milieu. D'Harnoncourt and his MoMA lieutenant, Porter A. McCray, also from OAI, were the main collaborators of the Franco administration in its efforts to promote politically neutral artists. D'Harnoncourt was in Spain in 1955, accompanying the exhibition Modern Art in the United States that was held in Barcelona in the framework of the III Biennial of Spanish American Art, between September 24, 1955 and January 6, 1956. And he pronounced on September 27 a conference in which he highlighted the freedom enjoyed by Spanish artists of the new avant-garde to decide what they wanted to represent of national identity 474. Jock Whitney Miro, whose participation in art exhibitions was managed at that time by his dealers Pierre Matisse and Aimé Maeght, did not attend most of these incessant exhibition activities, but strongly encouraged young artists to join the initiatives of the Franco government, and he also had some presence in the artistic manifestations. For example, in 1951 he 473 See Cockcroft, Eva. Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War, in Frascina, Francis (ed) Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, Harper & Row, New York, 1985, pp. 125-133 474 Ver Marzo 2006, pp. 64-66 227 participated in the official representation of Spain in the IX Milan Triennial, inaugurated on May 13. The Spanish pavilion was built by Catalan architect Josep Antoni Coderch and the curator of the Spanish exhibition was his close friend Rafael Santos i Torroella –for whose wedding the painter had been best man the previous year. The Milan exhibition was the first time that Spain exported avant-garde art after the civil war. The participation was mainly Catalan, including Josep Guinovart and Josep Llorens Artigas. This happened in 1951, the year of the great general strike in Catalonia, promoted by the CNT. According to Torroella, Miró also collaborated actively in the preparations for the Spanish pavilion at the Milan Triennale in 1952 475. And in any case he participated without doubt in the 1954 Venice Bienniale, in which he obtained the Engraving Grand Prize. Miró's participation in the official Spanish representation of the triennial of 1951 did not please Picasso, who immediately acted to prevent any Spanish artist from taking part in the great exhibition being prepared by the newly appointed education minister Joaquín Ruíz Gimenez for the fall. It was the First Hispanic-American Biennial of Art organized by the Institute of Hispanic Culture (ICH) in Madrid and inaugurated in October 1951 by General Franco, the first openness act (in the artistic sense) of the regime 476. One of the founding fathers of the initiative was Manuel Fraga Iribarne, whom Ruíz Gimenez had appointed ICH Secretary General during his time as director of the Institute. The Christian Democrat minister, well informed of Picasso's difficulties in Paris, where he was confronted with a fierce censorship by the communist establishment, which tried to force him to adopt socialist realism, said in the opening speech of the exhibition that “the education of the aesthetic sense it is one of the most important tasks of the great educational powers” and that art possesses “a legitimate sphere of autonomy as free expression of the individual soul in which the State can not, in its own interest, interfere. The authentic is always impolitic; the inauthentic of art –that is, what is not rooted in creative autonomy– reverts in the long run, whatever the adopted protectionist measures and the apparent successes, in impoverishment and impairment of one's own political work” . Dalí expressed the same provocation more directly, both in his lecture Picasso and I in Madrid, on November 11, 1951 (in which he pronounced his famous “Picasso is a communist, neither am I”) as in the telegram that on the same day, he sent the artist: "The spirituality of Spain today is the most antagonistic to Russian materialism. You know that Russia purges for political reasons even music. We believe in the absolute and catholic freedom of the human soul. Know then, that despite your current communism, we consider your anarchic genius as an inseparable heritage of our spiritual empire and your work as a glory of Spanish painting. God bless you” 477. Everything was perfectly coordinated, as shown by a photo taken that same day at the Institute of Hispanic Culture, and in which appear 475 Marzo 2006, p. 42 See Álvaro Oña, Francisco Javier La “I Bienal Hispanoamericana” de 1951. Paradigma y contradicción de la política artística franquista, dissertation to the VII Congreso da Asociación de Historia Contemporánea Santiago de Compostela-Ourense, 21-24 September 2004. 477 Reproduced in Cabañas 1996 página 506. 476 228 sitting chatting amicably the General Secretary of the Biennial Leopoldo Panero, Manuel Fraga, Salvador Dalí, general director of Fine Arts Antonio Gallego Burín and the intimate friend of Miró Rafael Santos Torroella. Fraga, Torroella et al From the moment the idea of the biennial in Madrid was launched, to which he was invited, Picasso mobilized Spanish and Latin American artists, denouncing the maneuver and urging them not to participate in it 478. The Picasso initiative, which was supported by the artists of the Spanish School of Paris (Bores, Peinado, Dominguez, Viñes, Fernandez, Palmeiro, Fores, Clavé, M.A. Ortiz, Grau Sala, Parra, Pelayo, González de la Serna, Fenosa, Lobo and García Condoy) took the form of a manifesto in which the artists point out their opposition to the project of the Institute of Hispanic Culture while warning the artists and invited countries that a participation in it would constitute a direct collaboration with the Franco regime, and they urged the holding of alternative exhibitions. The manifesto was surprisingly published in Spain in No. 34-35, November 1951, of the Madrid journal Correo Literario. Hispano-American Art and Literature, directed by the poet and top authority of the biennial Leopoldo Panero. Despite the call to boycott, most of the invited painters agreed to participate. Joan Miró would have hinted to the organizers that he would attend and his name appeared everywhere. When Correo Literario published on March 15, 1951 the call for the Biennial, it accompanied the announcement with an interview of Miró by his friend Santos i Torroella. When asked to give “some guidance for young Spanish painters”, Miró replied: “First of all, that they keep the Spanish racial sense and that they are sincere. If they need to look at a mirror, there is our great Romanesque painting” 479. In August, Correo Literario announced that Miró was going to attend, which spread throughout the press. On the eve of the exhibition, Sanchez Bella, who had replaced 478 See Fernández Martínez, Dolores Complejidad del exilio artístico en Francia, Revista Migraciones & Exilios: Cuadernos de la Asociación para el estudio de los exilios y migraciones ibéricos contemporáneos, nº 6, UNED, Madrid 2005, p.p. 23-42 479 Santos Torroella, 1951. Rowell 1992 p. 226 229 Ruíz Gimenez as director of the ICH, reiterated in an interview that Miró would attend, since “he has promised us his participation”. General Franco enjoys exhibition room of ‘revolutionary’ Catalan painters, close to Artigas But at the time of the inauguration, Miró neither showed up nor contributed works, possibly fearing the wrath of Picasso and his capacity to mobilize French intellectuals against him 480. But many painters attended the Biennale: Dalí and many others, and particularly the members of the Catalan group Dau al set (Joan Ponç, Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart and Joan-Josep Tharrats), as well as Zabaleta, Josep Guinovart, Benjamín Palencia, Ortega Muñoz, Manolo Millares, sculptors Jorge Oteiza, Josep Clará, Joan Rebull and Josep Maria Subirachs. According to Antoni Tàpies, while General Franco was observing a painting of his, together with Miró’s intimate friend Josep Llorens i Artigas, who also exhibited, the president of the Catalan Section of the Spanish Association of Art Critics, Alberto del Castillo, explained to the dictator: “Excellency, this is the room of the revolutionaries”. The tyrant's response was: "As long as you they do the revolutions like this...” 481. The anecdote was reflected in a photograph. Of the thirty-eight prizes awarded in the Francoist Biennial, eleven were awarded to Catalan "revolutionary" artists. The invitation to Miró would be repeated two years later at the II Bienal de São Paulo, for which Juan Ramón Masoliver, who would in 1986 receive the Fine Arts gold medal with Pilar Juncosa, was appointed curator. He got in touch with Miró and said that he had promised