Joan Miró | The Night, the Bear III, from: Series for King Ubu (1966) | Available for Sale

Joan Miró, ‘The Night, the Bear III, from: Series for King Ubu’, 1966, Gilden's Art Gallery

This original lithograph in colours is hand signed in pencil by the artist "Miró" at the lower right corner.
It is also hand numbered in pencil from the edition of 75, at the lower left corner. There were also 25 hors commerce [out of trade] impressions.
The work was part of a portfolio entitled "Roi Ubu" [King Ubu] realised by the artist in 1966.
It was printed by Atelier Mourlot, Paris and published by Tériade Éditeur, Paris.
The paper bears the Arches watermark along the lower margin.

Note: Ubu Roi (Ubu the King) is a play by Alfred Jarry, premiered in 1896. It is a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd and Surrealism.
It is the first of three stylised burlesques in which Jarry satirises power, greed, and their evil practices—in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeois to abuse the authority engendered by success.
It was followed by Ubu Cocu [Ubu Cuckolded] and Ubu Enchaîné [Ubu Enchained], neither of which was performed during Jarry's 34-year life.
Père Ubu first appeared in 1888 in a collaboration between Alfred Jarry and a fellow student at the Rennes Lycée, but his first public appearance came in 1893 when Jarry published some of prose works in an avant-garde review, the Minutes de Sable Mémorial. His triumph, however, was on the stage when the director of the Theâtre de l'Oeuvre, Lugne-Poe staged a production of Ubu Roi.
The audience received the play with screams, whistles, fist-shaking, the critics took up the cudgels and the play became infamous and its author an avant-garde hero.
Joan Miró used Ubu Roi as a subject of his most famous series, made of 50 1940 lithographs known as "the Barcelona Series".
These pictures could be Ubu Roi but they also satirise General Franco and his generals after he had won the Spanish Civil War.
He revisited this subject many times in his oeuvre.

Literature:

Mourlot, F. & Leiris, M. (1977). Joan Miró: Der Lithograph, Vol. III 1964-1969. Geneva: Weber.
Reference: Mourlot 424
Cramer, P. (1989). Miró: Catalogue des Livres Ilustrées. Paris: Edition Cramer,
Reference: Cramer 108

Condition: Very good condition. A 22 mm. area of moisture staining in the lower margin. Pale, unobtrusive staining in the margins.

Publisher: Tériade Éditeur, Paris

About Joan Miró

Joan Miró rejected the constraints of traditional painting, creating works “conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness,” as he once said. Widely considered one of the leading Surrealists, though never officially part of the group, Miró pioneered a wandering linear style of Automatism—a method of “random” drawing that attempted to express the inner workings of the human psyche. Miró used color and form in a symbolic rather than literal manner, his intricate compositions combining abstract elements with recurring motifs like birds, eyes, and the moon. “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music,” he said. While he prized artistic freedom, Miró revered art history, basing a series of works on the Dutch Baroque interiors of Hendrick Sorgh and Jan Steen. In turn, Miró has inspired many artists—significantly Arshile Gorky, whose bold linear abstractions proved a foundational influence on Abstract Expressionism.

Spanish, 1893-1983, Barcelona, Spain, based in Paris and Catalonia, Spain