Joan Miró

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Galerie Larock-Granoff, Paris
Galleria Marescalchi, Bologna
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Joan Miró. Recent paintings, gouaches and drawings from 1969 to 1978, 1978, no. 61, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Ikebukuro, Seibu Art Forum, Joan Miró, 1995, no. 11, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró. Catalogue raisonné. Paintings 1976-1981, Paris, 2001, vol. VI, no. 1873, illustrated in colour p. 120

The canvas is not lined and there are no signs of retouching visible under UV light. This work is in excellent condition, the surface is clean, and the impasto, where, present, is very well preserved.
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Miró's Femme, étoile is a striking example of figural abstraction at its most daring. Although no identifiable traits of woman or star are readily perceived, the artist evokes the motions of his subjects through the sweeping arabesques of his brushwork. When painting this work, Miró was primarily concerned with reducing his pictorial language to its barest essentials: 'Through this rarefaction and seeming lack of prudence,' explains his biographer Jacques Dupin, 'the canvas's pictorial energy was in fact magnified, and his painting strikingly reaffirmed. This process also seemed like a breath of fresh air, or an ecstatic present from which new signs, colors, and the full freedom of gesture surged forth. By limiting the colors of his palette, Miró's enduring themes yielded works of various sizes, proportions, rhythms, and resonances' (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, p. 337-338).

The frenetic expressiveness of the artist's brushwork here is not unlike the tag of the contemporary graffiti artist, whose bold yet economic imagery is the unmistakable calling card of a complex artistic persona. After his trip to New York in 1947, Miró became acquainted with the art of the Abstract Expressionists and was immediately fascinated by their techniques and aesthetic agenda. As the artist later recalled, the experience of seeing canvases of the Abstract Expressionists was like 'a blow to the solar plexus.' Several young painters including Jackson Pollock credited Miró's art as the inspiration for their wild, paint-splattered canvases, and in the years that followed Miró created spontaneous works that responded to the energy of this younger generation of American painters. By the time he painted the present work, Miró's compositions had gained a level of expressive freedom and exuberance that evidenced his complete confidence in his craft, whilst still maintaining the distinctive and instantly recognisable palette and iconography that underpin his œuvre across the many decades. Images of women, stars, birds and moons were omnipresent in his pictures to the point that they became memes for the artist's own identity. Jacques Dupin elaborated on the semiotic importance of figuration in these later paintings, arguing that '[t]he sign itself was no longer the image's double, it was rather reality assimilated then spat out by the painter, a reality he had incorporated then liberated, like air or light. The importance of the theme now depended on its manner of appearing or disappearing, and the few figures Miró still endlessly named and inscribed in his works are the natural go-between and guarantor of the reality of his universe. It would perhaps be more fruitful to give an account of those figures that have disappeared than of the survivors' (ibid., pp. 339-340).