.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In early 1944, Pierre Matisse, Miró's dealer in New York, wrote to the artist, expressing concern that he no longer seemed interested in painting. Miró had last worked in oil on canvas in his Varengeville series, which he began only days before the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, and brought to a conclusion at the end of that year. During his final days in Varengeville he commenced his celebrated Constellations, painted in gouache on paper (Dupin, nos. 628-650; fig. 1). Miró completed the final works in this series in Palma, Mallorca and at his family's home in Montroig, Catalonia during 1941. For most of the next several years the artist worked only on paper, experimenting with various media and techniques, and made numerous prints and ceramics. Miró wrote Matisse on 17 June 1944, seeking to reassure him, "I work as always a lot; if I've made ceramics and lithographs, as this summer I am going to make sculpture, it is not to abandon painting on the contrary, it is to enrich it with new possibilities and to take it up with a new enthusiasm" (quoted in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 336).
Miró had already begun, in fact, to paint on canvas again. Jacques Dupin has written, "In 1944, after four years away from oil painting, Miró went back to it in a new spirit, displaying astonishing ease and productivity. Oil confers an authority, a decisiveness, and a clarity to canvas that modifies its structure and its spirit. The climate is a more relaxed one, and figures have a sobriety that intensifies them" (in Miró, Barcelona, 2004, p. 264). Miró executed the first pictures on scraped canvases, with thinly painted figures emerging like wraiths from the stressed surface. Some of the paintings that followed are more like drawings on canvas, as Miró sought to translate some of the graphic techniques he had improvised for his gouaches and drawings into oil paint on canvas. He wrote in a war time notebook that he wanted to "achieve the same spontaneity in the paintings as in the drawings" (in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p.188).
By the end of 1944, when the present painting was done, Miró had fully reclaimed a vigorous and assured manner in oil, whose aspect and methods would characterize his painting for years to come (fig. 2). Femmes, oiseaux is virtually perfect in the way Miró has combined drawing with color, and employed different applications of paint. The imagery fills the canvas and is more compactly interactive than in previous works. The result is carefully composed, but possesses a felicitous aspect that is completely fresh and spontaneous. Miró wrote, "I will make my work emerge naturally, like the song of a bird or the music of Mozart, with no apparent effort, but thought out a length and worked out from within" (in ibid., pp. 185-186).
Most of the paintings done in 1944 are of relatively modest size. The present painting is slightly less wide than the sheets of paper used for the Constellations. Since his return to mainland Spain in 1941, Miró continued to feel anxiety about his political status vis-à-vis the fascist Franco regime, and these worries discouraged him from establishing his studio operations in one location. He worked in small, makeshift spaces in the house at Montroig, and in the family apartment at Passage del Crèdit, 4 in Barcelona, where he painted Femmes, oiseaux. He needed a permanent and suitably large studio, one that would enable him to work concurrently in the various media that now preoccupied him, and on a larger scale. In 1938 he had written an article for Paris journal XXe Siecle titled "I Dream of a Large Studio." This was a problem for which he would not find the perfect remedy until his friend the architect Josep Lluis Sert built a studio for him in Palma, which he began using in 1957.
While Miró never again packed so many signs and symbols into a picture as he did in some of the famous Constellations, the compositional process that he employed in later paintings, and indeed in Femmes, oiseaux, is fundamentally the same. He summarized it in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney published in the New York Partisan Review, February, 1948: "there have always been these three stages--first, the suggestion, usually from the material; second, the conscious organization of these forms; and third, the compositional enrichment" (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., op. cit., p. 211). Here the artist has scumbled thin, irregular washes of watercolor to tone the ground of the canvas. He then proceeded to draw over this ground a series of figures and motifs in a fine, fluent and extremely elegant line. The final step was to brush on opaque oil pigments to reinforce significant symbolic signs; these also function as primary color forms within the composition, from which the painting derives its rhythmic dynamism and overall design.
