胡安·米羅

Painted circa 1969.

馬格畫廊，巴黎
私人收藏，巴塞羅那（1979年或之前購入）
佩斯畫廊，紐約
私人收藏（1986年購自上述畫廊）
佩斯·維登斯坦畫廊，紐約
1996年7月10日購自上述畫廊

馬德里，西班牙當代藝術博物館，〈胡安·米羅畫展〉，1978年，品號92

馬約卡島帕爾馬，Sa Llotja，〈米羅〉，1978年，品號63

聖保羅德旺斯，馬格基金會美術館，〈胡安·米羅：油畫、雕塑、素描及陶瓷作品1956-1979年〉，1979年，139頁，品號22，載圖（紀年1969）

墨西哥城，現代藝術博物館，〈胡安·米羅：1914-1980年100件精選作品展〉，1980年，品號71

聖保羅德旺斯，馬格基金會美術館，〈艾米及瑪格麗特·馬格伉儷的世界〉，1982年，143頁，品號105，載彩圖

巴黎，馬格畫廊，〈胡安·米羅九十誕辰展〉，1983年，頁碼不詳，品號5，載彩圖（畫名《人與鳥》）

倫敦，沃丁頓畫廊，〈胡安·米羅 / 亨利·勞倫斯〉，1984年，22頁，品號19，載彩圖（紀年1974）

佩雷·金費雷，《米羅：加泰羅尼亞原則》，巴塞羅那，1978年，213頁，品號197，載彩圖

沃爾特·厄爾本，《胡安·米羅1893-1983年：生平與作品》，科隆，1988年，225頁，品號不詳，載彩圖（紀年1974）

雅克·杜賓及阿里安·勒龍·梅諾，《胡安·米羅專題目錄：油畫》，第V冊，巴黎，2003年，229頁，品號1632，載彩圖

Miró’s Femme, oiseau, painted in the last decade of his life, is a poetic example of abstraction at its most daring. Although no identifiable features of a woman or a bird are visible, the artist evokes the gestural motions of these figures through the sweeping arabesques of his brushwork. When he painted this work in 1969 and 1974, Miró was primarily concerned with reducing his pictorial language to its barest essentials. “Through this rarefaction and seeming lack of prudence,” explains his biographer Jacques Dupin, “the canvas’ pictorial energy was in fact magnified, and his painting strikingly reaffirmed. This process also seemed like a breath of fresh air, or an ecstatic present from which new signs, colors, and the full freedom of gesture surged forth. By limiting  the colors of his palette, Miró’s enduring themes yielded works of various sizes, proportions rhythms, and resonances.” (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, pp. 337-38)

The frenetic expressiveness of the artist’s brushwork here calls to mind the works 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 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 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.

By the time he completed the present work in 1974, Miró’s composition had gained a level of expressive freedom and exuberance that evidenced his confidence in his craft. Images of women, stars, birds and moons were omnipresent in his pictures to the point that these elements became memes for the artist’s own identity. Jacques Dupin elaborated on the semiotic importance of the figuration in these late paintings, “[t]he sign itself was no longer the image’s double, it was rather reality assimilated then spat out by the painter, a reality he had incorporated then liberated, like air or light. The importance of the theme now depended on its manner of appearing or disappearing, and the few figures Miró still endlessly named and inscribed in his works are the natural go-between and guarantor of the reality of his universe. It would perhaps be more fruitful to give an account of those figures that have disappeared than of the survivors.” (ibid. pp. 339-40)

Miró's own reflection on the artistic process further articulates his late style: "... silence is denial of a noise - but the smallest noise in the midst of silence becomes enormous. The same process makes me look for noise hidden in silence, the movement in immobility, life in inanimate things, the infinite and the finite, forms in a void, and myself in anonymity." (M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 253) Miró builds the present composition using a pictorial lexicon of signs and symbols, while still referencing recognizable objects, in this case, human figures. Working with thick lines and monochromatic spaces as his central compositional elements, Miró fully explored the possibilities of movement within a two-dimensional field.

The influence of Abstract Expressionism compelled Miró to begin painting on a large scale, requiring the construction of a massive studio in Palma by the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert. 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. By the late 1960s, Miró had become well-versed in the art of rendering his aesthetic ideas on a large-scale format. As was the case for most of these late works, the artist completed the picture in his studio in Palma de Mallorca, where the warm Mediterranean sunlight and invigorating sea air enlivened his desire to paint bold and exuberant oils.