Femme devant la lune

Following the occupation of Paris, Miró found refuge back in his hometown of Barcelona in 1944. There, as a supporter of the Republican cause, he was in turn faced with the anguish of Franco-ruled Spain. Miró’s otherwise joyous and playful anthropomorphic figures, which had become emblematic of his style, developed an ominous maturity during this period. Like the present Femme devant la lune, they grew fangs, their features sharpened, and innocence visibly dissipated. The effect of the uncertainty and violence of the political situation in which he now found himself is highly palpable in this painting. The thickness and assurance of the black line, contrasted with bright primary colors, intensely capture the viewer’s attention. The bright red in particular, applied in the figure’s body and again in her pupils, relay the disconcerting state of mind in which she seems to find herself in this environment. Even a familiar symbol such as the moon, which might serve a reassuring marker, is presented in a disorienting manner: green, with sharp edges threateningly closing in on her. Miró gives us no choice but to confront the lurking anxiety and trauma of the early forties in Europe.
This said, this painting’s aesthetic cohesiveness, the palpable quality of attention with which Miró executed it, suggests that even within some of the darkest hours of modern history, the artist believed that there remained beauty in the world—and a uniquely human desire and ability to both create and pursue it. The abstracted background, with its hints of surprisingly bright pink, aquamarine, orange, white and yellow, give the composition a distinctive vitality. As he often does, Miró brilliantly uses negative space and the raw canvas to create an atmosphere at once sophisticated and rustic, engineered and left to chance. His masterly arrangement of colors, form and lack-there-of, live at the border of instinct and intellect. It invites the viewer to remain there, with him, as if there was always another constellation to dream up and discover, a place worth imagining and therefore, worth hoping for.