his participation and presence in the exhibition. Sanchez Bella would explain, however, seven months later that Miró could not participate because his entire production was in the hands of his dealers, which seems perfectly credible. In any case, the artists of the new avant-garde gradually cut ties with the Franco regime to the extent that they were being thrown into the limelight in museums and signing contracts with galleries around the world. But they did it only when each one, individually, could afford it, and later than they later claimed to have done so. Tapies, 480 Cabañas Bravo 1996, p. 305 Tapies, Antoni Memoria personal. Fragmento para una autobiografía, Seix Barral, Barcelona 1983 pp. 376-377 481 230 for example, said that he had already broken with the regime in 1958, but the truth is that he continued to participate in exhibitions sponsored by the Franco government, such as the exhibition "Before Picasso, after Miró" at the Guggenheim in New York in 1960 482. The catalog of the exhibition, with a preface by James Johnson Sweeney, expressed his gratitude for the "suggestions, help and generous cooperation" of, among others, “Ambassador José María de Areilza; General Director of Fine Arts Antonio Gallego Burin; General Director of Cultural Relations José Ruiz Morales; Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Fernando Chueca Goitia; the General Director of Museums of Barcelona Joan Ainaud de Lasarte; Antoni Tapies; Joan Prats, Josep Lluis Sert ... and Joan Miro” 483. That is to say, that in the sixties of last century Joan Miró and his closest friends –be them republican or not– collaborated with the artistic authorities of the regime to promote Spanish art abroad. And Tapies, Cuixart and many other artists continued to benefit from it. Even more important was the exhibition that took place in that same year of 1960 at MoMA New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, organized by Porter A. McCray, another of Rockefeller's men at the OAI, in which the same painters participated. And this exhibition continued in the United States in an itinerant way until the end of 1962 thanks to a donation from the CBS Foundation, through which William Paley, owner of Columbia Broadcasting System and member of the MoMA board since 1937, channeled cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency CIA 484. Paley himself admitted such collaboration in his memoirs 485, pointing out without embarrassment that in the early 1950s, a representative of the CIA came to see him and asked him to use his foundation. He thought it was his patriotic duty to accept. MoMA president Jock Whitney also provided 'cover' to the CIA, through the Whitney Charitable Trust. Whitney also collaborated with other CIA structures, such as Radio Free Europe or the Congress for Cultural Freedom 486. MoMA’s press release presenting this exhibition, pointed out that “The long period of Spain’s isolation, from the end of its Civil War (1936-1939) until after the close of World War II, has been followed by period of intense artistic activity. In contrast with the generation of Picasso, Miró and Gonzalez, which had lived and worked largely outside Spain, the ‘new’ Spaniards, though exposed to current art movements while studying abroad, returned to their homeland. 482 Together with Rafael Canogar, Modest Cuixart, Francisco Farreras, Luis Feito, Juana Francés, Lucio Muñoz, Manelo Millares, Juan Hernández Pijuán, Carlos Planell, Manuel Rivera, Antonio Saura, Antonio Suárez,Vicente Vela, Juan Vila Casas, Manuel Viola, and Fernando Zobel. 483 Before Picasso: After Miro, The Solomon K. Guggenheim Museum, Nueva York, 1960. Text available at http://www.guggenheim.org/component/flippingbook/book/58?tmpl=component 484 See Stonor Saunders, Frances. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The New Press, New York, 1993 pp. 220-221; Also Bernstein, Carl. The CIA and the Media: How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up, Rolling Stone, Nueva York 1977 (available at http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php 485 Paley, William S. As It Happened, Simon and Schuster, New York 1979. 486 Massey, Anne The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 19451959, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1995 p. 66 231 There, much of their time is devoted to the propagation of contemporary aesthetic ideas” 487. The exhibition of Spanish 'apolitical' artists reincorporated into Franco's Spain was then taken to Washington DC and nine cities in the United States and Canada. Antoni Tàpies with Franco propagandist Eugenio D’Ors The consecration of Miró in his native country did not happen until the 1968 great exhibition of his 75th anniversary, in a considerable effort of the Franco regime authorities, notably directed by Manuel Fraga Iribarne. Since 1962 he was Minister of Information and Tourism and had promoted as no one else the tourist development of Spain. Miró would then take over, providing the logo that Spain uses for its tourism campaigns. The design, approved by the painter shortly before his death, is based precisely on the poster he made for the August and September 1968 commercial exhibition at the Maeght Foundation. The show displayed some of the works that – increased in number and quality to constitute an authentic retrospective– would be shown in at the Hospital de la Santa Cruz in Barcelona between November 1968 and January 1969. The poster design, turned into a sun, was completed with the text 'Spain' drawn by Miró for the 1982 football world cup poster. Thanks to the work and the excellent contacts of the regime’s museum bureaucrats, such as Luis González Robles –who in that year would take over the direction of the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art– international museums provided a quantity and quality of work never seen before in Spain. For example, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm lent her 1918 The Vegetable Garden with Donkey, a forerunner of The Farm –which Hemingway's widow did not lend. The Still Life with Rabbit of 1920-21; Interior of 1922-23; the Maternity of 1924; Head of a Catalan Peasant of 1925; Dutch Interior I of 1928 and Still Life with Old Shoe also arrived in Barcelona – all six borrowed by MoMA– as well as the gouaches Woman With Blond Armpit Combing Her Hair by the Light of the Stars, Awakening in the Early Morning and The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers of the Constellations series. Morning Star, which was still in Miró's hands, was also on display. Even Picasso collaborated without any sting to the success of the show promoted by Fraga Iribarne, lending the Miró paintings he had in his collection: Self-portrait of 1919 and the Portrait of a Spanish Dancer of 1921 488. 487 MoMA press release No 85 of 07.20 1960 New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, Nueva York. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/2710/releases/MOMA_196 0_0108_85.pdf?2010 488 Note that the paintings had been bought by Picasso from dealers. There were no gifts from Miró nor exchange of works between the two painters. 232 The other great support of the 1968 exhibition was Barcelona mayor José María de Porcioles, who, like Miró, had also fled Republican Catalonia in 1936 to join Franco's Spain. It was Miró's first retrospective held in his hometown and the painter had a huge illusion, making every possible effort in the preparations. The struggle of everyone involved in this exhibition was considerable, mobilizing the municipality of Barcelona in its entirety and with the unconditional support of the Provincial Council and the Madrid authorities 489. 