Photos: Carlos A. Schwartz – Efraín Pintos

Femme Bouteille

“The sculptures by Miró and Moore, which had been on display on the Rambla for almost half a year, returned to their places of origin –Paris and London– at the end of the loan period. At that moment, a real popular movement began, echoed by all the media, for the works to return to our city. The authors were not insensitive to such strong social pressure and decided to cede the rights to their sculptures so that new bronze casts could return to us. To this end, it was necessary to raise funds by means of popular fundraising activities, which were complemented by a special grant by the Tenerife Island Council. The works that came on this second occasion did not coincide with those previously exhibited in Santa Cruz and are entitled El Guerrero de Goslar (The Warrior of Goslar) by Henry Moore and Mujer Botella II (Bottle Woman II) by Joan Miró. “

Saavedra Martínez, V. (1996). Historia de un acontecimiento. En A. Carnero, D. Duque, & C. Schwartz, Iª Exposición Internacional de Escultura en La Calle (págs. 11-24). Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Cabildo Insular de Tenerife. Área de Cultura. ISBN: 84-87340-63-6

“Sculpture is not the occupation of space, but, precisely, its unoccupation. Sculpture does not fill a space or a place – it shows us its emptiness. It is only when matter appears in space that we become aware of space.

Miró’s sculpture, Femme bouteille (1972-1974), is of a very different lineage from the traditional motivations or impulses of sculpture. Miró was not a sculptor, even though many of his poetic objects and sculptures are first-rate works of art. The Femme bouteille is undoubtedly also first-rate, but with a different value compared to Moore’s The Warrior of Goslar or Pablo Serrano’s Homage to the Canary Islands (works which I will revisit) in which the experience of spatiality is immediately perceived as the essential meaning of his being there in sculpture.

Miró’s piece is, indeed, a poetic object, in the great surrealist tradition of the object. It is in this sense that I would point out that it is a work that does not follow a pure feeling of spatiality but, above all, that of mystical objectuality, a feeling that was at the origin of many of the artistic obsessions of the poets and painters of Surrealism, from the object-poems of André Breton to the “impossible” objects of Meret Oppenheim, the “symbolic functioning objects” of Salvador Dalí and, finally, so many others (including those of Marcel Duchamp). Joan Miró was one of the best exponents of this tradition; just think of his Spanish Dancer, 1928, in which we see a needle piercing a bottle cork and, above both, a bird’s feather, three elements which are enough to embody the mystery.

This is what happens in Femme bouteille, a bronze sculpture in which, as its title indicates, human and object forms merge to give rise to a third that is the meeting of the animate and the inanimate”.

Sánchez Robayna, A. (1996). El espacio de la escultura. En A. Carnero, D. Duque, & C. Schwartz, Iª Exposición Internacional de Escultura en La Calle (págs. 77-86). Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Cabildo Insular de Tenerife. Área de Cultura. ISBN: 84-87340-63-6

“The Maeght Gallery in Paris lent two magnificent pieces, an Estabile-Móbile by Alexander Calder, which for some time brightened up the Ramblas with the mobility of its precarious balance, and an early bronze sculpture by Joan Miró: Woman (1972). When the time came for it to be returned, and at the behest of the Cultural Commission, Miró agreed to replace the first piece with a copy of Femme Bouteille (1972), which was cast in September 1975 in the workshop of Fratelli Bonvicini, in Verona, and whose execution, insurance and transport costs were paid for by the City Council of the capital. As it happened with Calder’s, unfortunately the rest of the works belonging to private galleries had to be returned as their prices far exceeded the budget of the Exhibition.”

Fernández Lomana, M.A. (1996). De la conmemoración al homenaje. En A. Carnero, D. Duque, & C. Schwartz, Iª Exposición Internacional de Escultura en La Calle (págs. 87-108). Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Cabildo Insular de Tenerife. Área de Cultura. ISBN: 84-87340-63-6