E
xecuted in 1968, a period of exploration for Miró, during which he sought to merge the influences of recent American art and Japanese calligraphy into his gestural art, Femme et oiseau devant le soleil is an exceptionally large and vibrant composition.
In the 1960s, no doubt influenced by the dramatic large-scale open field style of painting as pioneered by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, Miro started to work on a large scale in his new studio. In 1966, he traveled to Japan for the retrospective of his work held in Tokyo, a visit that introduced him to Japanese poetry, pottery and calligraphy. Deeply inspired by this visit and the artists he had met, Miró started combining new techniques, evolving in his own style.
Femme et oiseau devant le soleil stands as particularly revealing of Miró’s genius and poetry. The figurel’s monumental aspect and frontal pose as well as the contrasting colors endow this work on paper, his preferred medium during the last years of his life, with a majestic presence. The present work combines various techniques, allowing him unprecedented inventiveness: the broad contours of the figure are rendered in ink, the face is handled with soft strokes of shimmering tones, the background alternates between sections of gouache and colored pencil.
The pictorial vocabulary and scale of the present work clearly reflect Miró’sinspiration from the Abstract Expressionists’ use of spatial dimension and spontaneity, as well as his continuing pursuit of simplicity and purity of line.
Joan Miró at Auction
