Joan Miró

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

Lydia Winston Malbin, Birmingham, Michigan (acquired from the above on 1 July 1948) 

Sotheby's, New York, 16 May 1990, lot 68 (consigned by the estate of the above)

Perls Galleries, New York (acquired at the above sale)

Sotheby's, New York, 2 May 1996, lot 298 (consigned by the above)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Joan Miró, 1948, no. 10 

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Museum of Cranbrook Academy of Art, 20th Century Paintings from Private Collections, 1948, no. 14 (titled Birds in Flight and dated 1921) 

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Museum of Cranbrook Academy of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Winston Collection, 1951, no. 34, illustrated 

Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, 20th Century Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lewis Winston, 1955, no. 46, p. 14, illustrated

Detroit Institute of Arts; Richmond, The Virginia Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Art and The Milwaukee Art Institute, Collecting Modern Art: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lewis Winston, 1957-58, no. 74, p. 65, illustrated (dated 1930)

Detroit Institute of Arts, Selections from the Lydia and Harry Lewis Winston Collections (Dr. and Mrs. Barnett Malbin), 1972-73 (dated 1930)

Detroit Institute of Arts, Cobra and Contrasts: The Lydia Harry Lewis Winston Collection (Dr. and Mrs. Barnett Malbin), 1974, no. 127, p. 162

Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, New York, 1961, no. 531, p. 525, illustrated (titled Personages and Birds in front of the Sun)

Gene Baro, “A Lifelong Education of the Senses,” Living with Art, New York, 1988, p. 138, illustrated  

Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró Catalogue raisonné: Paintings, vol. II, Paris, 2000, no. 621, p. 225, illustrated in color

In the final months of 1939, amid the uncertainty of Europe’s descent into war, Joan Miró found himself in the quiet coastal village of Varengeville-sur-Mer, a secluded corner of Normandy, searching for physical refuge as well as an artistic language that could offer psychic escape from the turmoil engulfing Paris and the continent. It was a moment marked by rupture and anxiety—a suspension of normalcy that forced many artists to reconsider the meaning and method of their practice.

Between August and December of that year, while living in the rented villa Clos des Sansonnets, Miró produced two closely related groups of paintings. The first, known as Varengeville I, were painted on traditional canvas and features a wider chromatic range, including deep raspberry-red backgrounds. The second group, Varengeville II, to which Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil belongs, saw a material shift: these works were painted on coarse burlap, a humble support that opened up new possibilities for texture, symbolism, and surface tension. This deliberate departure from convention introduced a raw, tactile quality that would reverberate through Miró’s practice in the years to come—a striking expression of his inward turn, aligning the surface of the work with the elemental, introspective language he was beginning to use.

Painted in November 1939, Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil ranks among the most significant works of this period. In it, three elongated humanoid figures and a stylized bird hover in a dreamlike, horizonless field. Their forms—etched in black and interspersed with flashes of red, blue and yellow—unfold like choreography on canvas. The scene is untethered from gravity or linear narrative, presenting instead a symbolic cosmos where animate and celestial forces coexist in equilibrium. The rough weave of the burlap becomes not merely a support but an active compositional agent—an earthy counterpoint to the painting’s ethereal, metaphorical tone.

The use of burlap was not merely a technical experiment but a deliberate aesthetic and philosophical choice. Its coarse weave rejects illusion, creates material presence, and emphasizes surface—grounding Miró’s vision in the material world even as his figures ascend into the imaginary. Jacques Dupin notes that “the unity of the composition is now defined by the surface, and it is only by starting with the surface that we can go back to a given figure. It may be assumed that the roughness of burlap in a sense embodies the unity of the surface even before the painter has applied a brush stroke or traced a line” (Jacques Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993, p. 247). The support is not passive; it becomes an active compositional element, a field whose material resistance informs the painting’s symbolic vocabulary.

This material innovation would echo throughout Miró’s later work, most notably in his Sobreteixims or “over-woven” pieces of the 1970s (see fig. 1), where fabric itself becomes both medium and message. Yet in 1939, burlap signified something elemental—an affinity with raw matter, primal instinct, and the enduring vitality of earthbound life. As Dupin further observes, “The impression of night is striking… due to the intensity of line and figures in dark spaces, to the flashes of color, and perhaps also to the fact that the entire surface has been mobilized so the figures are bathed in nocturnal light” (ibid., p. 354).

