U pon meeting Cuban poet and journalist Carlos Franqui in the 1970s, Joan Miró embarked on several joint projects with him, one of which culminated in the present work. Franqui had been a fervent supporter of the Cuban Revolution, even heading the Communist newspaper Revolución, but subsequently broke with the Cuban government over political differences and fled to Europe with his family. A polymath who penned books, poetry and art criticism alongside his political writings, Franqui’s cultural endeavors connected him with artists including not only Picasso and Miró but also Calder. Franqui ultimately became one of the Castro regime’s most vocal critics and spent the rest of his life in exile.

Though he was well aware of pervading trends and at t.mes s incorporated the aesthetic concepts advanced by his contemporaries, Miró maintained a singular voice throughout his career. His Dadaist roots are particularly evident in the present work, which combines disparate words into a short poetic fragment. In writing to the poet Michel Leiris in 1924, Miró opined that “You and all my writer friends have given me much help and improved my understanding of many things” (quoted in Joan Miró, The Birth of the World (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5031, accessed April 14, 2020). This intersection of word and image was unique to Miró’s late work, and would influence a generation of Contemporary artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.