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Lot Essay
Executed in Palma on 5 May 1942, Femmes, oiseau, étoiles belongs to a pivotal moment in Joan Miró’s career, emerging in the immediate aftermath of the celebrated Constellations. Completed between 1940 and September 1941, this sequence of twenty-three works had brought Miró’s private pictorial universe to an unprecedented intensity: women, birds, stars, eyes and fantastical creatures suspended within intricate webs of line and color, transforming the picture surface into a teeming, celestial cosmos. The present work and others of 1942, “are characterized by a freedom of invention and a marvelous effortlessness... In this new 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 Mallorca most especially—was doubtless crucial.” (J. Dupin, Miró, New York, 1962, p. 369).
In the months that followed, Miró did not abandon this newly forged language. Instead, he began to dismantle and reconfigure it. The present work retains the essential protagonists of the Constellations—the female figure, bird and star announced in its title—yet releases them from the dense, all-over structures of the earlier series. Against the comparatively open ground, Miró’s signs acquire a new autonomy. Lines spring across the sheet, forms hover in space and the familiar celestial and biomorphic motifs appear enlarged and newly emphatic. The concentrated universe of the Constellations has begun to expand.
The precise date of the present work places it within a particularly compelling moment of this development. During May 1942 Miró repeatedly returned to the constellation of women, birds and stars, creating a closely related group of works around this theme. Among them is Femmes, oiseaux, étoiles of 11 May 1942, executed only six days after the present work and today in the collection of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. These works reveal the artist actively exploring the possibilities of the visual vocabulary he had perfected during the preceding two years.
The circumstances in which this language had emerged lend these works particular poignancy. Miró began the Constellations at Varengeville-sur-Mer in Normandy in January 1940, as Europe descended into war. Following the German invasion of France, he returned with his family to Spain, eventually settling in Palma, where he continued the series in comparative isolation. In these small, intensely worked compositions, the heavens offered an imaginative counterworld to the violence and uncertainty surrounding him. “I felt a deep desire to escape,” Miró later recalled of this period. “I closed myself deliberately. The night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings.” (J.J. Sweeney, ‘Joan Miró: Comment and Interview’, Partisan Review, February 1948, p. 210).
By May 1942, the tightly woven cosmos of the Constellations was giving way to something more expansive. Femmes, oiseau, étoiles stands at precisely this juncture. Neither part of the celebrated cycle itself nor simply a later reprise of its imagery, the work is directly descended from the Constellations, capturing Miró as he transformed one of the great achievements of his wartime art into a freer and increasingly monumental language. The women, birds and stars remain, but the universe around them has opened.
In the months that followed, Miró did not abandon this newly forged language. Instead, he began to dismantle and reconfigure it. The present work retains the essential protagonists of the Constellations—the female figure, bird and star announced in its title—yet releases them from the dense, all-over structures of the earlier series. Against the comparatively open ground, Miró’s signs acquire a new autonomy. Lines spring across the sheet, forms hover in space and the familiar celestial and biomorphic motifs appear enlarged and newly emphatic. The concentrated universe of the Constellations has begun to expand.
The precise date of the present work places it within a particularly compelling moment of this development. During May 1942 Miró repeatedly returned to the constellation of women, birds and stars, creating a closely related group of works around this theme. Among them is Femmes, oiseaux, étoiles of 11 May 1942, executed only six days after the present work and today in the collection of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. These works reveal the artist actively exploring the possibilities of the visual vocabulary he had perfected during the preceding two years.
The circumstances in which this language had emerged lend these works particular poignancy. Miró began the Constellations at Varengeville-sur-Mer in Normandy in January 1940, as Europe descended into war. Following the German invasion of France, he returned with his family to Spain, eventually settling in Palma, where he continued the series in comparative isolation. In these small, intensely worked compositions, the heavens offered an imaginative counterworld to the violence and uncertainty surrounding him. “I felt a deep desire to escape,” Miró later recalled of this period. “I closed myself deliberately. The night, music and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings.” (J.J. Sweeney, ‘Joan Miró: Comment and Interview’, Partisan Review, February 1948, p. 210).
By May 1942, the tightly woven cosmos of the Constellations was giving way to something more expansive. Femmes, oiseau, étoiles stands at precisely this juncture. Neither part of the celebrated cycle itself nor simply a later reprise of its imagery, the work is directly descended from the Constellations, capturing Miró as he transformed one of the great achievements of his wartime art into a freer and increasingly monumental language. The women, birds and stars remain, but the universe around them has opened.