Joán Miró

Pilar Juncosa (wife of the artist), Palma de Mallorca
A gift from the above to the present owner on 29th September 1989

Executed on brown card, not laid down and attached to the mount intermittently along all four edges. There are artist's pinholes at all four corners. There are some studio stains in places, most of which inherent to the artist's process. Otherwise, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, though the background is warmer and the blacks more varied in the original.
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Painted in 1977, Tête, oiseau, is a quintessential example of Miró's late works, characterised by the amalgamation of figuration and abstraction. Executed with a technical assurance and the economy of pictorial means typical of the last decades of his life, the present work exceptionally represents this marriage.

Tête, oiseau is also a consummate depiction of Miró's application of intense colours which exemplify the union of the two approaches. The artist predominately utilized colour in strong and sudden spurts, with little effort to achieve distinct and defined tones. This particular treatment of colour, "brings light and rhythm, which is revelatory by dint of violent contrasts, plays an autonomous part, and only rarely serves to accentuate the detail of a figure, to stress an eye or line or of a mouth" (Jacques Dupin, Miró, New York, 1961, p. 480). Commenting on his own stylistic merger of abstraction and figuration, Miró pronounced, "It may be a dog, a woman or whatever. I don't really care. Of course, while I am painting, I see a woman or a bird in my mind, indeed, very tangibly a woman or a bird. Afterward, is up to you" (J. Miró & Georges Railard, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, Paris, 1977).

Although Miró spent the latter part of his life in Palma, Spain, the distinctive style of his works from the 1960s and 1970s is directly reflective of his time in New York where he became acquainted with Abstract Expressionism, an experience that he describes as a "blow to the solar plexus".  Several young painters, including Jackson Pollock, were crediting Miró as the inspiration for their wild paint-splattered canvases. In the years that followed he created works that responded to the enthusiasm of this younger generation of American painters and the spontaneity of their art. The influence of this artistic movement also took hold in the scale of his works, after the 1950s Miró began to create pieces on a far larger plane, incorporating abstraction whilst still maintaining the integrity and vision of own artistic pursuits.