While Miró was engaged in oil painting once again, he continued to hone his virtuosic skills as a draughtsman in the Barcelona Series, a group of fifty black and white lithographs (fig. 3) that he completed in May 1944 and were published in Barcelona by his friend Joan Prats later that year. Sir Roland Penrose wrote that "The Barcelona Series discloses the same anger which had been provoked by the continuous deterioration of the international situation before the war, but in its directness it is even more disturbing" (in Miró, Barcelona, 1970, p. 107). Miró's references to recent political events and personal tribulations take the form of a free-wheeling psycho-sexual narrative, in which male and female represent cosmic beings that struggle for power, the rights of seeking their own liberty and pleasure, or simply to survive.
The same observant eye and mordant wit that Miró brought to bear on the creation of the Barcelona Series are discernible in the paintings of 1944. Miró might have seen the models for the delightfully characterized figures in Femmes, oiseaux in the local town square, or they might have come out of a folk or fairy tale. Indeed, the scene may describe events in the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, a story that probably held personal and political overtones for Miró. Youthful Cinderella, humbly garbed, appears at upper left. The two grotesque, saw-tooth female figures at lower right are her older step-sisters, who persistently harangue and oppress her. In the story she calls on the birds (seen here at far left and top center) to help her with her endless chores: "two white pigeons came in through the kitchen window, and then the turtledoves, and finally all the birds beneath the sky came whirring and swarming in they were finished and flew out again" (translated by D. L. Ashliman). In the Grimms' story a beautiful white bird takes the role of the beneficent "fairy godmother," who serves as Cinderella's intermediary with goodness and justice. At the end of the tale, pigeons peck the eyes of the two vile step-sisters, "for their wickedness and falsehood." Cinderella is fundamentally a tale of oppression and eventual release, whose happy conclusion asserts the belief that good will come to decent people. The lessons of this timeless story were apparent in late 1944, as Allied armies were advancing on every front. Good, it seemed, would finally triumph over "wickedness and falsehood" in war torn Europe, and the artist, among countless others, would be released from years of oppression and dread.
(fig. 1) Joan Miró, L'Etoile matinale (from the Constellations series), 16 March 1940. Fundació Joan Miró. BARCODE 20627751
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, Le rouge, le bleu, le bel espoir, 1947. Sold, Christie's New York, 4 May 2004, lot 33. BARCODE 20627768
(fig. 3) Joan Miró, Barcelona Series, no. XIII (Mourlot 6-55), lithograph, 1944. BARCODE 20627744
Miró had already begun, in fact, to paint on canvas again. Jacques Dupin has written, "In 1944, after four years away from oil painting, Miró went back to it in a new spirit, displaying astonishing ease and productivity. Oil confers an authority, a decisiveness, and a clarity to canvas that modifies its structure and its spirit. The climate is a more relaxed one, and figures have a sobriety that intensifies them" (in Miró, Barcelona, 2004, p. 264). Miró executed the first pictures on scraped canvases, with thinly painted figures emerging like wraiths from the stressed surface. Some of the paintings that followed are more like drawings on canvas, as Miró sought to translate some of the graphic techniques he had improvised for his gouaches and drawings into oil paint on canvas. He wrote in a war time notebook that he wanted to "achieve the same spontaneity in the paintings as in the drawings" (in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p.188).
By the end of 1944, when the present painting was done, Miró had fully reclaimed a vigorous and assured manner in oil, whose aspect and methods would characterize his painting for years to come (fig. 2). Femmes, oiseaux is virtually perfect in the way Miró has combined drawing with color, and employed different applications of paint. The imagery fills the canvas and is more compactly interactive than in previous works. The result is carefully composed, but possesses a felicitous aspect that is completely fresh and spontaneous. Miró wrote, "I will make my work emerge naturally, like the song of a bird or the music of Mozart, with no apparent effort, but thought out a length and worked out from within" (in ibid., pp. 185-186).
