Joan Miró

Estate of the artist
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Marinaud, Joan Miró. Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, Paris, 2003, vol. V, no. 1512, illustrated in colour p. 134

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in excellent original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly brighter in the original.
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Personnage is a striking example of Miró's mature works, with bold colouring and monumental scale. Executed with a technical assurance and the economy of pictorial means typical of the last decades of his career, the present work shows his style verging between figuration and abstraction. Present here are the components with which he created the human form, a series of signs and symbols that display a formal sophistication unique to Miró's art. By the time he executed this work in 1973, the artist enjoyed general acclaim in the European and American artistic communities, which did not prevent him from continuing to expand the boundaries of the medium. Personnage is formed through a series of strokes and splatters that reference the gestural abstraction present in his earlier work of the 1930s. 

After a trip to New York in 1947, Miró became acquainted with the art of the Abstract Expressionists and was fascinated by their new techniques and aesthetic agenda. As the artist later recalled, the experience of seeing canvases of the Abstract Expressionists was like 'a blow to the solar plexus.' Several young painters, including Jackson Pollock, were crediting Miró as their inspiration for their wild, paint-splattered canvases. In the years that followed he created works that responded to the enthusiasm of this younger generation of American painters and the spontaneity of their art. It was also under their influence that he started painting on a large scale, such as in the present work. The paintings he created from the early 1950s onwards are a fascinating response to these new trends of abstraction, while at the same time showing Miró's allegiance to his own artistic pursuits.