1968 was proclaimed ‘The Year of Miró’, the painter was awarded the Gold Medal for Artistic Merit and a commemorative plaque was placed on the facade of the house where the artist was born. The great show was conceived in four parts: a retrospective constituted by works realized between 1914 and 1960, coming from the painter’s own collection, his friends of Barcelona and museums of the whole world; an exhibition 'Miró's current painting' with the 125 works that had been displayed in Maeght's commercial exhibition; a third manifestation composed of ceramics, engravings and sculptures; and finally, a space dedicated to exhibiting the more than one hundred artist books illustrated by Miró until then. All this accompanied by a graphic biography consisting of photographs contributed by the painter, family and friends and by the Historical Archive of Barcelona. An Organizing Board was constituted for the exhibition and conferences were held, one of which by Jacques Dupin, the painter's official biographer. In addition to Joan Prats, Joan Ainaud de Lasarte, director since 1948 of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia and of the Art Museums of Barcelona, played an essential role in the exhibition. And the painter’s friends Josep Llorens Artigas, Alejandro Cirici Pellicer and Sebastia Gasch also participated. All of them collaborated in a special issue of the magazine Miscellanea Barcelonesa that the city council published to promote the event. From Madrid also came the support of José Camón Aznar, who dedicated to the painter number 89 of his Goya Magazine of art, which included among others, long articles by him (The art of Miró) and by Alberto del Castillo (The great Joan Miró exhibition in Barcelona). Despite having done his utmost for the success of the exhibition, the painter slipped away at the last moment to avoid attending the inauguration by Minister Manuel Fraga. We were already almost in 1969 and the program of rewriting Miró's biography was under way, so that a photo of him together with the Franco minister was not appropriate. Shortly before the event, the painter alleged a supposed rise in temperature to cancel his attendance. But he had no objection to receiving the Barcelona medal from the hands of Falangist Porcioles. Actually, the mayor had only become a Falangist upon his arrival at Franco's headquarters in Valladolid in the spring of 1937. He had previously been head of the Lliga (the Catalan nationalist conservative party) in Balaguer, Lleida, where he was a notary. If he ran away it was because in the course of the massacres of dozens of priests, Falangists and traditionalists, he was arrested and sent to the Lérida prison. As soon as he got out of prison, he vanished and resurfaced, like many members of the Lliga, in Franco's headquarters. 489 See Gasch, Sebastián, El “año Miró”, diario ABC, 03.23.1968 233 Manuel Fraga and Porcioles inaugurate the Miró exhibition The 'collaboration' of Miró and other Spanish artists with the regime's artistic establishment should not be judged with severity, as did Eduardo Arroyo, who in his series Miró remade or the misfortunes of coexistence, denounced in 1967 the symbiosis between the artistic avant-garde and the regime, going as far as to remake The Farm into another painting called España te miró el culo (Spain looked at your ass) converting it into an extermination camp with Nazi symbols. The series was presented at the Miró rifatto exhibitions in the Galleria De Forcherari in Bologna and in the Galleria Il Fonte di Spade in Rome, taking it two years later to the Miró refait exhibition at the Galerie André Weil in Paris. In 1975, Raillard asked Miró what he tought of the accusation by Arroyo of working peacefully in Spain without giving any sign of explicit opposition to Franco, and Miró answered: “It is so banal to think that you can intervene directly in history ! It is pure naivety. It was naive, this Arroyo story, it's no use beating around the bush” 490. Actually, the heterodox figures of the museum establishment of the Franco regime came to contact even the intransigent Picasso, who according to José María Moreno Galván, later art guru of Spanish leftists, did not boast of his intransigence. The painter, who received the critic in 1956 as an envoy from the National Museum of Contemporary Art, explained “with a mixture of stubbornness and melancholy” that “certain attitudes, once taken, bind you for life” 491. The initiative to do a Picasso exhibition in Madrid on the occasion of its 75th anniversary did not bear fruit, but the painter discussed for the first time the possibility of donating some thirty works for a museum, a donation that materialized a decade later in Barcelona, after new transactions between Picasso and the Franco authorities. What is more reprehensible than the use of the means the Franco regime provided to promote not openly rebel artists, is the subsequent attempt to hide personal history or 490 See Fernández de Castro, Alex 'La masía', un Miró para Mrs. Hemingway. PUV Universidad de Valencia, 2015 491 See Tusell García 2009 234 the perks that were obtained from the Franco regime. Although Miró did not owe at all his artistic success to Franco or his collaborators, he was not bothered by the regime either, and he collaborated with the artistic authorities on numerous occasions. He also received recognition from the regime. Nothing to object to here in view of historical circumstances. But the manipulation of his biography has included the concealment of essential aspects of his life to convey a personal image that is far from coinciding with reality. When Joan Miró and his clan decide that the “internal exile” must end, that he must go out and build an image that corresponds to the times that were approaching is in 1970, when the regime appears moribund and the designation of D. Juan Carlos de Borbón as successor in the Head of State as king takes place. General Franco, who was 78 years old, had Parkinson's disease in an advanced state since at least ten years before. In May 1969, General Camilo Alonso Vega visits Franco and meets a Caudillo with a very advanced disease: “he was pale, shrunken and had shaking hands”. In the course of 1970, General de Gaulle visited Spain, and found him “aged and weak” and President Nixon observed that Franco fell asleep during the interview 492. Joan Miró is not in good shape either: he is the same age as Franco and has a very fragile health when he performs the first public act to convey his new image of 'opponent' to Franco. It was a brief visit –first denied and then vindicated– to the self confinement of intellectuals in the Montserrat Abbey on the weekend of December 12 to 14, 1970 (the Tancada), in protest against the Burgos Process against ETA terrorists authors of the first murders of the organization since 1968 –a policeman, a civil guard and a taxi driver who refused to help flee a terrorist. And in 1974, at 81, Miró will make the triptych The Hope of a Condemned Man in protest for the execution of anarchist bank robber Salvador Puig Antich, convicted of killing a policeman during his arrest on the street. In 1998, Puig Antich had become for Miró’s grandson of a “young Catalan nationalist” 493. When Professor Antonio Boix Pons addresses the biographical theme, essential for his 2010 monumental thesis “Joan Miró, the commitment of an artist” 494, he immediately realizes the fragility of the biographical data contributed by critics and the painter himself: “He, like many of the avant-garde artists who have left a detailed memory of themselves, tried to transmit three images: a good man in his private life, a responsible and free artist in his artistic vocation, and a committed personality in his public life without becoming a partisan militant. But to affirm an image of perfection entails the problem that reality is often invented rather than cultivated, transcending the boundaries between biography and art”. Boix goes on to quote George Bernard Shaw 495 : “All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies; I mean 492 See Sánchez Recio, Glicerio, “El Tardofranquismo (1969-1975): el crepúsculo del dictador y el declive de la dictadura”, Hispania Nova, nº 1 Extraordinario, Madrid 2015. pp. 332-333. 493 Punyet Miró, J.& Lolivier-Rahola, 1998 p. 102 494 Text available on-line in http://www.tesisenred.net/bitstream/handle/10803/9407/tabp1de1.pdf?sequence=1, consulted on 09.25.2014) 495 Boix Pons 2010 p.88 235 deliberate lies”. This quote reminds us of another one of Marshal Pétain, contributed by Kahnweiler’s biographer of Pierre Assouline. The French leader once told a journalist: “And why the hell do you want me to write my memoirs? I have nothing to hide”. Boix Pons makes a detailed analysis of the monumental process of rewriting Miró’s biography of that takes place since 1968 and in which an entire army of writers and critics, both Spanish and foreign (Penrose, Raillard, Dupin, Picon, Rowell, Permanyer, Catalá-Roca, etc.) participate and he gives us juicy anecdotes that show the naivety with which the painter acknowledged that he was manipulating the truth with the aim of improving his image: “I hope that people will later see that I was a honest guy”. What happened is that in 1968 the death of the dictator is expected soon and all want to be well placed for the new period that is approaching, whitewashing their biography: “Miró radically changes his vital and artistic priorities, in the sense of evolving from the private to the pre-eminence of the public. This is reflected in several facets: he 'rewrites' his biography, engages in more concrete public causes, reorients his artistic work, his aesthetic thinking evolves, and he accepts that his clan creates his myth and even uses him as an ideological banner, as an icon of the struggle in the new times.” 