Joan Miró

Galerie Maeght, Paris
Vittorio De Sica, Italy & Paris (acquired from the above in 1966)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1973

Paris, Galerie Maeght, Miró: Cartons, 1965, no. 20
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Joan Miró: 'Cartones', 1959-1965, 1965, no. 29, illustrated in the catalogue

Gaston Diehl, Miró, New York, 1974, illustrated in colour p. 78
Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró. Catalogue Raisonné. Paintings. 1959-1968, Paris, 2002, vol. IV, no. 1034, illustrated p. 37 (with incorrect medium)

The board is stable and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. Apart from a few tiny spots of foxing in the white pigment in the lower left, barely visible to the naked eye, this work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the board and the black shapes have a less red tonality in the original.
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By the time he painted Personnages et oiseaux devant le soleil, Miró had developed a distinctive iconography, and the present work exemplifies the expressive power of his imagery, bordering on representation and abstraction. For Miró, women, birds, stars, the moon, the sun, night and dusk formed a poetic language. He first introduced the motif of a woman with a bird, in a realistic manner, in his paintings of 1917, but it was only after his celebrated Constellations series of 1941, in which women, birds and stars feature prominently, that they became the primary theme of his art. Commenting on this subject matter, the artist himself pronounced: ‘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’ (J. Miró & Georges Raillard, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, Paris, 1977, p. 128).

 

Whilst taking recognisable objects as his starting point, in the present work Miró builds his composition using a pictorial lexicon of signs and symbols, in a style that characterised his post-war production. Gaston Diehl wrote about Miró’s works from this period: ‘A truly expressive fury unfurls in an increasingly succinct and compact style and takes root in and dominates his work, beginning in 1960 […]. Miró was encouraged in this direction by his then current work directly on the tiles without preliminary preparation. In the succeeding years its scope broadened and it gained in barbaric, almost savage power, in 1963 […]. Even in his vast and increasingly well-ordered compositions, […] the intensity of the color areas is restrained, like the fragments of a dazzling stained glass window, within vigorous structures, checkerboards, interlacings, and outlines in which the skilfully measured proportions of black areas in relation to the backgrounds heighten the suggestive power of the ideogram. The symbol, reduced to its essence, remains supreme, occupies the leading place, and plays a determining symbolic role, in accordance with the traditions of primitive magic (G. Diehl, op. cit., p. 65).