The dramatic Oiseau, insecte, constellation is a striking example of Miró's late work, featuring the poetic iconography that occupied the artist throughout his career. Executed with a technical assurance and the economy of means typical of his last decades, the present work shows his style oscilating between figuration and abstraction. For Miró, women, birds, stars, the moon, the sun, night and dusk formed a poetic language. He first introduced the motif of a woman with a bird, in a realistic manner, in his paintings of 1917, but it was only after his celebrated Constellations series of 1941, in which human figures, birds and stars feature prominently, that this theme became the primary subject of his art. Commenting on this subject matter, the artist pronounced: "It might be a dog, a woman, or whatever. I don't really care. Of course, while I am painting, I see a woman or a bird in my mind, indeed, very tangibly a woman or a bird. Afterward, it's up to you" (J. Miró & Georges Raillard, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves, Paris, 1977, p. 128).
By the t.mes he completed the present work in 1974, Miró's composition had gained a level of expressive freedom and exuberance that evidenced his confidence in his craft. Jacques Dupin elaborated on the semiotic importance of figuration in these late paintings, "[t]he sign itself was no longer the image's double, it was rather reality assimilated then spat out by the painter, a reality he had incorporated then liberated, like air or light. The importance of the theme now depended on its manner of appearing or disappearing, and the few figures Miró still endlessly named and inscribed in his works are the natural go-between and guarantor of the reality of his universe. It would perhaps be more fruitful to give an account of those figures that have disappeared than of the survivors" (ibid. pp. 339-40).
Miró's own reflection on the artistic process further articulates his late style: "... silence is denial of a noise—but the smallest noise in the midst of silence becomes enormous. The same process makes me look for noise hidden in silence, the movement in immobility, life in inanimate things, the infinite and the finite, forms in a void, and myself in anonymity" (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 253). Miró builds the present composition using a pictorial lexicon of signs and symbols, while still referencing recognizable objects, in this case, human figures. Working with thick lines and monochromatic spaces as his central compositional elements, Miró fully explored the possibilities of movement within a two-dimensional field. Two years after the present work was painted, Miró would complete the monumental Femme, oiseau in which this lexicon and heavy paint application are also clearly visible (see fig. 1).
(right) Fig. 2 Franz Kline, Black Reflections, oil and pasted paper mounted on masonite, 1959, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © 2017 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
After his trip to New York in 1947, Miró became acquainted with the art of the Abstract Expressionists and was fascinated by their techniques and their aesthetic agenda. As the artist later recalled, the experience of seeing canvases of the Abstract Expressionists was like “a blow to the solar plexus.” Several young painters, including Jackson Pollock, were crediting Miró as their inspiration for their wild, paint-splattered canvases. In the years that followed he created works that responded to the enthusiasm of this younger generation of American painters and the spontaneity of their art (see fig. 2). It was also under their influence that he started painting on a large scale, such as in the present work. The paintings he created from the early 1950s onwards are a fascinating response to these new trends of abstraction, while at the same t.mes showing Miró’s allegiance to his own artistic pursuits.