496 The task of rewriting Miró's biography is carried out with an admirable professionalism. They created, says Boix Pons, “a Mironian biographical corpus according to an authentic work program, on which however many contradictions will weigh. His life is 'rewritten' with an extraordinary increase in the number, length and depth of the statements and interviews he grants, all of them marked by his desire to make the coherence of his new public image as an honest, anti-Franco man, artistworker, based in Catalonia and Majorca; that is, his ambition, only confessed to his most intimate friends and family, to leave as legacy a perfect image, of surviving as an artistic ideal for future generations” 497. And the publishing production volume is impressive. Professor Boix uses as a measure the basic bibliography on Miró included as reference in the 1993 edition of Jacques Dupin's book. In the years 1960-1966 10 books appear. In the years 1967-1975 –from the preparation of the 1968 exhibitions until the death of Franco– 32 books are published. In the following eight years, between 1976 and 1983, production descends to 17 books 498. The rewriting of his biography provokes shocking situations, in which the reality of the events occurred contrasts in an extreme way with the invented story. To solve them, Miró and his biographers do not hesitate to alter the facts in such a crude way that, as Boix points out, “it will harm the full knowledge of his figure, by highlighting many gaps and contradictions in his life and in his artistic evolution”. The new Bible to interpret the biography of the painter will be the book of conversations of Miró with Georges Raillard of 1977, in which the painter –at 84 years of age– develops, specifies and fixes the new paradigm of the person that at that age he thinks he should have been his whole life. Driven by the French cultural establishment, which also seeks to 496 Boix Pons 2010 p.132 Boix Pons 2010, p. 652 498 Boix Pons 2010, p. 200 497 236 improve its own image by attributing itself unjustified anti-Franco laurels, the myth of Miró’s interior resistance against Franco is assumed by the Anglo-Saxon publishing sphere, with the help of Roland Penrose –who nonetheless knew the historical reality– and the critics associated to MoMA, which had a personal and institutional interest in the establishment of the myth. The bulk of the interviews with Raillard –a French state public official– take place while Franco is on his deathbed in the fall of 1975. They had to hurry up. Before Franco died they had to make it clear that Miró was a member of the resistance (“the hatred of Franco did not leave Miró a single day of his life”499). The critic goes as far as to affirm in the preface of his book that Miró “was during fifty years (Sic) sunk like a blue, shining wedge, in the trunk of the Spain subjected to the Francoist rot. On some occasions he manifested his notorious feelings, he published his opposition. But, above all, he did not stop thinking that the work he built day by day, in a surprising frenzy of work, was a response, the most appropriate at the moment and the most fruitful in the future, to that tyranny” 500. Perhaps the best expression of this official but spurious paradigm is the painter's last major exhibition in the world: Joan Miró, The Escape Ladder, which took place at the Tate Modern in London (14.04-11.09 2011), at the Fundación Joan Miró de Barcelona (13.10.2011-25.03.2012) and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (6.05-12.08.2012), promoted by the Minister of Culture of the Generalitat, ERC’s Joan Manuel Tresserras. The financing was provided by the Institut Ramon Llull, created and governed by the Generalitat, and which at that time was directed by the ERC’s deputy Josep Bargalló i Valls. The Embassy of Spain in London, led then by Catalan Carles Casajuana i Palet and the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, headed during the preparation of the exhibition by Catalan Joan Clos i Matheu. The exhibition was accompanied by an important editorial effort, with the publication of a book in several languages and wide dissemination, a book that was presented as follows: “Picasso left Spain, vowing to never return under a fascist government. On the contrary, Miró chose internal exile, fleeing to the island of Majorca, a decision that made him look like a less political artist. This book questions that impression by focusing on the politically engaged works of Miró, from the rural anarchist tradition and strong Catalanism reflected in early works such as The Farm or Head of a Catalan Peasant until the triptych The hope of a condemned man through which he publicly declared his opposition to Franco”501. In a press release, Tate Modern –headed then by Valencian Vicent Todolí– presented the main objective of the exhibition: “to bring to light the political commitment of the artist” and reveal the “more committed side of his artistic practice”. Tate sacralizes the fiction that Miró never fled the Republican Catalonia, stating that “With his young family, he stayed in France during the Spanish Civil War” 502. Note also that in parallel to the exhibition at the foundation, the Museum of History of Catalonia –directed by ultra-nationalist Agustí Alcoberro i Pericay– organized another even more 'political' show with the title Joan Miró. Posters of a time, of a country, and in which presentation it was emphasized that Miró had 499 Raillard 1998, p. 15 Raillard 1998, p. 13 501 Gale, Matthew & Daniel, Marko 2011, back cover. 502 Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Press release dated 09.09.2010, Tate Modern, London 500 237 expressed his desire “that Catalonia occupies a place of its own in the international scene” 503. In Spain, the press followed the slogans of the organizers of the show to the letter. For example, La Vanguardia de Barcelona published an agency dispatch the day after the inauguration, which repeated word for word the text of the press release of the Miró Foundation504. Accompanying the text, in the paper’s magazine, was an article by Joaquim Roglan, in which he quoted the director of the foundation, also turned into an anti-Franco freedom fighter: “'The time has come to show the world his political and social commitment, his indignation before wars and injustices, his Catalanness and his resistance against the dictatorship’. Malet speaks in the still empty rooms of the foundation, that the day General Franco died, did not cancel any event and inaugurated an exhibition as if nothing had happened.”505. As for the prestigious Madrid newspaper El País, it also reproduced word by word the Foundation’s statement on the same day, but it did not not attribute the text to Europapress Agency nor to the Foundation, but to its own staff writers in Barcelona 506. The next day, the newspaper published an article by the art critic of the newspaper Roberta Bosco, who also follows the slogans of the curators of the exhibition word by word and opens with the hackneyed phrase of the pochoir Aidez l'Espagne: “In the current struggle I see, on the Fascist side, obsolete forces, and on the other, the people, whose immense creative resources will give Spain an impulse that will amaze the world”. The article also highlights “the involvement that Miró maintained throughout his life in the great world events” and that the exhibition does nothing but capture “the deep political and social commitment of the artist with his native Catalonia, his environment in the broader sense and the very idea of freedom” 507. In any case, the manipulation did not convince outside of Spain. For Laura Cumming, the art critic of the icons of the left in the United Kingdom –The Observer and The Guardian– the exhibition’s postulate was bit too much for her to swallow, and points out that the exhibition “wants to make him into something he is not –a political artist responding to contemporary events with polemic and protest. One sees the nominal evidence, to be sure –the memorials to the assassinated anarchist, the titles referring to martyrdom and torture. We are to think of Miró's burned paintings as outcries, though they look like large dolls' house windows; to contemplate the parti-coloured Still Life With Old Shoe in terms of the Spanish civil war. But the expressly political works are so weak the best one can say is that Miró's sincerity is not in doubt. Enormous canvases in which a small point is writ too large, tiny sketches that offer no thoughts. The case for Miró as a modern Goya goes against the visual evidence” 508. Neither does the exhibition's postulate pass for Alastair Sooke, art critic of The Telegraph, who 503 Malet, Rosa Maria & Alcoberro, Agustí Joan Miró. Carteles de un tiempo, de un país Europapress, La Fundació Miró reúne 170 obras del artista, La Vanguardia, Barcelona 10. 