Personnage devant le soleil

Miró was in Varengeville, Normandy, at work on his Constellations, when the Germans invaded France in June 1940. He fled south and re-entered Spain shortly before the fall of Paris and the signing of the armistice later that month. At first he had reason to be concerned that he might be wanted by Franco's fascist police, and from July 1941 he stayed with his wife's family at Palma on the island of Mallorca. When it seemed safe Miró visited the mainland to see his ailing mother, and after spending the summer of 1942 on his family's estate at Montroig, he took an apartment in Barcelona. In October he opened up the top floor in the building at Passatge del Crèdit, 4, where he was born and his mother still lived, for use as his studio.

The present gouache was done in these new quarters shortly after he settled in. "In 1942 and 1943 Miró produced a great many works, all on paper. 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 the materials, the relationship between line and space" (J. Dupin, Miró, Barcelona, 1993, pp. 259-260).