Telegraph reader solves mystery of Miró ‘squiggles’
ATelegraph reader has solved a mystery that had puzzled the auction house experts who were handling the sale of Femme dans la Nuit, an $18million (£13.8million) painting by Joan Miró, the Spanish surrealist.
Two weeks ago, we broke the news that auctioneer Phillips had been entrusted with the sale of this valuable painting, and reproduced an image of it, see above. In the article, we asked various questions about the painting – why was the night white, for instance, and what were those squiggly bits in the night sky? An expert at Phillips, who had been in consultation with a former museum curator in America, and consulted every possible book on the artist, suggested the squiggles were smoke from an aeroplane that had been shot down. The painting was, after all, one of a series of 14 that were made by Miró in the closing stages of the Second World War. The black circles, they suggested, might have been falling bombs.
However, when 82-year-old Barbara Whitaker from Buckinghamshire studied the Telegraph reproduction closely, she came up with another answer. “I can’t draw for toffee,” Ms Whitaker wrote, “but I think the squiggly lines at the top are his name.” She enclosed her own drawing of the squiggle spelling out “Miró”.
Her theory was so plausible that I forwarded the letter to Phillips and had a reply by return. Not only was Ms Whitaker clearly very perceptive about that painting but, to their astonishment, looking at all 14 of the white paintings series, they could each have been signed with the artist’s pictogram in a similar way. Miró was given to using pictograms or ideograms in his paintings that could convey more than one meaning or message.
A call to Ms Whitaker established that, while she was no art historian, she had a fondness for Miró. She had visited the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona and had some books on the artist, including one in which the reader is invited to place different symbols around the reproduction of a Miró picture to suit themselves, which she bought for her grandchildren to play with.
Now, the experts at Phillips are researching further into Miró’s use of pictograms and adding at least one paragraph to their catalogue for the sale in New York in November. The discovery may, or may not, add value to the painting. Either way, it is a credit to the perceptiveness of Telegraph readers, says Phillips.