The Whip Cracking Painting That Set Joan Miro's Auction Record

Joan Miro's Peinture (Étoile Bleue) (1927) sold for $37.04m (£23.56m) at Sotheby's in London on June 19, 2012. The oil on canvas work had been traded twice before. In 2007, it sold at Aguttes auction house in Paris for $16.64m, then a record for the artist at auction.

While living in Paris in 1925, Miró began works that were to become known as his "dream paintings". They are considered to be among the Spanish-Catalan artist's most important and groundbreaking works, impressing his fellow Surrealist artists at the time and artists since.

He was inspired by visits to the circus, mesmerized by how the ringmaster controlled his horses with a whip. The exuberance of Miró's paintings of this period was at odds with his shy nature.

When the Guggenheim in New York was organizing its Miró retrospective in 1971 the artist urged the show's curator, Rosalind Krauss, to include Blue Star, such was its importance to him.

Miró's record-breaking 1927 painting was first owned by André Lefèvre, who became an art collector after he retired from stockbroking aged 44, coincidentally in 1927. Lefèvre's heirs donated 30 works to the Musée national d’Art Moderne in Paris in the 1950s but Blue Star was not among them.

The sale beat the artist’s previous auction record by $10.26m, a 38% rise. His previous record was set by Painting-Poem ("le corps de ma brune puisque je l'aime comme ma chatte habillée en vert salade comme de la grêle c'est pareil") (1925), which sold for $26.78m at Christie's on February 7, 2012.

A Brief History of Miro at Auction