"These works began with Miró slipping out of his studio, unseen, only to return with an impromptu harvest of objects, his bounty... For Miró, all paths were strewn with such marvelous nothings, all of life's refuse remained alive."
Femme arises from the great body of Joan Miró's late work, in which the artist devoted himself the discipline of sculpture. Soaring to a height of more than three meters tall, the bronze form asserts a playful yet elegant presence which beckons the viewer to behold it in the round. As the eye travels around the form, the impact of the figure become wholly apparent—the graceful lines and curves defining its female identity
By 1970, Miró was widely recognized for his contributions to Modern art, having inspired the younger generation of Abstract Expressionist painters in the 1950s. The 1960s were for Miró a t.mes of great accolade and recognition, with numerous retrospective of the artist's work held across Europe. By this t.mes , the artist's work had become quite literally larger than life, his monumental works resulting from the commissioned for the Paris World Fair, the Barcelona Airport, the UNESCO building in Paris, the graduate building at Harvard University and well as additional commercial building in the United States (see fig. 1). Comfortable working on a vast scale and across many mediums, Miró began to create larger, more impactful sculptures. The three-dimensional forms like Femme echoed the aleatory inspirations and Surrealist impetuses of the late 1920s and 1930s (see fig. 2).
As Jacques Dupin states of the artist's practice: “In painting, Miró produced his pictograms through the reduction and stylization of reality. Sculpture, on the contrary, allowed Miró to begin with concrete reality and collects ed objects, which were then internalized and plunged into the fires of his imagination, thereby producing three-dimensional images” (Miró, New York, 1993, p. 361).
Miró's monumental sculptures are some of his most inventive works of art. Repurposing utilitarian objects like forks and pipes, with the occasional addition of objects from the natural world such as shells and rocks, the artist would build his fanciful creations. According to Pilar Ortega Chapel, the initial maquette for this form was created using a shell and a tube of white glue that the artist assembled into a single object. From this model, he made a series of plasters in increasing size to arrive at the large-scale model from which Femme was cast.
"When Miró sculpted, everything was either anachronic or unexpected. There were no ground rules, only a penalty for ending the game. Or perhaps there never was any beginning or end, only the perpetual exchange between the sculptor's imagination—his bet as it were—and the objects which rose before him, imposing their presence, the exchange between a venturesome gaze and the work's response to it."
In contrast to the elaborate and fanciful nature of his sculpture, Miró's titles were invariably minimalistic. According to the catalogue raisonné of his sculpture, there are approximately 90 sculptures with the word Femme in the title, either whole or in part. The same approach to naming his works equally applies to his paintings and works on paper. For most of his output in the latter half of his career, his works are titled with some variant of three basic words: Woman, Bird, and Star. With these abstract concepts in mind, Miró found endless means of interpretation and expression.
The present work bears unmistakable allusions to the female form. The upright arrangement of elements mimics the form of a standing figure, with the seashell standing in for a head. The two curved elements at the midpoint of the cylinder are easily read as breasts, while the vertical teardrop recession on the opposite side relates to a woman's sex. Like the Paleolithic stone carvings of goddesses of fertility, such as the famed Venus of Willendorf, with their exaggerated sexual characteristics and absence of facial features, the present work achieves a universal status as a representation of woman—the source of all creation.
Conceived in 1970 and cast the following year in 1971, the present bronze is numbered 1/4 from an edition of 4 numbered casts, plus one nominative bronze made posthumously for the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. The first owner of the present work Aimé Maeght—renowned publisher, dealer and and patron of Modern artists—in whose collects ion it remained until his death in 1981.