Most of the paintings done in 1944 are of relatively modest size. The present painting is slightly less wide than the sheets of paper used for the Constellations. Since his return to mainland Spain in 1941, Miró continued to feel anxiety about his political status vis-à-vis the fascist Franco regime, and these worries discouraged him from establishing his studio operations in one location. He worked in small, makeshift spaces in the house at Montroig, and in the family apartment at Passage del Crèdit, 4 in Barcelona, where he painted Femmes, oiseaux. He needed a permanent and suitably large studio, one that would enable him to work concurrently in the various media that now preoccupied him, and on a larger scale. In 1938 he had written an article for Paris journal XXe Siecle titled "I Dream of a Large Studio." This was a problem for which he would not find the perfect remedy until his friend the architect Josep Lluis Sert built a studio for him in Palma, which he began using in 1957.
While Miró never again packed so many signs and symbols into a picture as he did in some of the famous Constellations, the compositional process that he employed in later paintings, and indeed in Femmes, oiseaux, is fundamentally the same. He summarized it in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney published in the New York Partisan Review, February, 1948: "there have always been these three stages--first, the suggestion, usually from the material; second, the conscious organization of these forms; and third, the compositional enrichment" (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., op. cit., p. 211). Here the artist has scumbled thin, irregular washes of watercolor to tone the ground of the canvas. He then proceeded to draw over this ground a series of figures and motifs in a fine, fluent and extremely elegant line. The final step was to brush on opaque oil pigments to reinforce significant symbolic signs; these also function as primary color forms within the composition, from which the painting derives its rhythmic dynamism and overall design.
While Miró was engaged in oil painting once again, he continued to hone his virtuosic skills as a draughtsman in the Barcelona Series, a group of fifty black and white lithographs (fig. 3) that he completed in May 1944 and were published in Barcelona by his friend Joan Prats later that year. Sir Roland Penrose wrote that "The Barcelona Series discloses the same anger which had been provoked by the continuous deterioration of the international situation before the war, but in its directness it is even more disturbing" (in Miró, Barcelona, 1970, p. 107). Miró's references to recent political events and personal tribulations take the form of a free-wheeling psycho-sexual narrative, in which male and female represent cosmic beings that struggle for power, the rights of seeking their own liberty and pleasure, or simply to survive.
The same observant eye and mordant wit that Miró brought to bear on the creation of the Barcelona Series are discernible in the paintings of 1944. Miró might have seen the models for the delightfully characterized figures in Femmes, oiseaux in the local town square, or they might have come out of a folk or fairy tale. Indeed, the scene may describe events in the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, a story that probably held personal and political overtones for Miró. Youthful Cinderella, humbly garbed, appears at upper left. The two grotesque, saw-tooth female figures at lower right are her older step-sisters, who persistently harangue and oppress her. In the story she calls on the birds (seen here at far left and top center) to help her with her endless chores: "two white pigeons came in through the kitchen window, and then the turtledoves, and finally all the birds beneath the sky came whirring and swarming in they were finished and flew out again" (translated by D. L. Ashliman). In the Grimms' story a beautiful white bird takes the role of the beneficent "fairy godmother," who serves as Cinderella's intermediary with goodness and justice. At the end of the tale, pigeons peck the eyes of the two vile step-sisters, "for their wickedness and falsehood." Cinderella is fundamentally a tale of oppression and eventual release, whose happy conclusion asserts the belief that good will come to decent people. The lessons of this timeless story were apparent in late 1944, as Allied armies were advancing on every front. Good, it seemed, would finally triumph over "wickedness and falsehood" in war torn Europe, and the artist, among countless others, would be released from years of oppression and dread.
(fig. 1) Joan Miró, L'Etoile matinale (from the Constellations series), 16 March 1940. Fundació Joan Miró. BARCODE 20627751
(fig. 2) Joan Miró, Le rouge, le bleu, le bel espoir, 1947. Sold, Christie's New York, 4 May 2004, lot 33. BARCODE 20627768
(fig. 3) Joan Miró, Barcelona Series, no. XIII (Mourlot 6-55), lithograph, 1944. BARCODE 20627744