Joan Miro (1893-1983) - À Toute Épreuve

JOAN MIRÓ (1893–1983)

À Toute Épreuve, 1958 – Firmato a mano –


Colour woodcut on BFK Rives paper (with watermark).

Sheet size: 52 × 38 cm, with full margins.

Edition of 125.

Hand-signed in pencil at the lower right and numbered at the lower left: 41/125.

Printed by Fequet and Baudier, Paris.

Published by Gérald Cramer, Geneva, and Galerie Berggruen, Paris.


This print is fully documented and referenced in the official catalogue raisonné.

Jacques Dupin, Miró Engraver, Vol. I, 1928–1960, listed and illustrated as no. 235, page 154.

Historical Description

À toute épreuve is one of the most celebrated artists’ books of the twentieth century: a project born of friendship, driven by boundless ambition and completed with a degree of patience that inspired the admiration of all those who witnessed its creation.

It all began in 1929, when Paul Éluard wrote these poems in the midst of a double loss: his wife, Gala, left him to join Salvador Dalí, while Nusch, with whom he was beginning to fall in love, entered his life. These Surrealist texts—fragments, proverbs and lyrical flashes—were published in 1930 by Éditions surréalistes. It was in 1947, during a meeting with the Geneva-based publisher Gérald Cramer, that the idea emerged of bringing them into dialogue with Miró’s work.

Miró embraced the project with a fervour that astonished everyone. In 1948, he wrote to Cramer: “I am completely absorbed in this sacred book; I hope to create something sensational, the most important work we have done in wood engraving since Gauguin.”

Inspired by Gauguin’s engravings and Japanese prints, he deliberately chose this ancient and demanding medium, carving 233 woodblocks and subjecting the work to 42,000 print impressions on the presses of Atelier Lacourière in Paris. The undertaking would last eleven years. Éluard, who died in 1952, did not live to see the book completed.

What Miró achieved here goes far beyond illustration in the traditional sense. He does not read the poems in order to translate them; instead, he inhabits them, focusing on the space occupied by words, their visual rhythm and their tension on the page. Woodcut becomes sculpture, colour becomes language, and the book becomes a complete artistic object in which two poetic visions—that of Éluard and that of Miró—immerse themselves in one another without ever fully merging.

This colour woodcut on BFK Rives paper, hand-signed and numbered by Miró, belongs to the separate print edition published alongside the original book for collectors. Listed as Dupin 235, it possesses all the richness and depth of a work that print historian Riva Castleman described as “one of the most original and beautiful books of the century”.

Artistic Description

This work embodies the spirit and thematic elements of the series as a whole. Against a dark grey background with a wood-grain texture, bold shades of red and green overlap within the rectangular composition, creating a uniform, translucent layer.

The vivid edges of the red circle and the green form leap from the page with remarkable vitality, while the overlapping areas recede into space through the darker tones introduced by the grey background.

Evoking a brilliant red sunset above a luminous green meadow, the composition leaves endless possibilities for interpretation.

With this work, Miró demonstrates his ability to break through the barriers and limitations of printmaking, presenting a visual language entirely his own and expressing his delight in bringing poetry to life through images.