Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/169626
Joan Miro 1893 - 1983 Femme, oiseau et étoile matinale, c.1969 Signed Indian ink, wash, gouache, and pastel on paper 19 x 14 in, 45.3 x 33 cm Provenance Private collection Exhibitions 2013: Lindau, Stadtmuseum Lindau, Miro – Sternennächte, 24 March - 1 September By 1969 Miró had made 3 trips to the United States of America. During his first visit, in 1947, he spent time in New York with his artist friends Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and Yves Tanguy. Significantly, during this trip he also met Jackson Pollock, following which a two-way dialogue between Miró and the young Abstract Expressionist painters emerged. Miró welcomed the stylistic influences of the younger generation of artists. The freedom, boldness and daring of the young American painters had a decisive impact upon Miró, who was shown new directions and possibilities for his art. Their emphasis upon spontaneity, improvisation and energetic gestures can be seen in works such as this. Ink has been dripped on to the paper and washes poured across as if by accident, endowing the work with exactly this sense of energy and movement which dominated "Action Painting". At the same time, artists including Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell readily acknowledged that they were influenced by Miró. The use of washes and gouache here signals the influence Miró was to have upon the Colour Field artists and his firmly drawn, thick black lines, executed with almost childlike spontaneity, were assimilated in Motherwell's canvases. This work also reveals the ornamentation and symbolism for which Miró is renowned. A star, one of Miró's most recurrent symbols, appears at the top of the paper. During the 1960s Miró had returned to the idea of reducing the pictorial elements in his paintings to dots, lines and simplified shapes on a monochromatic background; typical of this are the thin black lines with dots or parentheses at the end of them. Miró was adamant that such works were not mere abstractions but images strongly anchored in the reality of human experience, including the realm of the subconscious, "I cannot understand – and consider it an insult- to be placed in the category of "abstract painters"…As if the marks I put on a canvas did not correspond to a concrete representation of my mind, did not possess a profound reality, were not a part of the real itself".