Acquavella galleries has brought together the 23 gouaches in Joan Miró’s Constellations series that were last seen together in 1993 at the Museum of Modern Art.
Considered by many to be the height of Miró’s achievement as an artist, these works gain power and impact from being shown all together. Indeed, the condition for many of the loans was that the entire series had to be on view.
The suite of images was produced between January of 1940 and September of 1941—but it was not until 1958 that André Breton named them “Constellations.” When Miró and his family fled France for Spain ahead of the German invasion in June of 1940, he took virtually nothing with him apart from the portfolio of his ten completed Constellations.
“Since they were first exhibited at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in early 1945, after having been smuggled out of Europe, the Constellations have been celebrated as one of the most powerful artistic statements of the 20th century,” said Bill Acquavella.
Margit Rowell is an art historian and curator who works mostly in Paris and New York. She has held curatorial positions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and as curator of drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
One of the works on display, Willem de Kooning’s Police Gazette, 1955, brought $180,000 at Sotheby Parke Bernet in 1973. Years later, gallery patriarch William Acquavella acquired it for $2.2 million and eventually resold it to Steve Wynn for $12 million. Most recently, hedge funder Steven M. Cohen bought it from David Geffen for $63.5 million. Also on display are Jasper Johns’s Double-Flag, 1962; an early James Rosenquist, Untitled (Blue Sky), 1962; and Andy Warhol’s Red Airmail Stamps, 1962.
