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Lot Essay
Executed in 1942 at Palma de Mallorca, Femme, toile captures an extraordinary moment of creative impetus in Joan Miró's career. A literal description could not do justice to the inventiveness of the graphic language the artist created in this work: although three female figures are depicted, the wealth of symbols and the unpredictable details of their shapes elude any simplistic reading. Alongside new pictorial inventions, Miró has placed some of his most enduring motifs: a star, a spider-like creature and a zig-zag snake. Used sporadically and with care, colour functions in a symbolic way in Femme, étoile, hiding in its apparent illogical positions a suggestive meaning. Leaving the figures floating onto a smoky ground, Miró invites the viewer's eye to wander across the page, freed from any determined spatial or narrative reading.
When Miró executed Femme, étoile, he was negotiating, through a series of similar works, the vocabulary of his personal graphic language. In 1942 Miró was in Palma de Mallorca, where he completed the Constellations series. The stay came to be regarded as a crucial stage in the artist's career, reaffirming his bonds with his motherland in the very place where he used to spend the summers as a child. The childhood memories that Palma de Mallorca doubtless inspired probably had an impact on the graphic activity Miró embraced after the Constellations series. These works, which saw the surfacing of a crowd of new creatures, bear the spontaneity and playfulness of a child's creations. The uninterrupted lines of Femme, étoile express the great mastery and restless invention that characterised the artistic production of that period, which consistently evolved around the single theme of the woman-bird-star.
Femme, étoile's unusual and creative combination of media is also characteristic of Miró's stay at Palma de Mallorca. On the paper, Miró exploited the opacity of gouache to create a textured background; he used the haziness of charcoal to give substance to the lines and the delicate luminosity of pastels to pick out a few details. Although forms and media are here combined in perfect harmony, it is difficult to single out which determined the other. Jacques Dupin saw in Miró's alchemies of media the artist's desire to let the material express itself, in his quest for an unexpected discovery, a resounding image or a new lead to follow (J. Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993, p. 260). The mysterious energy of works such as Femme, étoile lies in this forever unknown, hidden process. Unable to discern the flow of memories from the flow of creation, the viewer is invited to play an active role and to plunge into the depths of his own being to find the key that will decipher the meaning of these signs.
When Miró executed Femme, étoile, he was negotiating, through a series of similar works, the vocabulary of his personal graphic language. In 1942 Miró was in Palma de Mallorca, where he completed the Constellations series. The stay came to be regarded as a crucial stage in the artist's career, reaffirming his bonds with his motherland in the very place where he used to spend the summers as a child. The childhood memories that Palma de Mallorca doubtless inspired probably had an impact on the graphic activity Miró embraced after the Constellations series. These works, which saw the surfacing of a crowd of new creatures, bear the spontaneity and playfulness of a child's creations. The uninterrupted lines of Femme, étoile express the great mastery and restless invention that characterised the artistic production of that period, which consistently evolved around the single theme of the woman-bird-star.
Femme, étoile's unusual and creative combination of media is also characteristic of Miró's stay at Palma de Mallorca. On the paper, Miró exploited the opacity of gouache to create a textured background; he used the haziness of charcoal to give substance to the lines and the delicate luminosity of pastels to pick out a few details. Although forms and media are here combined in perfect harmony, it is difficult to single out which determined the other. Jacques Dupin saw in Miró's alchemies of media the artist's desire to let the material express itself, in his quest for an unexpected discovery, a resounding image or a new lead to follow (J. Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993, p. 260). The mysterious energy of works such as Femme, étoile lies in this forever unknown, hidden process. Unable to discern the flow of memories from the flow of creation, the viewer is invited to play an active role and to plunge into the depths of his own being to find the key that will decipher the meaning of these signs.