Joan Miró

Doña Pilar Miró (the artist's wife. Sold: Sotheby's, Madrid, 42 Obras de Joan Miró. The Property of Doña Pilar Miró, 9th December 1986, lot 35)

Private Collection (purchased at the above sale. Sold: Christie's, London, 8th February 2007, lot 695)

Acquired by the present owner in 2011

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró. Catalogue raisonné. Drawings 1973-1976, Paris, 2013, vol. IV, no. 2573, illustrated in colour p. 86

Poète écrivant un poème dicté par l'oiseau de passage is a striking example of Miró's late work, featuring the poetic iconography that occupied the artist throughout his career. Executed with a technical assurance and the economy of means typical of his last decades, the work combines a brilliantly abstract application of paint with a suggestive figuration. Throughout his career Miró had always acknowledged the poetic force in painting; in choosing to paint a poet in the present work Miró places the focus on his own creative processes. The conflation of the two modes of expression also emphasises his personal belief: ‘I make no distinction between painting and poetry […]. Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it’s an exchange of blood, a total embrace – without caution, without anything protecting yourself’ (quoted in Margit Rowell (ed.), Joan Miró. Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, pp. 151-152).

The frenetic expressiveness of the artist's brushwork in the present work calls to mind paintings of Willem de Kooning completed around the same time. After his trip to New York in 1947, Miró became acquainted with the art of the Abstract Expressionists and was fascinated by their new techniques and their 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 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. 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.