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Constellations. Nightingale Midnight Song and Morning Rain
Joan (Joan) Miro • Painting, 1940, 46×38 cm
Description of the artwork «Constellations. Nightingale Midnight Song and Morning Rain»
Miro wrote a series of 23 paintings "The Constellations" in 1940-1941 in three different cities: Varanzhevile, Palma de Mallorca and Mont Roch. These were the most terrible, hopeless and difficult times for the artist. In 1936, he fled to Paris from Spain, when the civil war broke out there, and with the outbreak of World War II he moved to quiet Varanzheville. In 1940, German troops invaded France - and Miro again forced to flee. On the train from Varanzhevil to Paris, through the bombing and the roar of shells, Miro, his wife Pilar and ten-year-old daughter Dolores ride. Miro only has a portfolio with him, in which he takes 10 ready-made sheets with “Constellations” and empty sheets for new ones. The Miro family travels to Mallorca, in the hometown of Pilar.
In Palma, the artist writes another 10 “Constellations” and is preparing for the fact that he will have to spend the rest of his life here, walk on the sand, look at the sea and paint pictures that no one will ever see. Tired of moving, driven to despair, Miro is confident that Hitler will take over half the world and Nazism will win. And news of the war only strengthens this confidence.
“The Nightingale Song of the Nightingale and the Morning Rain” is already written in Mallorca. At this time, paintings from the Constellations series became more abstract and compositionally complex. If the names of the first works urged the viewer to find translucent, hardly defined, but still certain figures: a woman, a bird, a star. In the title of this picture, Miro, for example, directly says: it is about sound, about singing, and this does not mean that the nightingale itself will certainly be found in the image, it is about rain, but this does not mean that the viewer should peer and look for falling drops. Perhaps there is only the sound of rain, perhaps only the smell. And over time, there is a mess here: the nightingale sings at midnight, and the rain begins only in the morning. It is hopeless to find here the state of the world at one specific moment - the viewer will have to deploy the image in time, feel the long singing of the nightingale, sit very long in the garden and wait until the morning when the first cold drops fall to the ground.
When the war was nearing completion, Miro sent the Constellations series for an exhibition in America. The Museum of Modern Art is ready to host it, but cannot pay for delivery. Then the American dealer Miro Pierre Matisse undertakes this, who pays for shipping and displays all 23 paintings in his gallery in January 1945. The Miro exhibition was America's first pictorial message from Europe that survived the war.
Author: Anna Sidelnikova
In Palma, the artist writes another 10 “Constellations” and is preparing for the fact that he will have to spend the rest of his life here, walk on the sand, look at the sea and paint pictures that no one will ever see. Tired of moving, driven to despair, Miro is confident that Hitler will take over half the world and Nazism will win. And news of the war only strengthens this confidence.
“The Nightingale Song of the Nightingale and the Morning Rain” is already written in Mallorca. At this time, paintings from the Constellations series became more abstract and compositionally complex. If the names of the first works urged the viewer to find translucent, hardly defined, but still certain figures: a woman, a bird, a star. In the title of this picture, Miro, for example, directly says: it is about sound, about singing, and this does not mean that the nightingale itself will certainly be found in the image, it is about rain, but this does not mean that the viewer should peer and look for falling drops. Perhaps there is only the sound of rain, perhaps only the smell. And over time, there is a mess here: the nightingale sings at midnight, and the rain begins only in the morning. It is hopeless to find here the state of the world at one specific moment - the viewer will have to deploy the image in time, feel the long singing of the nightingale, sit very long in the garden and wait until the morning when the first cold drops fall to the ground.
When the war was nearing completion, Miro sent the Constellations series for an exhibition in America. The Museum of Modern Art is ready to host it, but cannot pay for delivery. Then the American dealer Miro Pierre Matisse undertakes this, who pays for shipping and displays all 23 paintings in his gallery in January 1945. The Miro exhibition was America's first pictorial message from Europe that survived the war.
Author: Anna Sidelnikova
