Joan Miró

Private Collection, Spain (a gift from the artist on 23rd July 1946)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró. Catalogue raisonné. Drawings 1938-1959, Paris, 2010, vol. II, no. 1078, illustrated in colour p. 144

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down. The corners are rounded. There is a minute crease to the lower right corner and there are some tape remnants to the upper edge of the verso due to previous mounting. Otherwise, this work is in overall very good condition.
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When Miró executed this work in 1946, he was at the height of his international acclaim. The previous year, the New York dealer Pierre Matisse had exhibited the artist's celebrated series of Constellations to enormous praise. The demand for Miró's work in the United States had become so great that in August 1946 Pierre Matisse offered to purchase the artist's entire production of 1942-46 and to finance him for the next two years. Better yet, Miró was invited to the United States to create what would be his first public commission - a mural for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati. What the public, his dealer and his critics recognised in Miró's paintings from this era was a certain zeal and optimism that was in sharp contrast to the sombre mood of post-war Europe. Figures is a composition populated by Miró's recognisable Surrealist characters – several highly stylised human figures and a bird suspended above them.

Jacques Dupin wrote about the artist's production from 1946: 'Although the handwriting will tend to become freer and invention more flexible, nonetheless his works of 1946 follow the lines established in the paintings of the two preceding years. [...] we find the confirmation and the continuing development of an art which becomes progressively less capricious, less anxious, and more self-assured. All the paintings of this year are characterized by the abandonment of the purely rhythmic elements and signs that abounded in 1945. The artist concentrates on his figures and animals, now making them more and more unlike each other, even odder and more humorous in character ... (a) renewed passion for artistic materials produces grounds of great richness and animation' (Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 382). The works from this period are recognised for their lively animation and humour, populated with a profusion of figures and signs. Dupin held them in high regard, commenting that 'The artist's imagination roams freely on them, and he improvises with much greater ease and casualness. The absence of the easel seems to have freed him from the usual constraints... The gestures that create them are swift and sure' (ibid., p. 378).