14.2011 505 Roglan, Joaquim, Todo Miró en su casa, La Vanguardia, Barcelona 10. 14.2011 506 El Miró más completo, El País, Madrid 14.10.2011 507 Bosco, Roberta, La poética del Miró más político, El País, Madrid 10. 15.2011 508 Cumming , Laura Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape – review, The Observer/The Guardian 04.17.2011 504 238 sees a lot of political manipulation in the exhibition: “the spin of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is that the artist was a political animal. Where others see joy in Miró’s paintings, the Tate’s curators, Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale, spy ‘anxiety’ about contemporary political events – clapping the artist in the irons of interpretation. As a result, the Miró on view at the Tate has a hint of a limp, inasmuch as it is possible to impede a giant’s gait... Perhaps the Tate’s curators downplay the impact of Surrealism on Miró because it does not suit their argument. After all, Surrealism is primarily about the inner visions of individual artists, rather than wider political events” 509. The same skepticism is shown by prestigious critic Alex Danchev, who in his chronicle for the Times Higher Education magazine, asks rhetorically if the works presented by the show justify the political interpretation of Miró. Danchev gives his diagnosis of Miró, and therefore of the exhibition, in the first lines of his article: “In art and life, Joan Miró (1893-1983) was an escapologist. He took everything the 20th century had to throw at him, wriggling free of all entanglements, ideological and other”. He adds that the alleged displays of political activism arrive too late in his biography, and concludes by asking about the exhibition “Do the works match the words ?” 510. Marko Daniel was rewarded in 2017 with the job of Director of the Miró Foundation Museum. When the exhibition arrives in the United States, where the MoMA has significantly declined to house it, Ken , Johnson, the art critic of The New York Times, dismantles one by one the postulates that the exhibition tries to pass, pointing out that “On its face, his oeuvre appears remarkably apolitical, especially considering that he lived through two world wars and a murderous civil war in his homeland, Spain”, adding that “evidence of worldly political engagement is hard to find”. According to Johnson, the attempt of the curators of the exhibition to politicize the painter throws a balance of “a muddled effort”, no matter how much the organizers of the exhibition “contend that at certain crucial times in his life Miró did express passionately held political concerns”. For the critic, the pretension of seing “Catalonian nationalism in his early proto-magic realist landscapes and in his more abstract images of the Catalan peasanthunter” it is not supported by the evidence that constitute the works. And the bond that art historian Robert S. Lubar establishes in the catalog of the exhibition between those surprising landscapes and “his vision of an essential Catalonia with the promise of an emergent nation that hoped to participate on the world stage as an equal partner” 511 is not acceptable for Johnson. Besides, he states, “romancing rural life is standard fare in art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne and countless others contributed to that tradition”. For the critic, the fact that “this Edenlike scene (The Farm) happens to be in Catalonia rather than, say, Normandy, is incidental”. And 509 Sooke, Alastair Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern, review. Tate’s Miró retrospective paints the artist as a political animal, playing down his Surrealism, finds Alastair Sooke. The Telegraph, 04.14.2011 510 Danchev, Alex Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape THE (Times Higher Education), London 04. 21.2011 511 Lubar, Robert S., Miro’s Commitment, in Gale, Matthew & Daniel, Marko 2011, p. 37 239 the critic even ends up saying that “Making a political case for Miró’s later work is a harder sell yet” 512. Roland Flamini, the prestigious correspondent for Time magazine in Europe, did not let himself be fooled either and wrote in the Washington Times that “The exhibit’s portrayal of an artist passionately responsive to his era’s political convulsions represents something of a change from the conventional scholarly emphasis on Miró”, adding that “The case for the more politically engaged Miro appears circumstantial at best”. And Flamini noes not fail to remind his readers that while “Picasso shunned his homeland throughout the long reign of the dictator. Miro went home to Spain in 1939 and within two months had resumed work. He remained based there throughout the fascist regime, apparently without interference... He signed no manifestos and joined no public protests” 513. The recreation of his biography, the invention of a story of imagined resistance –the work of his clan and the Catalan political establishment, but to which he lends himself without limits–is not something exclusive to Miró. If we are to believe writer Javier Cercas, “The Transition was in part a great imposture. There were many people who invented their own biography; at the end of the Franco regime it turned out that the whole world had been anti-Franco. A big lie: real anti-Francoists were very few, and that's why Franco lasted what he lasted. This is the truth” 514. Giving your personality to those who build a myth has its drawbacks, and Miró experienced them in the form of appropriation of his image by Catalan nationalism. The then president of the Generalitat Jordi Pujol, today investigated for massive theft of public funds, declared after the painter's death: “not only was he a great Catalan, but he was also always a Catalan nationalist” 515. As Shlomo Ben Ami, Israel's former foreign minister, commented, “A nation has often been a group of people who lie collectively about their distant past, a past often –too often– rewritten to fit the needs of the present” 516. But, as Antonio Boix recalls, the painter was in his later years “more distant from these efforts to pigeonhole him as Catalan, because the flattery he liked the most was that he would be called universal Catalan, and he saw the previous attempts as rejectable 'nationalizations' in which historians and art critics were obedient instruments of political power”517. In fact, when he had to vote in the first free elections of 1977, he refrained from showing any sign of support for Catalanist parties (the PDPC of Jordi Pujol, the UDCIDCC of Antón Cañellas, the EC-FED of Heribert Barrera or the Lliga) or close to 512 Johnson, Ken Filtering Miró’s Work Through a Political Sieve, The New York Times, 08.02.2012 513 Flamini, Roland ‘Ladder of Escape’ celebrates the range of Joan Miro, The Washington Times, 05.03.2012 514 Cercas, Javier La memoria histórica se ha vuelto una industria, Babelia, El País 11.15.2014 515 Boix Pons 2010, p. 1157 516 Ben Ami, Shlomo El espejismo posnacional, El País, Madrid 05.12. 2014 517 Boix Pons 2010 tomo I, p. 175 240 them (PSUC, PSC). He personally voted for the Spanish Popular Socialist Party of Madrilenian Enrique Tierno Galván. His grandson, Emili Fernández Miró, affirmed: “I can tell you, if it is of any interest, that the only time I saw his ballot, he voted for Tierno Galván, when he was still leading the PSP” 518. And that was precisely the only time in which the painter was able to go to the polls in the Spanish democracy: disease ended up knocking him down in 1979, suffering a heart attack 519 and a stroke from which he will never recover, cataracts that will leave him almost blind, and a deep depression that accompanied him until his death four years later. Miró in 1978 with Vicente Molina Foix We can not forget either that his Catalanist pronouncements of the seventies of last century are also closely linked to his need for municipal and Catalan government support for his museumfoundation project, which the Catalanists would turn into a fundamental element of the entire scaffolding of the Miró myth as a national painter of Catalonia. Although it has been said that the idea of the Miró Foundation dates back to 1967, attributed to Joan Prats, the reality is that, as pointed out by Dupin 520, it really emerges from the 1968 exhibition promoted by Franco minister Manuel Fraga and Falangist mayor Porcioles. Initially, the idea was to build a museum that would rival the Picasso one that existed in Barcelona since 1963, thanks to the initiative of Jaime Sabartés, with the support of the painter himself and the collaboration of Porcioles. Precisely in 1968, the painter made his museum a gift of 59 paintings and promised even more. Miró could not be less than Picasso in his hometown. From the first moment, Prats had a solid group to launch the idea, starting with Joaquím Gomis, critic María Luisa Borràs, her partner and PSUC member Francesc Vicens –the Foundation's first director–, notary Ramón Noguera, and the men of the Francoist Porcioles administration that had made possible the Picasso Museum: José Luis Sicart Quert –responsible for culture–, José Blajot –for whom Sert would build a 518 Cited by Boix Pons 2010 p. 186. Sources: Capellà, L. Interview of Emili Fernández Miró. “Última Hora”, Brisas, 299 (10-I-1993) 20-23. Miro’s grandson confirmed the information in Entrevista a Emili Fernández Miró. “El Periódico”, Barcelona 04.03.1993. 