A Miró for €9.05

Buried within the exhibition Miró: Painting As Poetry is a minor sensation. The presentation contains a hitherto unknown drawing by Joan Miró, a work that slumbered for decades unrecognized in the holdings of a corporate collection. This astonishing find saw the light of day only through the investigations of an inquisitive private collector. Its rediscovery reads like an art-world whodunit, and revolves around the search for clues about Joan Miró – and it’s a story well worth telling.

By Valerie Hortolani for #32.

At first glance, this work – surrounded by numerous large-format paintings – seems rather inconspicuous. A medium-sized sheet of paper (it measures 46.8 x 62.3 cm), yellowed with age. Recognizable upon close examination, however, is a precisely composed drawing by Miró, which bears the inscription “Et les seins mouraient” – “And the Breasts Are Dying.” The line of text exemplifies to the Surrealist play with poetic structures with which Miró cultivated a strong affinity during the 1920s. It evokes multiple associations while at the same time refusing any rational meaning. Arrow, breast, woman, star's – on the visual level as well, Miró pursued a similar play with allusions and ciphers. But this work is not only exceptionally significant for the theme of our exhibition, which focuses on Miró’s preoccupation with poetry. It also harbors an astonishing tale of discovery.

A Bargain with Surprise Value

The work is on loan from a private collector in North Rhine-Westphalia who prefers to remain anonymous. Without his tireless efforts, the drawing would almost certainly still remain unidentified, would still languish in limbo. 

Before this collector acquired the sheet in 2003, it was part of the corporate collection of the Wuppertal firm of Dr. Kurt Herbert (1901-1989). The paint manufacturer nurtured a passion for art, and assembled a wide-ranging collection of paintings, prints, and sculptures that encompassed East Asian and modern art, and included works by Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde. During World War II, this entrepreneur was active as an advocate on behalf of artists then being stigmatized as “degenerate,” ensuring them livelihoods through artistic commissions. He hired Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer, and Georg Muche to design advertisements for his firm, and entrusted the Wuppertal architect Franz Krause with the design of the Villa Waldfrieden, today located within the Tony Cragg Sculpture Park. But the art was not reserved exclusively for Herbert’s personal pleasure. He also allowed his employees to borrow from the collection to adorn their workstations. Herbert held the conviction that proximity to art, to its aesthetic as well as critical horizons, was educational, and would strengthen the individual and society in equal measure.  

During a company takeover that took place in 2003, when portions of the firm's art collection were sold, an anonymous collector acquired the Miró drawing together with other print works. Oddly enough, the work was identified not as a drawing, but instead as a print (neither the seller nor the collector were aware of its true status), and was offered for the price of €9.05. This tremendous blunder was however recognized before long.

Reconstruction of Rediscovery

Initially, the collector reports that he intended to use the old paper of the drawing for his own chemical experiments, but the work appealed to him too much – fortunately! Impelled by curiosity, he tried to uncover the significance of the inscription “Et les seins mouraient.”

He learned that Miró had produced a book illustration bearing the same inscription for an eponymous publication for his poet friend Benjamin Péret (Les Cahiers du Sud, 1929). The motifs are similar, but not identical. In the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon, moreover, he found a drawing by Miró from 1927 that bears the same inscription, yet different markedly from the other two works compositionally. Through his correspondence with the museum, he learned that both works were executed on the same type of paper, as indicated by the watermark of Canson & Montgolfier from Vidalon-les-Annonay, one of the leading manufacturers of artist’s paper during the early twentieth century. As confirmed moreover by sketches in the collection of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona, there exist three pencil drawings by Miró on the theme “Et les seins mouraient.” One of them is clearly a study for the work acquired by our private collector.

Was it possible to confirm that this work on paper came from Miró’s own hand? Ultimately, a laboratory investigation conducted by conservators provided conclusive evidence: the sheet cannot possibly be a high edition print, and is instead definitely a hand drawing by Miró, one whose market value is vastly higher than the purchase price.

Finally, in spring of 2005, the Successió Miró, the Miró expert and biographer Jacques Dupin, and the ADOM (Association pour la Défense de l'oeuvre de Joan Miró), who are supervising the production of the Miró catalog raisonné, provided the collector with solid certification of the drawing’s authenticity.

New Gains in Miró Research

Meanwhile, this works provides insights into the artist’s workshop practice, and offers Miró research with significant new information. As it happens, the volume in question, Benjamin Péret’s Et les seins mouraient, for whose frontispiece design Miró executed various sketches and drawings, is missing from the Miró catalog of book publications. Assuming the collaboration between poet and artist began as early as 1927, as suggested by the dating of this drawing, then Péret’s may be among the earliest Miró book projects. Produce concurrently were the illustrations for Lise Hirtz’s Il était une petite pie of 1927 (published by Jeanne Bucher, 1928), hitherto regarded as Miró’s debut artist’s book.

What a discovery! All the same, a number of questions still surround this work. Via which route did it travel from Miró’s studio to the collection of the Herbert firm? Do the perforations at the corners of the sheet document its negligent handling when it was mounted for display by an earlier owner? Or did Miró himself pin it to the studio wall, using it to as a stimulus to further compositions, or to show it to visitors? 

Path to the Museum

Another 10 years had elapsed before an opportunity finally arose for a public presentation. Once again, it was the collector who took the initiative when he learned of the Miró exhibition planned by the K20. How else could we have become aware of a work that is absent from the catalog raisonné of Miró’s drawings? In spring of 2015, the paper conservator Nina Quabeck and I visited this collector, and learned from him of the drawing’s eventful narrative of discovery, and of the tireless commitment with which he had pursued his investigation.  

For its first “grand entrance,” the drawing was subjected to a so-called tear closing procedure in our conservation studio, and also acquired a new frame. Now, it is mounted inside a new mat, and is able to make its full impact.

We are particularly proud that this work is being shown publicly for the very first time in our exhibition “Miró: Painting As Poetry” in the midst of so many other authentic Mirós. It’s almost as though this drawing has been waiting all this time for this moment…