Personnage

Executed during a period of great optimism in Spain in the late 1970s – following the death of General Franco in 1975, and the restoration of democracy to the country –Personnage dates from a dramatic, prolific period in Joan Miró’s career.

As Miró’s friend and biographer, Jacques Dupin has written, the 1970s were a period in which Miró’s perennial motifs of the bird in flight, the woman, the male figure and the star all became fused with, and ultimately subordinated to, the immediate graphic power of his increasingly gestural and calligraphic style. ‘During the final years of his life, Miró continued to execute magnificent paintings, densely inhabited, insurgent dances…’ he wrote. ‘[His] works had reached such a level of success and buoyancy, or freedom and aloofness, that it seemed absurd and even ‘sterile’ to seek to invent new figures and to renew old themes. The perennial depiction of a woman and a bird, of a star, of the sun, and the moon, or the striking appearance of a rooster or a dancer confirmed that the importance of the theme was now secondary compared to the sign. The sign itself no longer the image’s double, it was rather reality assimilated then spat out by the painter, a reality he had incorporated then liberated, like air or light. The importance of the theme now depended on its manner of appearing or disappearing, and the few figures Miró still endlessly named and inscribed in his works are the natural go-betweens and guarantors of the reality of his universe... In a word, Miró’s painting became solar, purged of anecdotal references, refined mannerisms, self-satisfied taste and obscure manoeuvres. Hidden or fleeting elements lost their place, nor was there any need to decipher these works. For they had become sovereignly pure acts bursting with a self-evidence that the painter had achieved only through an endless series of interruptions and ruptures’ (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1983, pp. 339-340 & 351).

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Miró had been inspired by the more open approach to automatism taken by the American Abstract Expressionists – painters who, in turn, had themselves been influenced by Miró’s revolutionary early works of the 1920s. After visiting many of these artists in the United States soon after the war, Miró had become freer with his own work and thereafter increasingly adopted a more gestural approach that was later to be augmented by the more meditative methods and techniques of Japanese calligraphers.

By the 1970s all these disparate influences and approaches had coalesced in Miró’s work into a powerful, dramatic and often violent assault on his works in the form of a myriad of gestural marks, splashes, smudges and drips. Miró was even, on occasion, slashing and burning parts of his canvases in a manner aimed directly at reflecting the continuing mix of violence, oppression and bitter resistance taking place in Spain under Franco. By 1977, and the passing of the Franco years, this renewed energy and vigour in Miró’s work continued, but now coalesced with his earlier repertoire of more poetic signs, motifs and constellations into new, vibrant and lyrical forms in which the raw energy and directness of his gestural mark-making fused with the calligraphic logic of his earlier pictorial language. The result was the creation of more elegant and subtle compositions such as Personnage that persuasively conjure the idea of an entire fluid universe of pictographic harmony.

Here, within the unique logic of the picture that Miró has set up, for example, the apparently autonomous and separate entities of line, form, symbol, colour and motif are all in fact wholly interdependent upon one another in the creation of the image. Set against a bright yellow ground that emits a rich radiant energy, these bold marks seem to float before the eye, suggesting an apparently fluid cosmos of perpetual and constant metamorphosis where one element or painterly action can magically change into or form part of another. It is an optimistic, new universe of potential that Miró here articulates: a world where the artist’s own creative imagination seamlessly unites with his actions and gestures, to become an integrated, and interwoven, whole.