519 Boix Pons 2010 p. 1131 520 Dupin 2012 p. 343 241 home– and Joan Ainaud de Lasarte, director of Museums of the city. The Francoist city council offered to cede, as it had done with Picasso, a small palace in Moncada street. But in an initiative that would later take its toll, architect Sert objected, stating that a larger space was needed and that he was willing to build it. In addition, the immediate proximity of the Picasso museum would have placed Miró in the shadow of his fellow Spaniard 521. The move away from the Picasso museum and the entry into play of Sert transformed the idea of the Miró center, turning it into what it later claimed to be: a living center of creation and encounter of the arts. The town hall then offered land on the Montjuic mountain. But the project provoked criticism: painter and illustrator Julián Grau Santos –son of painter Emilio Grau Sala and nephew of Rafael Santos Torroella– expressed his opposition to its construction and even said in an article that “Miró's work is an absolute lie, lacking the most elementary pictorial value ... and in no way comparable to the work of a Picasso or a Klee –two great and authentic creators– ... Miró seems to me an incoherent sum of null values”522. The Foundation was finally inaugurated in June 1975 with an exhibition of drawings donated by Miró. But the institution did not start well. The legal and economic complications were very large and it involved too many actors: Joan Prats as owner of the main canvases that were going to be exhibited; Miró and his heirs, who would immediately cede a collection of his complete graphic work, but nothing more; Maeght and his partners and heirs, who wanted to preserve the privileges granted to the Saint-Paul de Vence Foundation; Sert, Gomis and other members of the Miró clan; the City Council, the provincial administration, the Generalitat and the central state. Right after the inauguration, the painter declared to Georges Raillard in relation to the difficulties that it had to surpass: “It is a miracle, a miracle ... (His chin is twitched, the eyes remain fixed, a silence). I have donated all my graphic work, but things are still difficult...” 523. Miró's hope was focused on the politicians of the democracy that was being prepared: “now, after the elections, conditions may perhaps change”524. But the new museum did not meet the expectations that had been placed on it. The number of visitors never came close to what was expected and did not correspond to the huge investment and maintenance expenses that it represented. According to the Foundation itself, despite the novelty effect, in 1975 only 42,000 visitors were counted, rose to 134,000 in 1978, and fell down again to 75,000 in 1983. Only a fraction of the number of paid visitors received by the Picasso Museum. And some said that in its statistics the FJM counted not only those who entered the museum, but “all attendees to cultural events, including those free of charge, as well as children's educational visits” 525. In any case, the solution to this problem was a greater investment from Barcelona: more identification of Miró as the “national painter of Catalonia”, more exhibitions and cultural events. For this, Miró needed a greater 521 Boix Pons 2010 p. 303 Grau Santos, Miró y la agonía de los museos, Tele-Expres, Barcelona 01.04.1969. Cited by Boix Pons 2010 p. 307 523 Raillard 1998, p. 234 524 Raillard 1998, p. 233 525 Boix Pons 2010 p. 963 522 242 dedication from the Catalan cultural and political establishment, especially from Barcelona. It was therefore imperative to highlight his commitment to the task of nationalist construction. But at the same time identify himself in some way to leftist forces, since in the first municipal elections of democracy, held on April 3, 1979, the left won a resounding victory in Barcelona. Between the PSC and the PSUC they obtained 53% of the votes. This left could also be described as Catalanist, because it disputed the leadership of this current to the conservatives. When in October 1979 Miró was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Barcelona, the ceremony was interrupted by a group of young secessionists and the old painter subscribed a short speech in Catalan with the title “Introductory lesson on the civic conception of the artist”. Given Miró’s physical disability, the text was read by Santiago Alcolea. His speech could not be more Catalanist, and said "that when an artist speaks from a country like ours, cruelly marginalized by an adverse history, it is necessary for him to make his voice heard throughout the world, to affirm, against all ignorance, all the misunderstandings and all the bad faith, that Catalonia exists, that it is original and that it is alive”526. And he marks his support, his commitment to be present alongside all those who strive to serve “men in general and particularly their people and the full realization of its history.” It was in perfect harmony with the result of the first Catalan regional elections, held five months later, won by Catalanist CIU, whose candidate Jordi Pujol was inaugurated president of the Generalitat with the votes of ERC and the centrists of Anton Cañellas. But the speech, which was intended to constitute a political-artistic legacy, comes forty years late. Critic Alex Danchev can only applaud the words of the painter: “I understand the artist to be someone who, amidst the silence of others, uses his voice to say something... For the fact of being able to say something, when the majority of people do not have the option of expressing themselves, obliges this voice in some way to be prophetic”. But Danchev can not but remind us that this 'courageous' discourse takes place "in 1979, four years after the death of the dictator and the liberation of Spain from the dictatorship”527. The massive support and financing of the municipal and regional authorities managed to get the Miró Foundation out of the hole, but it has not succeeded in placing it at the level of other similar establishments in Catalonia or the rest of Spain. In 2013, for example, when according to the official statistics of the Barcelona City Council the city received seven and a half million tourists, plus a further 2,599,000 cruise passengers 528, the Foundation hosted only 497,719 visitors, thus becoming the 12th receiver of visits in the city, with six times less than the Sagrada Familia, three times less than the F.C. Barcelona or half of the Picasso Museums 529. It also lost its arm wrestling with Miró’s eternal rival Dalí, whose Museum in Figueras received 526 Speech reproduced in Boix Pons 2010 pp. 961-962 Danchev, Alex Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape THE (Times Higher Education), 04. 21.2011 528 Estadísticas del turismo en Barcelona de 2010 a 2014, Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, 2015 pp.374-376 529 Evolución visitantes en lugares de interés de Barcelona. 2011-2013, Ayuntamiento de Barcelona. 