Although part of the Varengeville II group, Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil prefigures the Constellations, the series of 23 gouaches that Miró began shortly thereafter in Mallorca and completed between 1940 and 1941. The visual logic is already present: the disavowal of perspective, the floating symbolic forms, the fusion of anthropomorphic, cosmic and avian elements into a suspended, frictionless field. As in the Constellations, the world depicted here has no horizon, no spatial hierarchy—only a rhythmic distribution of signs, each carrying poetic and metaphysical weight (see figs. 2-4).

Miró’s articulation of this symbolic cosmos was, in part, a response to the violent fragmentation of the external world. In an essay published earlier that year in Cahiers d’Art, he reflected on the artist’s role during crisis, stating: “The outer world… always has an influence on the painter… The forms expressed by an individual who is part of society must reveal the movement of a soul trying to escape the present, which is particularly ignoble today, in order to approach new realities…” (Joan Miró, "Statement," Cahiers d’Art, Paris, April-May, 1939). This yearning “to approach new realities” defines Miró’s work from this moment. He did not retreat from the world; rather, he sought to reimagine it—to build from fragments a new symbolic order, at once intimate and universal.

The composition of Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil exemplifies this new order. The three humanoid figures and bird—elongated, calligraphic, and seemingly weightless—move in silent communion beneath a radiant sun, a motif that recurs throughout Miró’s symbolic lexicon. Their gestures are archetypal rather than illustrative, conjuring a theater of forms in which meaning arises through rhythm, resonance and alignment. They cast no shadows, nor do they occupy conventional space; instead, they inhabit a visual field animated by energy, with burlap playing as essential a role as line or color.

The black line in these works functions not merely as contour but as a vital pulse—a dynamic rhythm that both unifies and animates the composition. As Dupin notes, the compositions balance flexibility and control through a powerful rhythmic structure that governs line, color scumbles, and white accents. “Rigorousness has not hindered the formal imagination of the artist… it has merely given his personal gifts more room to move about in, for his forms and figures to breathe in.”

This triadic motif—person, bird and celestial body—recurs throughout Miró’s career, underscoring its symbolic resonance as a dialectic between terrestrial and celestial, conscious and unconscious realms. Similarly titled pieces depict figures and fauna swirling around a radiant orb—sharing the same symbolic grammar as this painting, where light, flight and cosmic order merge into a visionary visual language. Here, the sun functions not as a naturalistic element but as a metaphysical force. The bird, long a cipher of freedom and transcendence in Miró’s iconography, acts as a mediator between the human and the infinite.

Writing in 1948, Clement Greenberg recognized the burlap paintings of 1939 as “among the few perfect things artists have done anywhere and at any time,” singling out “one or two paintings in black, red and yellow on burlap” as exemplary of modernist achievement. For Greenberg—an advocate of formalist rigor and medium specificity—these works embodied the modernist ideal. They decisively rejected illusion, foregrounded the material presence of their coarse support, and asserted the autonomy of surface, line, and color. In this rare synthesis of material, vision, and technique, Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil stands among Miró’s most significant accomplishments.

Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil was acquired directly from the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, by Lydia Winston Malbin and her husband, Harry L. Winston, in 1948, and held in their collection for over four decades. As pioneering American patrons of European modernism—particularly Italian Futurism—the Winstons were instrumental in shaping mid-century institutional collections and expanding the reception of avant-garde art in the United States. Their close relationship with Pierre Matisse and artists such as Miró is reflected in a 1957 Detroit exhibition catalogue, which includes a sketch and dedication by Miró himself (Exh. Cat., Detroit Institute of Arts, Cobra and Contrasts: The Lydia Harry Lewis Winston Collection, 1974, no. 127, p. 162). The present work is one of nine oils on burlap created in 1939, one of which is held in the collection of the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art (see fig. 5). Seldom seen on the market, works from this exceptional series have surfaced at auction only three times in the last decade—underscoring their prized status among collectors and institutions alike.