Personnage, oiseaux, étoiles

Joan Miró made his second trip to the United States in 1959, on the occasion of the opening of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Invigorated by the images he encountered whilst there, Miró was inspired to paint for the first time in five years. Such work, he said, ‘showed me the liberties we can take, and how far we can go, beyond the limits. In a sense, it freed me’ (J. Miró, quoted in J. Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993, p. 303). He returned to his studio in Palma de Mallorca with a vengeance, and the paintings produced during the 1960s testify to this renewed energy and gusto.
Thick, sweeping black lines fill many of the artist’s paintings from this period including Personnage, oiseaux, étoiles. Created on 5 July 1965, the work integrates some of Miró’s most enduring motifs: abstracted figures, birds, and the schematic star. According to Jacques Dupin, Miró’s friend and the author of his catalogue raisonné, the ‘theme of the woman, the bird and the night provides one of the keys to Miró's cosmic imagination: it expounds the conflict between the earthly and aerial elements and, in the dialogue between the woman and the bird, renders the precariousness of the balance achieved between them’ (J. Dupin, Miró: Life and Work, London, 1962, p. 485). Personnage, oiseaux, étoiles also encapsulates Miró’s visual idiom of that era, which drew from both contemporaneous American canvases and Japanese calligraphy to yield poetic and gestural imagery. The unmixed colours freely applied to the canvas burn with an intensity, and as the decade progressed so too did Miró’s work evolve as he became more at ease with his painterly process. His forms grew brasher, the colours bolder, and the lines more expressive and charged. Paintings such as Personnage, oiseaux, étoiles embody this freedom and the sense of boundless and wild creativity.