Joan Miró

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired by 1948)

Private Collection, Canada

Sotheby's, New York, 9 November 1995, lot 354 (consigned by the above)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Clement Greenberg, Joan Miró, New York, 1948, p. 108, pl. LXIX, illustrated

Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró Catalogue raisonné: Drawings, vol. II, Paris, 2010, no. 967, p. 93, illustrated in color

Created in the immediate wake of his Constellation series of 1940-41, Femmes, oiseau, étoiles dates from one of the most formative and introspective periods of Joan Miró’s career. This large-scale drawing encapsulates the artist’s retreat into a private mythology of poetic symbols and intuitive forms that he developed in response to the Second World War and is one of a limited suite of meter-high compositions executed between May and June of 1942. Femmes, oiseau, étoiles stands out for its balance of spontaneity and structure—a lyrical interplay of signs that distills Miró’s creative response to a world in turmoil.

By mid-1942, Miró had relocated from Paris to various sanctuaries across France and Spain—Varengeville-sur-Mer, Palma de Mallorca, Mont-roig, and eventually Barcelona. This nomadic period of exile and introspection fundamentally shaped his art. Having completed the final Constellation in Mont-roig in September 1941, Miró entered a new phase of experimentation on paper, abandoning oil painting for a time. His letters from the period reveal a man deeply affected by global catastrophe, seeking solace through artistic labor. Writing to his friend Enric Ricart in early 1942, Miró explained: “I spend nearly all my time here working… I see almost no one, and in this way I can escape without being engulfed by the terrible tragedy of the entire world” (quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Miró, 1993, p. 336).

Like Picasso, whose response to the war was more metaphysical than documentary (with the notable exception of Guernica), Miró withdrew into a symbolic cosmos of his own making, filtering global trauma through a private and poetic vocabulary. The works on paper from 1942–43—of which Femmes, oiseau, étoiles is a defining example—are characterized by freedom of invention and fluidity. These were not preparatory studies but autonomous explorations into form, material and myth. As Jacques Dupin describes:

“They are explorations undertaken with no preconceived notions—effervescent creations in which the artist perfected a vast repertoire of shapes, signs and formulas, bringing into play every material and instrument compatible with paper” (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Paris, 2004, pp. 257-60).

Miró found that paper, rather than canvas, best suited his itinerant and furtive existence during wartime. Canvas was costly and difficult to obtain, while drawing offered a more immediate and flexible means of expression. Working in various combinations of pen, pastel, gouache, ink and charcoal on flocked papers, Miró explored new levels of tactility and responsiveness in surface. In Femmes, oiseau, étoiles, the softly modulated fields of color—blush pinks, sea greens, radiant yellows, and coal-like voids—are overlaid with a taut scaffolding of calligraphic lines. Miró's archetypal triad of woman, bird and star is given a fresh, dreamlike interpretation: the woman with extended limbs seems to both conjure and embody celestial forces; the bird is invoked through gesture or implied in form; and the stars, scattered across the surface, serve as silent witnesses to a cosmic drama.

This compositional strategy builds on the innovations of the Constellations, with their dense matrices of floating biomorphic shapes. Yet while the Constellations dazzled with kaleidoscopic intricacy, the drawings of 1942 reflect a newfound clarity and restraint. The move from dense constellation to airy meditation reflects Miró’s psychological shift—from anxiety to a form of spiritual renewal. Dupin writes:

“In 1942 [the Constellations] were followed by a large number of watercolors, gouaches and drawings, characterized by freedom of invention and a marvelous effortlessness... In this evolution of his art, which was to end in the creation of his definitive style, renewed contact with Spain after five years of absence—with Majorca most especially—was doubtless crucial... They are explorations undertaken with no preconceived idea—effervescent creations in which the artist perfected a vast repertory of forms, signs, and formulas, bringing into play all the materials and instruments compatible with paper... The object of all these explorations is to determine the relationship between drawing and the materials, the relationship between line and space.” (ibid., pp. 257–60).

The title Femmes, oiseau, étoiles links the work to recurring themes within the artist's oeuvre and reaffirms his abiding interest in elemental forces and mythopoetic structures. The woman—often symbolic of nature, intuition, and the unconscious—stands in dynamic relation to the bird, representing freedom and transformation, and to the stars, which evoke fate and the infinite.

Writing on this group of drawings, Dupin explains, “these works on paper are all variations on a single theme, Woman-Bird-Star. This serves as a title for a great many of them, while others are only slightly modified: instead of ‘woman’ we sometimes find ‘personage’; for ‘star,’ we find ‘sun’... The variations on this extremely simple theme are all the richer, more complex and baffling, because the theme is so elementary.” The simplicity of these motifs gave Miró a structure flexible enough to express a vast range of emotional and psychological registers—what Dupin elsewhere described as “commonplace and fantastic,” capable of “endless imaginative combinations” (Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, New York, 1961, p. 267).

The blackened voids and abstracted faces in this work echo the distorted figures of Miró’s Barcelona Series (1939–44), a suite of lithographs made in response to the Spanish Civil War. Works such as plate one and plate 32 (see figs. 2 and 3), depict deformed beings in an atmosphere of existential threat. Femmes, oiseau, étoiles engages similar themes, with contorted forms and smoke-like black shapes suggesting suffocation or obliteration—evoking the atrocities of war. Likewise, its rhythmic scatter of stars and gestural lines recalls Le Bel oiseau déchiffrant l'inconnu au couple d'amoureux (see fig. 4)—another instance in which Miró fused cosmic metaphor with psychological intensity.

Alongside this darkness there is also a palpable sense of renewal. Radiant orbs and playful marks signal hope. Miró often described how elemental encounters—like watching light shimmer on the surface of the sea—could ignite the imagination and open pathways into the surreal. In these wartime drawings, such impressions become a means of alchemy: transforming private anxiety and collective trauma into luminous invention.

Femmes, oiseau, étoiles also speaks to Miró’s deeply personal method of transforming external chaos into internal order. While some artists addressed war through realism or direct critique, Miró developed a symbolic language that spoke obliquely yet powerfully to the fears of his time. Dupin observed, “on hundreds of sheets of paper dating from 1942 and 1943, we can follow them as they clown around, run their foolish errands, play their whimsical or mysterious games. Their enormous capacity for life is subject to no law save that of the internal logic of their birth and development” (ibid, p. 268). This blend of pathos and playfulness captures Miró’s unique surrealist vision of the human condition.

A rare survivor from a particularly nomadic and creatively fertile period, this is one of the few large-scale works on paper from 1942 that remain in private hands. Such works are exceedingly rare on the market; with most now housed in institutional collections such as the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. Acquired by Matthew and Carolyn Bucksbaum in 1996, it has remained in their collection ever since. No other wartime works on paper of this scale have appeared at auction in the past decade.