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Lot Essay
Miró's creativity in his later years was characterized by an adventurous expansion into new materials and techniques. He worked in sculpture, made ceramics, tapestries and mosaics, and designed stained glass windows. He was a tireless experimenter in print workshops. During the 1950s Miró painted on unusual supports and on found objects. In 1973 Miró used burned and lacerated canvases, and in the following year painted over kitsch art he purchased at a flea market. "If matière had commanded the execution in the past, it would continue to do so; its potential for what Miró called 'beautiful surprises' would simply be enlarged. Miró had always known that to 'make it new' had no meaning beyond revealing an unsuspected dimension in the familiar--that the materials of art must always be shaped into a medium that would shunt us back to the world of human experience. His ceramics, his sculpture, his prints, his books were, like his paintings and drawings, a constant attempt to surprise meaning from matter" (C. Lanchner, "Peinture-Poesie, Its Logic and Logistics," Joan Miró, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 74).
If Miró's treatment of his materials could be unexpected and novel, his subject matter remained relatively constant, and the chief image in his pictorial universe is the figure of woman, just as it was for Picasso and Chagall, two contemporaries who also worked vigorously into their late careers. Whereas these two artists retained a generally recognizable figurative character in their depiction of the female form, Miró's woman is more purely a symbol, and as seen here she has evolved into an ideogram comprised of sweeping gestural lines.
This reductionistic tendency in Miró's imagery is not new and was present during his association with Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. However, in the 1960s Miró began to cultivate a more wild, expressionist aspect in his depiction of the figure, which to some extent was influenced by the work of the American abstract-expressionists, whose work Miró had seen and admired during visits to the United States in 1947 and 1959.
The figure of the woman in the present painting is composed of broad slashes of black paint. These lines crisscross the canvas, almost to the edge, lending the work the flat, unified, "all-over" look that the American abstract expressionists sought in their paintings. Miró contrasts these thick ribbons of paint with thinly washed areas at the periphery of the composition, and random splatters of black pigment underscore the improvisatory character of the artist's method. Miró, then well into his eighties, demonstrates in Femme how the intuitive methods he derived from the Surrealist movement continued to serve him well, most of all by encouraging an open and searching approach that enabled him to absorb and adapt the techniques of younger artists to his own ends. More importantly, Miró remains true to the essential idea of his subject, that of an vital expression of primal female power, a theme that had emerged in his work as far back as the 1920s.
If Miró's treatment of his materials could be unexpected and novel, his subject matter remained relatively constant, and the chief image in his pictorial universe is the figure of woman, just as it was for Picasso and Chagall, two contemporaries who also worked vigorously into their late careers. Whereas these two artists retained a generally recognizable figurative character in their depiction of the female form, Miró's woman is more purely a symbol, and as seen here she has evolved into an ideogram comprised of sweeping gestural lines.
This reductionistic tendency in Miró's imagery is not new and was present during his association with Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. However, in the 1960s Miró began to cultivate a more wild, expressionist aspect in his depiction of the figure, which to some extent was influenced by the work of the American abstract-expressionists, whose work Miró had seen and admired during visits to the United States in 1947 and 1959.
The figure of the woman in the present painting is composed of broad slashes of black paint. These lines crisscross the canvas, almost to the edge, lending the work the flat, unified, "all-over" look that the American abstract expressionists sought in their paintings. Miró contrasts these thick ribbons of paint with thinly washed areas at the periphery of the composition, and random splatters of black pigment underscore the improvisatory character of the artist's method. Miró, then well into his eighties, demonstrates in Femme how the intuitive methods he derived from the Surrealist movement continued to serve him well, most of all by encouraging an open and searching approach that enabled him to absorb and adapt the techniques of younger artists to his own ends. More importantly, Miró remains true to the essential idea of his subject, that of an vital expression of primal female power, a theme that had emerged in his work as far back as the 1920s.