Joan Miró

This is no ‘typical’ Miró: there is little to be seen here of luminous colour planes, silently floating flowerings of form or the cheerful enchantment that infuses so many of the Catalan artist’s works. We are looking at the scribbled doodle of an intimate dream, audaciously magnified on a monumental scale and unparalleled in intensity. In the first instance, Miró presents us with a narrative: on the left we see a woman, her expression still marked by a grating of fear but her head already overlapping in purple with that of her suitor, who is approaching enthusiastically from the right. At another level, however, Miró wants to demonstrate the dazzling modern capabilities of line wielded as a paintbrush. The man and woman are both drawn, while the bird with blue in its body, pecking at the painted red which is swallowing up some yellow, resembles an etching; above the woman, flat paint makes way for plaster, adding spatial depth. Thus, as the free-flowing line lower right also demonstrates, the artistic means are allowed to speak for themselves – Miró, in the manner of a seismograph, is simply taking dictation.

This picture belongs to a series of three paintings with Spanish themes Miró produced in 1945. The works draw their vitality from the contrast between the stark grey of the background and the exquisite equilibrium of the lines and colour planes. These latter recall Miró’s Constellations of 1941 and in formal terms already herald the huge Cincinnati wall painting of 1947. A probable reference to the mural can be seen in the background of the present picture, where Miró has attempted to imitate a wall as his pictorial ground. After painting the grey background, Miró deliberately maltreated the canvas by folding it up into a small square, leaving crease lines that are still visible today. Over the resulting illusion of a ‘plastered wall’, he applied the delicately floating forms of his Spanish dancer, whose glowing ecstasy vents itself in a constellation of restless grace.

In amongst his succession of floating, filigree pictorial worlds, which began with the Constellations of the war years and culminated in the vast Cincinnati mural, in 1944 Joan Miró also produced two clay sculptures, each less than 20 cm tall but powerfully robust, which he baptized Oiseau solaire (Solar bird) and Oiseau lunaire (Lunar bird). They were cast in bronze, later in larger dimensions as well. In 1966 Miró then produced a giant version of Oiseau lunaire, of which five copies were cast. One of these is today housed in the Fondation Beyeler. Whereas the little original cut the figure of an enchantingly pompous half-pint, the large version fills an entire room on its own. The lines shaping this colossus of a crowing cockerel nevertheless flow with the same animated lightness so characteristic of Miró’s paintings and dispel all sense of heaviness from the darkly cheerful giant.