Tête was originally included in a sale of forty-two works by Joan Miró held at Sotheby's Madrid in 1986. The sale comprised works from Dona Pilar Miró-Juncosa's collection (the artist's widow), which were sold to fund the building of the Miró Foundation in Barcelona.

For Miró, women, birds, stars, the moon, the sun, the night sky and dusk formed a distinctive, poetic language. He first introduced the motif of a woman with a bird in his representational paintings of 1917, but it was only after he completed his celebrated Constellations series in 1941, that this theme became the primary subject of numerous works. With reference to the imagery embedded in his works, Miró made the following comment: "It might be a dog, a woman, or whatever. I don't really care. Of course, while I am painting, I see a woman or a bird in my mind, indeed, very tangibly a woman or a bird. Afterward, it's up to you" (Joan Miró and Georges Raillard, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, Paris, 1977, p. 128).

Tête exemplifies Miró’s continued confidence in the potential of his line while simultaneously espousing his later experimentations with other expressive forms of mark-making. The work sits at the intersection of control and spontaneity, where experimental and emotive flecks of pure white paint and pastel embrace the linear figures. These drippings of white paint pierce through their hazy, brown background, evocative of the stars against the night sky – another of the artist’s favored motifs.