Rago Auctions

Having forged an early friendship in Barcelona and Paris, Josep Llorens Artigas and Joan Miró reunited towards the end of World War II, creating fantastical ceramic forms Miró termed terres de grand feu (firestones). The two artists began their collaboration in Artigas’s small studio, remotely located outside of Barcelona in the mountain village of Gallifa. While Miró would produce the designs, Artigas would utilize a slow-firing technique in wood-burning kilns that was once favored by the ancient Greeks, believing that this preserved the integrity of the ceramics. Their works were first presented in a joint exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York in 1956. The following year, the artists received a commission to create a mural at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, which won them the Guggenheim International Award in 1958. Miró and Artigas continued to produce ceramic works, each one bearing the signature of both men, until the 1970s when Artigas’s health forced him to step away and allow his son, Joan Gardy Artigas, to take over his studio. Their years together were some of the most productive and successful of both men’s careers and were a showcase of ingenuity and imagination. Jacques Dupin, Miró’s biographer, wrote of the works, 

“Miró was the drunken sculptor who staggered but did not fall, who pursued his tight-rope dance among malicious spirits taking form… It was just a game, but a game in which all the danger lay - in this similar to the delirium of sleep, where minuscule creatures take on gigantic dimensions… And the only way we may face them is to submit them to our own personal whims or to submit to theirs: this is the rule of reciprocity of these works. Each partner is vulnerable, each awaiting that the other affirm his existence.”