527 243 1,333,430 visitors that same year –not including the 136,744 of the Gala Dalí Castle in Púbol and the 110,343 people who visited the Salvador Dalí House in Portlligat. It did manage, however, to get six and a half times more visitors than the museum Foundation of the other great 'national painter' of Catalonia, Antoni Tàpies (76,344 visitors). Although he defended the use of Catalan, Miró must be seen as an internationalist. His life, saving the parenthesis of his old age, is far from nationalism and is closer to Stephen Dedalus's answer to Cranly in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning”530. And feeling Catalan did not make him distance himself from Spain or from Spanish language –which was his home’s language of his last three decades of life– but to the contrary. For him “Spanishness was a link of connection between Catalanness and universality, so it was not possible to renounce the former” 531. Miró distanced himself clearly from separatism, affirming precisely in the final paragraph of his conversations with Raillard in May 1977: “Now I see the Great Hope of the new Spain, with its creative force. I am not in favor of separatism. I am for Spanish unity, European unity, world unity. The closed world is somewhat obsolete. They have already messed enough with borders. The closed world is the bourgeois world” 532. Miró's much-vindicated contribution to the renaissance of Catalan nationalism, which has been using him as a 'national painter', can be summed up in reality to very few things, or, to put it another way, to a handful of posters, all made after the death of Franco and the restoration of democracy 533. Although already in the key year of 1968 had made the announcing poster of the Diccionari Català de Salvat; in 1971 the one of the II Catalan Juridical Congress; in 1974 the 75th anniversary of the F.C. Barcelona; and in 1976, the centenary of the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya and another one welcoming the Avui newspaper. In 1977, Miró made the poster project for the campaign "Volem l'Estatut" (We want the Statute of Autonomy) of the Assembly of Catalonia, organization of the democratic parties that asked for the statute of autonomy and that was dissolved once this was obtained, giving the Spanish region more autonomy than any other one in Europe. The poster was not printed. In any case, the painter did not offer the sketch to Catalonia: he took it out of Spain. The gouache ended in the hands of Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, daughter of Daniel Lelong. In 2010, the Ministry of Culture of the tripartite nationalist-socialist government bought this small sketch on paper of 75x56 cm from its owner for the considerable sum of € 110,000, transferring it to the Museum of History of Catalonia. In a display of imagination, the ineffable counselor Joan Manuel 530 Joyce , James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (5.3.112) Boix Pons 2010 p. 188 532 Raillard 1998, pp. 237-238. Cited in Amón, Santiago, Joan Miró: "Ahora veo la gran esperanza de la nueva España", El País, Madrid 04.20.1978 and in Boix Pons 2010, p. 188 533 See Minguet Batllori, Joan M. Joan Miró: l'artista i el seu entorn cultural, 1918-1983, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Monstserrat, Barcelona 2000. pp. 29-31 531 244 Tresserras (ERC) pretended in the presentation of the poster project in Barcelona that what Miró had written on the poster was Volem l'Estat (We want the State), and that was why he had deviated the writing of the last two letters "UT", a pleasantry that spread among the nationalist media 534. But Miró made the same operation hundreds of times, such as in lithographs for his friend LLORENS ARTI-GAS (Mourlot 835), or JOSEP LLUIS SER-T (Mourlot 1168); CONG-RES on his poster for the II Congrés de Pediatres de Llengua Catalana (Mourlot 1228) or the 60 VOL-TA (Mourlot 1229). Filmmaker Pere Portabella was more understanding with Miró, before a 'lapsus' of the painter, whom he had asked to make a poster for his film Umbracle of 1972. Portabella recalls the anecdote: “'You need money, right ? Well I will make the poster and with the Gaspar Gallery we will make a limited edition, half signed by me. The gallery will keep a few and pay you the value of the rest '... Some time passed and one day Miquel Gaspar called me telling me he had the poster. When I saw it I realized that the 'A' of Umbracle was missing. Gaspar did not know how to tell Miró. I had it clear, if he has done it this way you can not change anything. I made a joke that he was old enough to know what he was doing. And so it remained ! Later I realized that that "A" is duplicated, as if it had slid up”535. Indeed, Miró had written in one line "UMB" 534 See Europa Press wire dated 09.09.2010 La obra de Miró 'Volem l'Estatut' se incorpora al Museu d'Història de Catalunya. Also the press release by the Generalitat dated 9.09.2010 La Generalitat cedeix l'obra de Miró "Volem l'Estatut" al Museu d'Història de Catalunya 535 Martí Rom, Josep Miquel, Pere Portabella y Joan Miró, Centre Miró, Eglessia Vella, Mont-roig 2008 245 and in another under "RCLE". And above UMB appeared a clearly identifiable "A" and another one that was less visible. Artist licenses. 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50, 56, 247 Greenberg, Clement, 122, 123, 124, 146, 186, 247, 251 Gris, Juan, 10, 176, 225 Grund, Helen, 23 Guderian, Heinz, 68 Gudiol i Cunill, Josep, 92 Gudiol Ricart, José María, 47, 48, 51, 92, 93, 94, 95, 246 Guggenheim, Peggy, 62, 133, 159, 187 Guggenheim, Solomon R., 187 Guinovart, Josep, 227, 229 Gusmão, Adriano de, 86, 99, 100, 101, 105 I Iglesias Oromi, Enriqueta, 21 J Jacob, Max, 13, 16 Jacomet, Daniel, 115, 154, 173, 207, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221 Joblau, Caroline, 186 Johnson, Ken, 238, 239 Jouhandeau, Marcel, 15 Juncosa Iglesias, Lluís, 71, 86, 129, 251 Juncosa Iglesias, Pilar, 5, 21, 44, 48, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 100, 119, 144, 216, 220, 225, 229, 246, 251 Juncosa Massip, Lamberto, 21, 71, 72 Juncosa Vecchierini, Elena, 46, 49, 225, 248 Juncosa, Alberto, 72 Junoy, Josep María, 37 K Kahlo, Frida, 142 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 13, 15, 21, 22, 23, 26, 28, 116, 127, 130, 169, 188, 198, 199, 205, 211, 221, 235, 246, 248, 251 Kandinsky, Vasili, 122, 139, 211 Kemper Riley, Maude, 129 Khokhlova, Olga, 16 Klee, Paul, 21, 122, 211, 241 Klimt, Gustav, 139 Kober, Jacques, 201 Kochno, Boris, 17 Kootz, Samuel, 130, 167, 187, 188, 198 H Helm Jr., George Washington, 147 Helm, Michael Hardin Voir Helm, Mrs. Georges W. See Ault, Hildegard Von Steinwehr Hemingway, Ernst, 15, 28, 146, 231 Hérold, Jacques, 69 Hessel, Franz, 23 Hessel, Stéphane, 23 Hirshfield, Morris, 124 Hitler, Adolf, 38, 60, 88, 89 L Lacasa, Luis, 55 Lacourière, Roger, 60, 214, 221 257 208, 209, 211, 214, 219, 221, 223, 224, 226, 232, 241 Maeght, Marguerite, 200, 205 Malet, Rosa María, 33, 44, 78, 86, 113, 237, 248 Malraux, André, 206 Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), 16, 23, 36, 40, 123, 144, 174, 248 Mañach, Pere, 198 Mann, Thomas, 62 Maragall, Pascual, 224 March, Juan, 72 Marchand, André, 201 Margulies, Martin Z., 149 Martí Rom, Josep Miquel, 46, 251 Martín Artajo, Alberto, 181 Martín Martín, Fernando, 32, 35, 36, 57, 58, 248 Marzo, Jorge Luis, 66, 248 Masoliver, Juan Ramón, 229 Massine, Léonide, 10, 26 Masson, André, 15, 16, 22, 23, 26, 27, 53, 61, 110, 251 Matarasso, Henri, 207 Matet, Maurice, 179 Matisse Amélie, 186 Matisse, Alexina 'Teeny' Sattler, 58, 89, 113, 140, 148, 149, 162, 194, 195 Matisse, Henri, 9, 23, 24, 27, 53, 60, 74, 105, 106, 122, 127, 144, 147, 152, 157, 158, 170, 185, 186, 187, 191, 198, 200, 201, 203, 210, 211, 218 Matisse, Marguerite, 185, 186, 191, 192 Matisse, Patricia Kane Matta, 119, 135, 140, 148, 162 Matta, Roberto Sebastián, 61, 106, 127, 148, 152, 162 May, Saidie A., 133 McCray, Porter A., 226, 230 McEntire, Vera Roberta, 119, 143, 144 McEntire, Walter Francis , 144 McKim, Mrs. William See Bevans, Charlotte McKim, William (Bill) Lee, 119, 167 Melo Neto, Joao Cabral de, 86, 99 Metcalf, Elizabeth See Paine, Elizabeth Mason Lamba, Jacqueline, 62, 164 Lanchner, Carolyn, 134, 248, 249 Lansdowne, Helen Bayleff, 119, 165, 166, 174 Larrea, Juan, 55 Laughlin, James Laurence, 166 Laughlin, Thomas, 133 Laugier, Dr. Henri, 98, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181 Laurencin, Marie, 10, 24, 139, 150 Laurens, Henri, 53, 176, 211 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 182 Léger, Fernand, 10, 53, 61, 142, 159, 174, 176 Leiris, Louise, 23, 28, 198 Leiris, Michel, 15, 16, 22, 23, 52, 60, 73, 247 Lelong, Daniel, 205, 206, 221, 243 Lelong-Mainaud, Ariane, 243 Lenars, Arthur, 90, 91 Lerroux, Alejandro, 31, 72 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 62 Lévy, Dominique, 158 Lewisohn, Samuel A., 25 Libbey, Edward Drummond, 174 Lieberman, William (Bill), 209, 215 Lifar, Serge, 17 Lilly, Evan Frost, 139 Limbour, Georges, 16 Lippincott, Josephine Sarah, 120 List, Herbert, 202 Llorens Artigas, Josep, 12, 67, 100, 103, 105, 111, 126, 131, 207, 227, 229, 232 Lloyd Kreeger, David, 148 Lobo, Baltasar, 228 Loeb, Pierre, 17, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 