Oiseau mare de sang sur la plaine

In January of 1931, Joan Miró returned to Paris after a prolonged stay in Spain. It was there, in his studio at 3 rue François Mouthon, that Miró threw himself into painting again after a hiatus of several years. Painted between January and June of 1931, this small but pivotal group of paintings – to which Oiseau mare de sang sur la plaine belongs – would prove crucial to his development. ‘In 1931 he took up the palette again, but with some hesitation, like a man who has been through a long illness,’ Jacques Dupin has written. ‘A dozen paintings executed between January and June, mostly of small or medium size, provide the necessary transition, clearing the way for a new, more affirmative, more powerful style… Poetry remains the supreme goal of Miró’s art, but his means for attaining it became richer and more complex’ (J. Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993, p. 161).
Between 1929 and 1930 Miró experimented with a variety of unusual materials, heralding the beginning of what would become known as his anti-painting period. Combing the sandy beaches of the Spanish coast, a short distance from his family’s estate at Montroig, he gathered pieces of cast-off ephemera that he would later transform into collages and assemblages. Miró still possessed a painter’s eye, however, and he could visualize the latent emotional power in the curved edge of a piece of shell or the oblique angle of a fragment of wood. ‘It must be remembered that there is no such thing as a nonfigurative element in Miro's painting,’ the Museum of Modern Art curator Bill Rubin has written. ‘However elliptical, however distant the allusion, every form in his paintings is associated metaphorically with something outside the work’ (W. Rubin, Miró in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, exh. cat., New York, 1973, p. 51).
Intriguingly, Miró never entirely abandoned painting during his so-called anti-painting period. In fact, he made several experimental series, most notably the large paintings on white backgrounds that occupied him for much of the first half of 1930. The following year, between January and June of 1931, he painted the roughly twenty works to which Oiseau mare de sang sur la plaine belongs. Familiar motifs, such as birds, heads and abstracted human figures, emerge from the series. ‘He also experimented with other media,’ Dupin explained, ‘with pieces of plywood especially, sometimes irregular in shape, on which he used a runny paint so that we can still see the texture of the wood. These small paintings are less calculated, hence freer and more expressive. Some of them anticipate developments that will come only much later’ (J. Dupin, op. cit, p. 164).
In Oiseau mare de sang sur la plaine, Miró has created an enigmatic landscape where a mysterious world is brought to life. Dividing the composition into the dual realms of earth and sky, he indicates a horizon line, using olive green for the heavens and dark brown for the earth below. Its title, which roughly translates to ‘bird, pool of blood, on the plain’ is indicated by the sizable red oval in the central register, around which a variety of enigmatic creatures are arranged. The platform at left might be read as a guillotine, with the shard of yellow light the executioner’s blade. In the distance, a human figure with the face of an owl and the feet of a sphinx presides over the scene. He sports a great multicoloured cape that flies up behind him, like a royal robe caught in the wind. It bears the red and yellow colours of the Catalonian flag, accented with touches of green.
In 1940, the Japanese art critic, poet and sculptor Shuzo Takiguchi illustrated the present work in his monograph on Miró. Published in Tokyo, Takiguchi’s book would prove to be one of the very first monographs on the artist ever written. Takiguchi was instrumental in developing the Japanese avant-garde and is largely credited with bringing Surrealism to Japan, translating André Breton’s Surrealism and Painting into Japanese in 1930. Miró and Takiguchi met and collaborated on several occasions, and he would go on to write several poems for Miró's exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in 1967.