Joán Miró

Estate of the artist (acquired in 2007)

In very good condition. Mounted to a board with foam core on the verso. The corners are visible in the current frame, there are no stairns or losses or discoloration, and the medium is bright and fresh. The colors are a bit brighter and more saturated in person. Two pinhead sized holes near the top of center edge and some faint horizonal creases visible along center line. A few very faint fox marks scattered.
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Executed toward the end of the artists's oeuvre, this work from 1972 exemplifies the culmination of Miró's lifelong exploration of representation and abstraction. Tête Dans la Nuit II demonstrates the impact of the younger generation of 'action painters', who themselves credited Miró as inspiration for their Abstract Expressionist style. Miró first saw their work in New York in 1947, and the experience, the artist would later recall, was like 'a blow to the solar plexus.'

In the early 1960s, Miró's work had almost abandoned representation altogether in favor of gestural abstraction. However by the 1970s he had begun to reintroduce his familiar visual vocabulary of signs and symbols that he had developed over the years. In this composition he has carried with him these experiments in gesture and expression, but he has remained faithful to his own artistic pursuits. His insistence on the expressive power of signs sets him apart from the purely non-representative Abstract Expressionists. "A form is never something abstract...it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never form for form's sake" (quoted in Margit Rowell, Miró, New York, 1970, p. 207). This work on paper may then be viewed as a synthesis of these two distinct styles, of Abstract Expressionism and his own poetic vision of reality, on the border between abstraction and representation.