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Lot Essay
Painted in the spring of 1968, Femme et oiseau ou Le réveil de l'étoile amour I showcases the renewed intensity and innovative freedom that marked Joan Miró’s work during the 1960s, inspired by a generation of younger artists who were making a name for themselves across the Atlantic. While one part of the title, which translates to the highly poetic The Awakening of the Love Star I, appears to be an expression of Miró’s enduring fascination with the night sky—“The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me,” he declared to Yvon Taillandier in 1959 (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 275)—the composition reveals the profound impact the Abstract Expressionists had on the Spanish artist during this period of his career, as their bold visual language pushed him towards a more energetic and visceral painterly style.
In November 1941 the first retrospective exhibition devoted to Miró opened to the public at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. This show had a major and timely impact on many young artists in the city’s avant-garde circles, including Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hoffmann and Barnett Newman. Upon his first journey to the United States in 1947, Miró was delighted to learn that his work had been exerting a strong influence on these artists. When he returned to America twelve years later, Miró renewed contact with many of the painters and curators he had met during his first stay in the country, taking the opportunity to immerse himself in the latest work by the leading Abstract Expressionists. This encounter came at a crucial juncture in Miró’s career—the artist had taken a hiatus from painting for several years in the mid-1950s, as he became accustomed to the specially designed new studio he had built near Palma, Mallorca. The example set by the New York painters was profound and liberating, the dramatically large-scale, open-field style of painting they had pioneered inspiring Miró to return to his practice with a new fervor. As he explained, “When I saw those paintings, I said to myself, ‘You can do it, too; go to it, you see, it is O.K.!’” (quoted in ibid., p. 279).
Over the ensuing years, Miró’s paintings exhibited an increasing gestural boldness and spontaneous handling of pigment, as he married the “all-over” look that had become characteristic of American post-war painting with his own unique style. While Miró’s approach to materials continued to evolve in novel and unexpected ways, his subject matter remained relatively constant, returning repeatedly to the familiar cast of amorphic characters, female figures, birds, and swiftly delineated stars, that had occupied his canvases across the decades.
In the present work, the canvas is dominated by broad passages of graphic black paint that flow in meandering pathways, the lines overlapping and branching outwards to create a dynamic pattern, which Miró then filled with planes of pure color, from vibrant green to vivid reds and touches of sky blue. The addition of sweeping strokes of white paint within the black expanse enliven the forms, the soft, almost calligraphic marks suggesting a mysterious presence within the forms. In this way, Miró demonstrated how the intuitive methods of creation he had developed at the height of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s could be brought forward several decades and reinvigorated, inspired by the latest developments he had discovered in America. Femme et oiseau ou Le réveil de l'étoile amour I is one of three works of the same series (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, nos. 1307, 1309 and 1310). Ariane Mainaud has noted that Miró initially gave these works the title, Le réveil de l'étoile, but decided once he had finished the group to call them Femme et oiseau, which he inscribed on the reverse of the canvas.
In November 1941 the first retrospective exhibition devoted to Miró opened to the public at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. This show had a major and timely impact on many young artists in the city’s avant-garde circles, including Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hoffmann and Barnett Newman. Upon his first journey to the United States in 1947, Miró was delighted to learn that his work had been exerting a strong influence on these artists. When he returned to America twelve years later, Miró renewed contact with many of the painters and curators he had met during his first stay in the country, taking the opportunity to immerse himself in the latest work by the leading Abstract Expressionists. This encounter came at a crucial juncture in Miró’s career—the artist had taken a hiatus from painting for several years in the mid-1950s, as he became accustomed to the specially designed new studio he had built near Palma, Mallorca. The example set by the New York painters was profound and liberating, the dramatically large-scale, open-field style of painting they had pioneered inspiring Miró to return to his practice with a new fervor. As he explained, “When I saw those paintings, I said to myself, ‘You can do it, too; go to it, you see, it is O.K.!’” (quoted in ibid., p. 279).
Over the ensuing years, Miró’s paintings exhibited an increasing gestural boldness and spontaneous handling of pigment, as he married the “all-over” look that had become characteristic of American post-war painting with his own unique style. While Miró’s approach to materials continued to evolve in novel and unexpected ways, his subject matter remained relatively constant, returning repeatedly to the familiar cast of amorphic characters, female figures, birds, and swiftly delineated stars, that had occupied his canvases across the decades.
In the present work, the canvas is dominated by broad passages of graphic black paint that flow in meandering pathways, the lines overlapping and branching outwards to create a dynamic pattern, which Miró then filled with planes of pure color, from vibrant green to vivid reds and touches of sky blue. The addition of sweeping strokes of white paint within the black expanse enliven the forms, the soft, almost calligraphic marks suggesting a mysterious presence within the forms. In this way, Miró demonstrated how the intuitive methods of creation he had developed at the height of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s could be brought forward several decades and reinvigorated, inspired by the latest developments he had discovered in America. Femme et oiseau ou Le réveil de l'étoile amour I is one of three works of the same series (Dupin and Lelong-Mainaud, nos. 1307, 1309 and 1310). Ariane Mainaud has noted that Miró initially gave these works the title, Le réveil de l'étoile, but decided once he had finished the group to call them Femme et oiseau, which he inscribed on the reverse of the canvas.