When Miró returned to Paris from Barcelona in the autumn of 1936 he experienced something of a crisis. As the political situation in Spain deteriorated, the French capital became, for the first t.mes
, not an artistic hub to visit, but a place of exile. Unable to return to his native country and initially without a studio in which to work, Miró faced a creative hiatus. His response to this was to return to reality; the following year he went back to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where he had studied when he first came to Paris in 1919 and enrolled in the life drawing classes. The drawings from this period are hugely powerful; the female body is broken down and distorted, the human figure made both fantastic and monstrous. Although returning to “reality” through a historic and conventional artistic process, Miró succeeds in creating works that are highly experimental and modern.
Painted some months later in 1938, Groupe de personnages retains the powerful influence of these graphic experiments. The composition is populated by a parade of figures that must be among some of the most vividly imagined of the artist’s entire oeuvre. The deftly articulated lines that delineate the figures reflect the confidence of the mature artist and Miró orchestrates the drama of these characters through passages of vivid color. The range of their emotions is remarkable; through them the artist expresses anger, alarm, revulsion and amusement. In Shooting Star, painted the same year as the present work, the artist instead uses verticality to emphasize these attributes (see fig. 1). The deformation of the human body, which bears a comparison with Picasso’s Surrealist figures, borders on the grotesque yet that instinct is overcome by the sheer energy of the composition (see fig. 2).
Discussing works from around this period Jacques Dupin also argues that “deformation of the human figure, in works drawn or painted from nature or not, is always related to the artist’s inner problems, his secret wound, his unexpressed revolt.… The horror he feels is translated into his art (no matter what he expresses) in a gesture that releases instinctual energy. These primitive forces, colored with eroticism, aggressiveness and bestiality were not inspired by erotic sensations or some morbid obsession, but by tragic passion” (J. Dupin, Joan Miró. Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 292).
Describings his work from this period in an interview with Denys Chevalier some years later, Miró explained: “that realism, a certain realism, is an excellent.mes ans of overcoming despair, whereas the mistreated form brings you to mutilation, to monstrosity. I therefore returned to drawing. Reflecting on the inexhaustible possibilities of the sign, I ended up envisaging it as an extraordinary enabler of mobility and I treated it as such” (J. Miró, quoted in Miró. La couleur de mes rêves (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 128). The works of 1938 have often been considered a precursor to Miró’s celebrated Constellations of 1940 (see fig. 3). In the present composition there is certainly a sense that his experiments with color—applying the oil paint in misty patches that often overlap—anticipate his use of gouache and oil wash in the Constellations. More importantly though, the arrangement of the figures—which are beginning to take on the role of signs—creates a rhythmic force across the canvas that imbues the composition with a mobility and energy that would be a significant element of the later series. As Groupe de personnages gloriously reveals, in a period of great political and personal turmoil, Miró was nonetheless able to harness the deep emotions that he felt and achieve important new developments in his art.
One of the early owners of the present work was Noel Evelyn, Lady Norton (née Hughes)—better known to her friends as “Peter”—who was a pioneering figure in the British art world in the 1930s (see fig. 4). Helped by Roland Penrose, she founded the London Gallery with her cousin Rita Strettell in 1936. A daring venture, the gallery supported and promoted many artists of the avant-garde at a t.mes when the London art market was still catching up with post-Impressionism. In response to the opening of the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich in 1937, Norton proposed an exhibition of “Banned Art” to be held in London, an idea which would later take form as the great Twentieth Century German Art show which not only provided the British public with an unrivalled insight into modern German art, but also an ingenious mechanism to rescue works from private collects ions under threat from hostile authorities. Although present at its instigation, Norton was not in fact there to see her idea come to fruition—she had left for Warsaw in late 1937 with her husband Sir Clifford who went to take up his appointment to the staff of the British Embassy, and where he worked strenuously to promote a strong Anglo-Polish alliance. After the fall of Poland the Nortons moved to Bern, and after the war Sir Clifford was made Ambassador to Greece. According to her friend John Craxton, Lady Norton transformed the embassy in Athens with her collects ion of modern, mainly abstract paintings—Craxton also recalled Peter Watson telling him that she was “Art mad, even madder than I am!”