61, 85, 88, 89, 97, 115, 116, 127, 180, 181, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 198, 203, 204, 205 Lolivier-Rahola, Gloria, 249 Lozoya, Marquis of, 95, 99 Lubar, Robert S., 238, 250 M Macià, Francesc, 31 Maeght, Aimé, 22, 33, 57, 132, 190, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 258 Metcalf, Thomas Newell, 173 Milans del Bosch, Joaquín, 12 Millares, Manolo, 225, 229 Miller, Dorothy C., 139 Miller, Henry, 15 Miravitlles i Navarra, Jaume, 48, 49, 50, P Paepcke, Mrs. Walter P. See Nitze, Elizabech 'Pussy' Paepcke, Walter, 174 Paine the 2nd, Robert Treat, 172 Paine, Elizabeth Mason, 119, 172, 173 Paine, Robert Treat, 172 Palau i Fabre, Josep, 248 Palencia, Benjamín, 229 51, 54, 246 Miró i Ferrà, Maria Dolors, 8, 41, 64, 71, 92, 96 Miró Juncosa, María Dolors, 48, 67, 69 Miró, Miguel, 8, 9 Misson, Mary-Katherine, 156, 157 Mitchell, Jan, 146, 147 Mitterrand, François, 164 Mnuchin, Robert, 158 Molina Foix, Vicente, 40, 72 Mondrian, Piet, 61, 151, 152 Monleón, Manuel, 55 Moreno Galván, José María, 233 Morris Jr., H. Cameron, 150 Morris, George Lovett Kingsland, 39, Paley, William S., 230 Palmeiro, José, 228 Panero, Leopoldo, 228 Parra, Ginés, 228 Payne Card, Elizabeth L. See Paine, Elizabeth Mason Peinado, Joaquín, 228 Pelayo, Orlando, 228 Penrose, Roland, 32, 34, 43, 44, 48, 50, 51, 67, 68, 77, 80, 81, 86, 235, 236, 248 Péret, Benjamin, 15, 16, 45, 46, 52, 56, 62, 69, 98 Pérez Jorba, Joan, 14 Perin Smith, Dorothy, 146 Perls, Frank, 150 Perls, Klaus, 150 Permanyer, Lluis, 44, 46, 86, 99, 119, 192, 205, 235, 248, 251 Perucho, Joan, 72 Pesquero Ramón, Saturnino, 84, 249 Peyrissac, Jean, 201 Phelps de Cisneros, Patricia 'Patty'', 119, 147 Phelps, Jr, William H., 147 Picabia, Francis, 10, 21 Picasso, Pablo Ruíz, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 27, 37, 54, 55, 60, 70, 74, 76, 79, 82, 98, 103, 104, 116, 122, 123, 124, 130, 138, 140, 154, 158, 159, 169, 171, 173, 181, 182, 187, 188, 189, 198, 201, 203, 211, 214, 218, 221, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 236, 239, 240, 241 Pierpont Morgan Jr., John, 120 Pla, Josep, 12, 37 Planell, Carlos, 230 Pleven, René, 178 Ponç, Joan, 229 251 Morris, Herbert Cameron, 150 Morris, Mrs. Herbert C. See Sober, Willavene Motherwell, Robert, 152 Moulin, Jean, 200 Mourlot, Fernand, 127, 188, 198, 201, 202, 209, 214, 218, 219, 221, 247, 248 Muse, Nancy Lee, 161 N Naville, Pierre, 15 Nelson, Paul, 69 Nitze, Elizabeth 'Pussy', 119, 169, 173, 174 Nitze, Paul, 173 Nixon, Richard, 234 Noguera, Ramón, 240 O O'Neill, Eugene, 159 Oromi, Josefa, 21 Orozco, Miguel, 20, 116, 124, 199, 218, 248 Ortiz, Manuel Ángeles, 228 Oteiza, Jorge, 224, 225, 229 259 Porcel, Baltasar, 225 Porcioles, José María de, 232, 240 Portabella, Pere, 244, 251 Prats, Joan, 8, 9, 27, 32, 38, 47, 49, 50, Ricart, Enric C., 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 46, 83, 185, 223 Richier, Germaine, 201 Ridruejo, Dionisio, 64 Riley, Peggy See Rosenbaum, Rosamond Rimbaud, Arthur, 19, 77, 100 Ripley, Harry Dwight Dillon, 119, 135, 51, 52, 54, 58, 64, 71, 73, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 120, 175, 179, 181, 182, 184, 186, 197, 223, 230, 232, 240, 241 Prévert, Jacques, 15 Puig Antich, Salvador, 234 Puigferrat i Oliva, Carles, 40, 43, 251 Pujol, Jordi, 239, 242 Punyet Miró, Joan, 34, 35, 36, 72, 249 Puyol, Ramón, 55 137, 138, 143, 213 Rius, Robert, 69 Rivera, Diego, 142 Rivet, Paul, 98 Roberts, Helene E., 150 Robson, Anne Deirdre, 133, 135, 249, 251 Roché, Henri-Pierre, 23, 24 Rockefeller IV, John Davison, 226 Rockefeller Jr., John Davison, 121, 226 Rockefeller, Abby See Aldrich, Abigail Q Quinn Sullivan, Mary, 121, 170 Quinn, John, 24, 144 Quintanes i Vilarrúbia, Carme, 41 Greene 'Abby' Rockefeller, David, 169, 226 Rockefeller, Jr., David, 226 Rockefeller, Nelson Aldrich, 30, 98, R 105, 106, 226, 230 Rafols, Josep Francesc, 9, 223 Raillard, Georges, 44, 62, 63, 67, 70, 71, Rockefeller, Sharon Percy, 226 Roglan, Joaquim, 237 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 61 Roosevelt, Teddy, 155 Rosenberg, Alexandre, 208 Rosenberg, Leonce, 15, 140 Rosenberg, Paul, 13, 23, 28, 61, 67, 130, 140, 173, 187, 188, 198, 208, 211 Rothko, Mark, 152 Rothschild (family), 61 Rouault, Georges, 127, 133, 150 Rousseau le Douanier, 24 Rowell, Margit, 34, 49, 54, 55, 59, 76, 77, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 115, 116, 180, 190, 228, 235, 249 Ruíz Gimenez, Joaquín, 225, 227, 229 Ruiz Morales, José, 230 Russell, John, 29, 87, 130, 138, 249 73, 155, 214, 223, 233, 235, 236, 241, 243, 246, 249, 251 Rajaratnam, Sukanya, 158 Rebeyrol, Philippe, 116, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 192 Rebull, Joan, 229 Reis, Bernard, 113 Renau, Josep, 55, 249 Repin, Ilya, 123 Resor, Ann, 165 Resor, Helen, 166 Resor, Mrs. Stanley See Lansdowne, Helen Bayleff Resor, Stanley Burnet, 165 Reus Morro, Jaume, 59, 62, 69, 71, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 128, 131, 175, 177, 180, 184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 207, 249 Reverdy, Pierre, 13, 15 Ribot Martín, Domènec, 26, 34, 36, 249 S Saavedra Arias, Rebeca, 51, 252 Sabartés, Jaime, 116, 240 Sachs, Paul Joseph, 121, 122, 123, 252 Sage, Kay, 62, 208 260 Salacrou, Armand, 22 Salas, Xavier de, 66, 108 San Juan de la Cruz, 83 Sánchez Bella, Alfredo, 225, 228, 229 Sánchez, Alberto, 55 Santa Teresa de Jesús, 83 Santos Torroella, Rafael, 67, 223, 224, Subirachs, Josep Maria, 229 Suñol i Garriga, Josep, 40, 41, 42 Sunyer, Ramón, 134 Sweeney, James Johnson, 23, 28, 39, 40, 63, 76, 79, 80, 82, 106, 113, 117, 126, 134, 151, 152, 230, 249, 252 T 228, 241, 252 Sanz Miralles, 55 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 60 Satie, Erik, 10 Saura, Antonio, 230 Scherer, Helen, 119, 139, 140 Schildkraut, Joseph J. , 81, 249, 252 Schoeller, André, 201 Schuman, Robert, 181 Seeger, Helen Buchanan, 157 Seeger, Stanley, 5, 119, 157 Seligmann, Kurt, 62 Sentís, Carlos, 37 Sert, Francisco, 92 Sert, José Luis, 27, 38, 55, 62, 63, 64, 65, 92, 96, 97, 99, 113, 195, 196, 204, 206, 230, 240, 241 Sert, Josep María, 65 Sert, Moncha, 96 Shapiro, Joseph Randall, 208 Shervashidze, Prince Aleksandr, 26 Sicart Quert, José Luis, 240 Signovert, Jean, 201 Skira, Albert, 27 Smith, David, 152 Sober, Edward K., 150 Sober, Willavene, 119, 150 Soby, James Thrall, 36, 37, 106, 117, 118, 120, 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 135, 156, 209, 214, 215, 249, 252 Soler Elías, Gloria, 41 Solley, Thomas T., 139, 174 Sooke, Alastair, 237 Sorlier, Charles, 202, 249 Soulié, Eugène, 198 Sousa Mendes, Aristides, 61 Stalin, Josef, 60, 88 Stein, Gertrude, 169 Stern, Louis E., 140, 141, 208 Stravinsky, Igor, 157 Talmey, George Nathan, 158 Talmey, Irene Georgia, 119, 158, 159, 160, 161 Tanguy, Yves, 15, 61, 62, 123, 127, 147, 208, 212 Tàpies, Antoni, 73, 229, 243 Tarradellas, Josep, 48 Taueber-Arp, Sophie, 39 Tei, Maria Pilar, 20, 21 Tériade, Efstathios (Stratis) Eleftheriades (Ευσταθιος Στρατης Ελευθεριαδης), 26, 27, 81, 82, 210, 252 Tharrats, Joan-Josep, 229 Tierno Galván, Enrique, 240 Tjeder, Mrs. Rolf See Ault, Hildegard Von Steinwehr Todolí, Vicent, 236 Togores, José de, 12, 21, 205 Toklas, Alice B, 169 Tone, Lilian, 85, 86, 87, 118, 119, 128, 130, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 212, 252 Trabal, Francesc, 31 Tresserras, Joan Manuel, 236, 244 Truman, Harry, 181 Tusquets, Esther, 65, 252 Tzara, Christophe, 69 Tzara, Tristan, 13, 69, 202 U Umland, Anne, 59, 69, 70, 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 97, 104, 107, 108, 184, 185 Utrillo, Maurice, 25 V Vairel, Edmond, 210 261 Valland, Rosa Antonia, 60 Van Velde , Geer, 201 Van Velde, Bram, 201 Vanderpoel Hun, Susan, 156 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 74 Varo, Remedios, 69 Vicens, Francesc, 240 Vidal de Llobatera, Xavier, 223 Vidal y Barraquer, Francisco, 47 Vidiella, Rafael, 43 Villeri, Jean, 201 Viñes, Hernando, 228 Viot, Jacques, 15, 16, 17 Vollard, Ambroise, 10, 21, 198 Wiener, Paul Lester, 63 Wildenstein, Georges, 173, 198 Wingate Lloyd, Mary, 151 Y Ylla i Cassany, Lluís G., 49, 64, 71, 93, 96 Z Zabaleta, Rafael, 229 Zadkine, Ossip, 61 Zahalkaha, Natasha, 119, 135, 141, 142, 162 Zeisler, Claire See Block, Claire Zeisler, Ernest Bloomfield, 145 Zeisler, Richard S., 145 Zervos, Christian (Χρήστος Ζερβός), W Wallach, Ira David, 197 Wallingford III, Buckner Ashby, 147 Watson, Peter, 63, 252 Weill, Berthe, 198 Wheeler, Monroe Lathrop, 104, 124 White, Samuel Stockton III, 144 27, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 60, 73, 90, 116, 159, 176, 180, 181, 191, 193, 200, 203, 252 Zervos, Yvonne, 50, 90, 115, 176 Zweig, Stefan, 66 Whitney, John Hay 'Jock', 226, 230 262