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Lot Essay
Throughout his career, Miró repeatedly returned to the motifs of woman and bird. These are iconic, universal symbols that appear throughout the history of art, with origins in prehistoric cave painting. In the hands of Miró, however, the female and avian bodies are radically simplified, abstracted nearly beyond recognition. Miró explored these subjects in various media, including ceramic, polychromatic bronze, etching, gouache or colored wax crayon on paper—but above all, in oil paint.
Femme et oiseaux V/X belongs to a series of ten numbered oil paintings on burlap, which were executed between April and June 1960; the present work was painted in May of that year. In each of these burlap paintings, Miró carefully inscribed the figures of woman and bird in the simplest of thick black lines, as if they were Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or a pagan runes. He used color with a similar degree of deliberation. In the present work, for example, only the torso of the ‘woman’ is animated with a bright red rectangle. Meanwhile, irregular bursts of white, kelly green, sky blue, violet-purple and marigold yellow illuminate the background of raw, roughly hewn burlap. Miró regularly incorporated both opaque lines and geometric shapes as well as organic, gestural sprays; in this way, his painting technique is simultaneously static and dynamic; controlled and spontaneous; timeless and urgent.
Jacques Dupin, the author of the Miró catalogue raisonné, identified the larger theme of woman and bird as a crucial theme in the artist’s painted oeuvre. According to Dupin, it was through this dual subject that Miró explored bigger formal concepts, including the relationship between line and space: "The dialogue between the woman and the bird renders the precariousness of the balance achieved between them... Nothing is heavy or stabilized in this poetic stylisation of woman in the process of metamorphosis between fixity and volatility. The analogy between the two creatures, and the interlacing of their lines are sometimes so strong that it is hard to say where the woman ends and the bird begins, whether they do not after all form one marvelous hybrid creature” (J. Dupin, op. cit., 1962, p. 485).
Indeed, for Miró, representation was beyond the point of his art; he preferred to grant his viewers total freedom of interpretation and to allow the power of his expressive painting to speak for itself. As he put it bluntly in 1977, “It might be a dog, a woman, or whatever. I don’t really care. Of course, while I am painting, I see a woman or a bird in my mind, indeed, very tangibly a woman or a bird. Afterward, it’s up to you” (J. Miró and G. Raillard, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, Paris, 1977, p. 128).
The first owner of Femme et oiseaux V/X was the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York—the dealership of the son of the famed painter, who was largely responsible for introducing Miró to American audiences earlier in the twentieth century. A year following its execution, Femme et oiseaux V/X was featured in a major solo show staged at the Galerie Maeght in Paris: Miró: Peintures, murales. An installation photograph shows Jacques Prévert, a French poet who wrote extensively about Miró, visiting the exhibition; Prévert stands mesmerized before Femme et oiseaux V/X, as well as other examples from the same series, as if drawn to it like an iconic altarpiece in a church. Prévert would soon go on to draft one of his most famous poems, Pour faire le portrait d’un oiseau (To Make a Portrait of a Bird), inspired by Miró.
Femme et oiseaux V/X belongs to a series of ten numbered oil paintings on burlap, which were executed between April and June 1960; the present work was painted in May of that year. In each of these burlap paintings, Miró carefully inscribed the figures of woman and bird in the simplest of thick black lines, as if they were Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or a pagan runes. He used color with a similar degree of deliberation. In the present work, for example, only the torso of the ‘woman’ is animated with a bright red rectangle. Meanwhile, irregular bursts of white, kelly green, sky blue, violet-purple and marigold yellow illuminate the background of raw, roughly hewn burlap. Miró regularly incorporated both opaque lines and geometric shapes as well as organic, gestural sprays; in this way, his painting technique is simultaneously static and dynamic; controlled and spontaneous; timeless and urgent.
Jacques Dupin, the author of the Miró catalogue raisonné, identified the larger theme of woman and bird as a crucial theme in the artist’s painted oeuvre. According to Dupin, it was through this dual subject that Miró explored bigger formal concepts, including the relationship between line and space: "The dialogue between the woman and the bird renders the precariousness of the balance achieved between them... Nothing is heavy or stabilized in this poetic stylisation of woman in the process of metamorphosis between fixity and volatility. The analogy between the two creatures, and the interlacing of their lines are sometimes so strong that it is hard to say where the woman ends and the bird begins, whether they do not after all form one marvelous hybrid creature” (J. Dupin, op. cit., 1962, p. 485).
Indeed, for Miró, representation was beyond the point of his art; he preferred to grant his viewers total freedom of interpretation and to allow the power of his expressive painting to speak for itself. As he put it bluntly in 1977, “It might be a dog, a woman, or whatever. I don’t really care. Of course, while I am painting, I see a woman or a bird in my mind, indeed, very tangibly a woman or a bird. Afterward, it’s up to you” (J. Miró and G. Raillard, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, Paris, 1977, p. 128).
The first owner of Femme et oiseaux V/X was the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York—the dealership of the son of the famed painter, who was largely responsible for introducing Miró to American audiences earlier in the twentieth century. A year following its execution, Femme et oiseaux V/X was featured in a major solo show staged at the Galerie Maeght in Paris: Miró: Peintures, murales. An installation photograph shows Jacques Prévert, a French poet who wrote extensively about Miró, visiting the exhibition; Prévert stands mesmerized before Femme et oiseaux V/X, as well as other examples from the same series, as if drawn to it like an iconic altarpiece in a church. Prévert would soon go on to draft one of his most famous poems, Pour faire le portrait d’un oiseau (To Make a Portrait of a Bird), inspired by Miró.