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Joan Miró 1893 - 1983 Tête de petite fille, 1931 Signed. Titled verso Oil on canvas 6 ¼ x .8 5/8 in, 16 x 22 cm Provenance Galerie Pierre, Paris Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York Florence Maisel, Redbank. N.J Exhibitions 2013: Lindau, Stadtmuseum Lindau, Miró – Sternennächte, 24 March -1 September Literature Jacques Dupin, Miro, Paris, 1961, n° 278, p. 507 Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, Volume II : 1931-1941, Paris, 2004, n° 324, repr. p. 17 In 1930 Miró returned to Paris with his newly-wedded wife Pilar Juncosa. In 1931, their only daughter Dolores was born, following which Miró created a series of small paintings representing her, of which Tête de petite fille is one. During the 1920s Miró's work had been transformed under the influence of Surrealism. The Surrealist artists and poets, many of whom became life-long friends, inspired Miró to see the world in terms of shape and symbol rather than representational imagery. As in the sculptures of his friend Jean Arp from this period, simple, abstracted shapes suggest living forms. This work is typical of Miró's portraits during the 1930s in which figures are reduced to individual body parts, such as an eye, a hand or a foot. In Tête de petite fille, the head of his young daughter is presented as a simplified, symbolic figure lacking in detail with the exception of the eyes, which are drawn out in confident black markings. Such biomorphic representations were taken up by other artists including Picasso, Matisse and Dali in the following decades. By the late 1920s Miró began to move away from the Surrealist circle. Tête de petite fille clearly signals a turning point for Miró, who was beginning to replace bright colour with a much darker palette. The backgrounds of many portraits from this period are filled with large areas of flat black and brown. This could be read as "a sign of the spiritual disturbance caused by the approach of war" (Jacques Dupin). Miró also began to replace geometric designs with more organic forms and twisted lines, used here to describe Dolores' head and tendrils of hair. This image foreshadows his Personnage and Femme works from 1934, in which he created an imaginative world of fantastic female figures.