‘untitled (nude descending a stair)’

mixed media on board
600mm x 600mm
Kim Pieters 2018

from ‘the guitar lesson’ series
seven paintings

…Not far from us lived the people of the rue du Château, where the atmosphere was quite different…the rue du Château, that was Prévert, Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel. We would see them from time to time. I met Tanguy in particular when he was just starting. He painted very slowly, assiduously, in long and regular sessions, after which he would throw himself on the bottle, equally seriously.

Among the people we often saw in our gatherings at the rue Blomet there was Antonin Artaud, who was then an actor with Dullin, at the Atelier. He read us his earliest texts, and gave us theatre tickets. And Dubuffet, before he went off to Le Havre, and Juan Gris, and Robert Desnos, who had his flat at the Dôme and would make tracks over as far as the rue Blomet…

Joan Miró ‘Souvenir de la rue Blomet’Unpublished memoir, transcribed by Jacques Dupin, 1977

from
‘I’m going to smash their guitar’ Joan Miró 1917-1934
catalogue to the exhibition “La Naissance du Mode “
(Birth of the World)
in Galerie 1, Centre Pompidou from 3 March to 28th June.
Paris. France. 2004.

…In 1912 Paris, France; Marcel Duchamp painted ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2’ and it was exhibited for the first time at Galeries Dalmau, in ‘Exposició d’Art Cubista’, Barcelona, 1912; the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain. Joan Miró saw that show. Amongst many subsequent homages by other artists to the work; Joan Miró in Montroig, Catalonia, Spain on the 4 September 1924, drew ‘Untitled (Nude descending the stair)’ which is reproduced in the ‘I’m going to smash their guitar’ catalogue. Kim Pieters painted ‘untitled (nude descending the stair)’ with reference to this history in the summer of 2018 in her Dunedin studio, New Zealand. So orbits the dust.