Joan Miró

Tête belongs to a series of Miró's works that Jacques Dupin grouped under the term 'Cartones', executed between 1959-65 in oil on cardboard, in which color patches, black line and the cardboard medium all play an equally important pictorial role.  These paintings often consist of various geometric and organic forms suggestive of a human figure, a head or a bird, thus verging between figuration and abstraction.  Discussing Miró's paintings of the 1960s, Margit Rowell wrote: "In  Miró's anthropomorphic cycle of the sixties [...] the images are more schematic or reductive than any seen thus far. What is unprecedented is the fact that although we are conversant with the forms we are no longer interested in the primary associations of these images (personage, bird) but approach them at a level both more literal and more abstract. Attention is focused on the paint itself, compelled by its immanent expressivity as dynamic gesture, textured substance, chromatic value. What was formerly primary - the reading of the image as image - has become secondary. Contours that were merely contours here assume, through their breadth, texture, dynamic force, direction and open-endedness, the powers of calligraphic signs. The grounds are coarse and assertive. The swatches of color exist for their own sake, uncorrelated and unrefined" (Margit Rowell, Miró, New York, 1970, p. 20).

Rowell adds that we cannot discount the referential content of these painitngs, but emphasizes Miró's move toward other layers of meaning. In the striking lines and color of the present work, the composition has indeed become more schematic than in his earlier work. The head or face of the figure has been splayed against the surface, emphasizing the flatness of the background by using the board as an integral part of the composition. Miró's use of color here moves from defined areas to the free forms of blue and orange, "swatches of color [that] exist for their own sake." While this work recalls the shape of a person's head, Miró schematizes the lines and shapes toward an arrangement that celebrates the flatness of painting and the interaction of paint and surface.