Executed with a technical assurance and economy of pictorial means typical of the last decades of Miró’s career, the present work exemplifies his mature style, verging between figuration and abstraction. With its bold, spontaneous brushstrokes, this large sheet reflects the artist's expressive power. Abandoning a more figurative approach, Miró developed a distinctive vocabulary of signs, relishing whimsical and ambiguous shapes that take form in shifting and delightful ways. As Sidra Stich suggests: "the art of Joan Miró heralds a deep grasp of the marvelous. Beyond childlike innocence, romantic fantasy and poetic reverie, the marvelous for Miró connotes a cosmic perspective and focus on the dynamics of creation" (Sidra Stich, Joan Miró: The Development of a Sign Language (exhibition catalogue), Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in Saint Louis, 1980, p. 8).

During the 1960s and 1970s Miró experimented with painting on a wide variety of supports, including canvas fragments, sack cloth, wooden boards, fiber boards, newsprint and even souvenir paintings from local antique shops, which he would then score, burn and break as part of his creative process. During World War II, the artist had painted on what little canvas he could gather and turned his attention primarily to creating works on paper. The present work, executed in 1972, harkens back to this era of experimentation, and builds on his previous work by incorporating a more playful mode of expression. The pictorial lexicon and scale of the present work reflect the influence of American post-war painting, which Miró first encountered during a trip to New York in 1947. He became fascinated by the art produced by Abstract Expressionists. Several young painters, including Jackson Pollock, were crediting Miró as their inspiration for their wild, paint-splattered canvases, yet in the years that followed Miró likewise created works that responded to the enthusiasm of this younger generation of American painters and the spontaneity of their art.