“Miró let go with the full range of his powers, showing us what he could really do all the time. Anywhere outside the world, and outside time, too—his voice echoes everywhere and always, a voice carried to us from afar, to join the chorus of the loftiest, most inspired voices the world has ever heard.”
A poetic array of Joan Miró’s greatest motifs, Femme, étoiles can be viewed as a culminating opus of its era, chronicling the end of the Second World War and serving as a coda to the masterful Constellations begun at its onset. Of the related works from 1945, there is perhaps no other painting with more historical significance than Femme, étoiles. Painted on the 7th of May 1945, the present work marks the very day that the German High Command signed an unconditional surrender at Reims, marking a long-awaited and momentous end to the world’s deadliest war. Imbued with the import of the moment, Femme, étoiles presents an inherent dichotomy which speaks to horror of conflict and the hope of freedom; with the composition’s dueling expanses of light and dark, the alternately placid and menacing figures and the balance of heavy and fine lines, the elements within Femme, étoiles coalesce to create a work at once enveloping and anticipatory, expressing an excruciating lyricism rife with the poetics of tragedy and comity.
A favored cast of characters from Miró’s visual lexicon appear in the present composition as an anthropomorphic figure of a woman floats at left, seemingly emanating from a grey portal at right. Varied stars and mellifluous lines dance across the surface, achieving a paradoxical balance of motion and stasis within the scene. Beholding the power of Miró’s work, one has the feeling of emerging from the long dark of night, headed at last toward a brilliant new dawn of possibility.
Engendered by the defining Constellations series begun in 1940, Femme, étoiles inherits the legacy of the iconic body of twenty-three works considered by Miró at the time to be “one of the most important things I have done” (quoted in Margit Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 168). As the name of the series implies, the works belonging to Miró’s Constellations are often set against a background of muted washes and darker tones evoking the night sky and providing a context for the abundant forms of women, birds and stars that mingle within them.
Miró began working on the watershed gouache compositions in January 1940 in the quiet northern French village of Varengeville, where he had settled after leaving his home country at the onset of The Spanish Civil War. Like his fellow countryman Picasso, Miró’s most famed works would be defined in relation to shifts in the world order. At the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World’s Fair both painters present distinctly anti-war paintings on a monumental scale; Picasso’s revolutionary Guernica and Miró’s Le Faucheur.
By May 1940, Miró was again forced to relocate, this time back to Spain due to the German invasion of Paris. By the time his Constellations were done, the artist had moved to Mallorca (careful at first to avoid his native Catalonia out of fear of Francisco Franco’s secret police) and then to his family’s home at Montroig. Amid all the upheaval Miró found solace in his art, stating in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney that "It was about the time that the war broke out. I felt a desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, the music, and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings" (quoted in Janis Mink, Joan Miró: 1893-1983, Cologne, 1993, p. 67).
Such fonts of inspiration carried on in the following years after Miró’s first major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1941 and his subsequent relocation to Barcelona in 1942, where, after months of careful dedication to his Constellations, Miró let his imagination take flight in hundreds of unbridled and diverse works on paper centered around the theme of women, birds and stars. It was not until 1944 that he again took up oil painting, committing to an authority and decisiveness that the medium commanded.
Miró’s 1945 Paintings in Institutional Collections
At the same time that Miró’s Constellations opened to critical acclaim at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in early 1945, the artist embarked upon yet another defining series which would translate the idols of his earlier gouache masterpieces into indelible large-scale canvases like Femme, étoiles.
Discussing the significance of the artist’s work from this period, Jacques Dupin states, “The intimism of Miró’s entire production from 1939 on, and the invention of a new language which it made possible, lead to a magnificent series of large canvases painted in 1945, which are among the best-known and most frequently reproduced of all his works” (Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, New York, 1962, pp. 378). On the iconography of Miró’s 1945 works, Dupin continues, “The space is taken up with big figures, birds, stars, and signs…No signs could be simpler, yet they are constantly renewed from one canvas to the next, in strict obedience to mysterious laws governing their dimensions, number, direction, and distribution…The forms are, in the artist’s own words, ‘at once mobile and immobile.’ ‘What I am looking for,’ Miró also said, ‘is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called “an eloquent silence” or what St. John of the Cross referred to as muted music.’” (ibid., pp. 379-80).
Of the eighteen other canvases in this remarkable series, ten are in museum collections including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, among others. Painted on roughly the same scale (typically between 57 and 63 inches in the largest direction), the canvases from 1945 feature an evolution of female figures in the night. The first half of the series is dominated by playful figures and connected black dots against soft white grounds in horizontal format. The execution of the present work in May marks a turning point within the series, the grounds becoming increasingly modulated and rich in color. For the first time, the large orb of grey encircles a black two-legged form—a feature which would carry over into the following two canvases from that month. Suddenly the main protagonist, ostensibly the namesake woman, bears a small set of sharp teeth, another motif which would in part define the remaining works of the series. While the impact of the composition on the whole is one of resounding eloquence, even calm, there exists a faint echo of antagonism; though the war had come to an end in Europe, the harsh realities of General Franco’s fascist reign in Spain remained.
In addition to the important gallery shows in Paris and Stockholm in the late 1940s, Femme, étoiles was notably featured at The Museum of Modern Art’s historic centennial exhibition dedicated to Miró’s legacy where it hung beside related works from the series and the fantastical sculptures that such paintings inspired.
