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Lot Essay
Jacques Dupin has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Miró, his wife Pilar and their daughter fled France in June 1940 as the German armies entered Paris and occupied the northern part of the country. The following month they arrived in Palma, Mallorca, where Pilar's family resided. The artist had openly supported the defeated Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, and he wanted to avoid the attention of the dictator Franco's police. When finally it seemed safe, Miró visited his family home in Montroig, which he had not seen since the outbreak of the civil war in 1936. There he completed the final three gouaches in his celebrated series of Constellations in July-September 1941. He returned to Palma that fall, and commenced a new group of works on paper. Jacques Dupin has written:
In 1942 [the Constellations] were followed by a large number of watercolors, gouaches and drawings, characterized by freedom of invention and a marvelous effortlessness. In this evolution of his art, which was to end in the creation of his definitive style, renewed contact with Spain after five years of absence--with Majorca most especially--was doubtless crucial. They are explorations undertaken with no preconceived idea--effervescent creations in which the artist perfected a vast repertory of forms, signs, and formulas, bringing into play all the materials and instruments compatible with paper. The object of all these explorations is to determine the relationship between drawing and materials, the relationship between line and space (in Miró, Paris, 2004, pp. 257-260).
Femmes et oiseaux devant le soleil was executed at the height of this remarkable period of experimentation and improvisation. In the Constellations, Miró's whimsical figures had lain submerged and obscured in a dense sea of cosmic signs. In the gouaches of 1942 they re-emerge into the bright Mediterranean sunlight, and again take center stage. The central image in the present gouache is a spiny female figure standing on a Majorcan beach. She has thorns for breasts, her sex is exposed, and she lumbers atop two gargantuan feet, one of which possesses its own monstrous eye. The scene might be a remix of events in the Odyssey, reflecting the travels of the artist as he surmounted all manner of obstacles to safely return to his homeland. He might be the figure in the boat, seen cresting the saw-tooth signs that stand for the sea. Looking westward from Palma, the red disk of the setting sun hovers the distant Spanish mainland. The female figure might represent a dangerous siren, or the spell-casting Circe, attended by nymphs. Her foot is like the single-eyed Cyclops. Dupin has observed:
New Forms and constant color surprises result from Miró's insistent explorations of the materials in all their richness and diversity. These works on paper are all variations on a single theme, Woman-Bird-Star. This serves as title for a great many of them, while others are only slightly modified for "star" we find "sun," etc. The variations of this extremely simple theme are all the richer, more complex and baffling, because the theme is so elementary. Subjects at one commonplace and fantastic lend themselves to endless imaginative combinations. We follow them as they clown around, run their foolish errands, play their whimsical or mysterious games. Their enormous capacity for life is subject to no law save that of the internal logic of their birth and development. Miró's drawing is prodigiously inventive. What accounts for this unbroken freshness can only be the artist's constant renewal of his means of expression, his ability to treat the artistic materials as forever fresh and untouched. (ibid., p. 261)
Miró, his wife Pilar and their daughter fled France in June 1940 as the German armies entered Paris and occupied the northern part of the country. The following month they arrived in Palma, Mallorca, where Pilar's family resided. The artist had openly supported the defeated Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, and he wanted to avoid the attention of the dictator Franco's police. When finally it seemed safe, Miró visited his family home in Montroig, which he had not seen since the outbreak of the civil war in 1936. There he completed the final three gouaches in his celebrated series of Constellations in July-September 1941. He returned to Palma that fall, and commenced a new group of works on paper. Jacques Dupin has written:
In 1942 [the Constellations] were followed by a large number of watercolors, gouaches and drawings, characterized by freedom of invention and a marvelous effortlessness. In this evolution of his art, which was to end in the creation of his definitive style, renewed contact with Spain after five years of absence--with Majorca most especially--was doubtless crucial. They are explorations undertaken with no preconceived idea--effervescent creations in which the artist perfected a vast repertory of forms, signs, and formulas, bringing into play all the materials and instruments compatible with paper. The object of all these explorations is to determine the relationship between drawing and materials, the relationship between line and space (in Miró, Paris, 2004, pp. 257-260).
Femmes et oiseaux devant le soleil was executed at the height of this remarkable period of experimentation and improvisation. In the Constellations, Miró's whimsical figures had lain submerged and obscured in a dense sea of cosmic signs. In the gouaches of 1942 they re-emerge into the bright Mediterranean sunlight, and again take center stage. The central image in the present gouache is a spiny female figure standing on a Majorcan beach. She has thorns for breasts, her sex is exposed, and she lumbers atop two gargantuan feet, one of which possesses its own monstrous eye. The scene might be a remix of events in the Odyssey, reflecting the travels of the artist as he surmounted all manner of obstacles to safely return to his homeland. He might be the figure in the boat, seen cresting the saw-tooth signs that stand for the sea. Looking westward from Palma, the red disk of the setting sun hovers the distant Spanish mainland. The female figure might represent a dangerous siren, or the spell-casting Circe, attended by nymphs. Her foot is like the single-eyed Cyclops. Dupin has observed:
New Forms and constant color surprises result from Miró's insistent explorations of the materials in all their richness and diversity. These works on paper are all variations on a single theme, Woman-Bird-Star. This serves as title for a great many of them, while others are only slightly modified for "star" we find "sun," etc. The variations of this extremely simple theme are all the richer, more complex and baffling, because the theme is so elementary. Subjects at one commonplace and fantastic lend themselves to endless imaginative combinations. We follow them as they clown around, run their foolish errands, play their whimsical or mysterious games. Their enormous capacity for life is subject to no law save that of the internal logic of their birth and development. Miró's drawing is prodigiously inventive. What accounts for this unbroken freshness can only be the artist's constant renewal of his means of expression, his ability to treat the artistic materials as forever fresh and untouched. (ibid., p. 261)