Lot 16
  • 16

Joán Miró

Estimate
1,000,000 - 1,500,000 EUR
bidding is closed

Description

  • Joan Miró
  • Personnage, oiseau
  • signed Miró (lower right)
  • oil, gouache and pastel on paper
  • 141.6 by 77.3 cm ; 55 3/4 by 30 3/8 in.

Provenance

Galerie Maeght, Paris
Acquired from the above in 1979

Exhibited

Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Joán Miró : Peintures, sculptures, dessins, céramiques 1956-1979, 1979, no. 102

Literature

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joán Miró Catalogue raisonné. Drawings, Paris, 2013, vol. IV : 1973-1976, no. 3135, illustrated p. 359

Condition

Executed on a large, previously folded sheet of paper with a bank imprint on each section, not laid down, hinged at the verso corners with brown paper tape hinges. There is a restored split fold approx. 10 cm long at the lower right, just above the split is a curving hard crease with some associated time staining. There are a few restored small tears located: at the upper right edge (approx. 2.5 cm long), at the bottom edge right (a curving tear of approximately 3.5 cm), at the bottom edge near the centre (tiny tear), and at the left edge below the centre (approximately 1 cm). The pigment is in very fine condition with only some tiny pigment losses at the restored tears. This work remains in very good condition.
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Catalogue Note

Personnage, oiseau is an accomplished example of Miró’s favourite iconography. He had developed a poetic language composed of birds, stars, moons, suns and women since the beginning of his career, but it was above all after his famous series of Constellations in 1941 that the bird, the woman and the totemic figure became the principle theme of his art.

In this work, painted on a “recovered” sheet of paper – in a knowing reference to the Surrealist tradition of reused objects and collage – the figure and the bird are fused into a kind of ideogram, a symbol reduced to its primal essence. The same year, Miró would also paint a picture that can be considered a pendant to the present work, and whose theme, complimenting the bird, is the woman (fig. 1).

As Jacques Dupin, the artist’s official biographer, expresses in the catalogue to the exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in 1979 in which this work featured: “Faced with the prevalence of the theme Woman and Bird in Miró’s oeuvre, one wonders: is the woman not a mother-goddess, familiar and all-enveloping, and the bird not the painter himself who looks to her for refuge, but above all for the power to fly and sing with intensity?” (Jacques Dupin, in Miró,  Fondation Maeght, 1979, p.26).