In a dialectical play of opposites, woman and bird constitute the precarious balance between sky and land, between the finite and infinite dimension, which characterises “Miró’s cosmic imagination”.

After a period of experimenting with different media, such as ceramics, lithography and engraving (1954-59), the Surrealist artist Joan Miró returned to painting with renewed energy and a propensity for experimentation in 1959. This was also the year of his next visit to the United States, following his second retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an event that marked the culmination of a series of international recognitions, starting with the Prize for Engraving at the Venice Biennale in 1954. 

This new season got underway in the new studio Miró commissioned from his close friend, the architect Josep Lluís Sert, next to his home in Calamajor, near Palma de Mallorca, where he had moved permanently in 1956, leaving Barcelona behind. Miró brought a series of paintings from his period in Paris to his large new workshop, conducting a thorough review of his Surrealist research, which even led him to destroy a few of his paintings. As Roland Penrose writes, the large spaces of his new studio “opened up unthought-of possibilities for expansion for Miró, and not only in a physical sense […], they provided a further goal for that sense of ordered development and continuity that was so fundamental to Miró’s work, in the same way that the ground on which he walked served as a trampoline for his flights into the world of the imagination”.¹ The cycles of works produced between 1959 and 1960 include a nucleus of ten paintings, of which Femme et oiseau II/X forms part. 

Femme et oiseau (Woman and Bird) is a recurrent and emblematic theme in Miró’s imaginative repertoire. In a dialectical play of opposites, woman and bird constitute the precarious balance between sky and land, between the finite and infinite dimension, which characterises “Miró’s cosmic imagination”.² 

In this Femme et oiseau cycle, Miró uses jute sacks as a support, applying black signs to them that take on the shapes and symbols of his syntactical universe and become increasingly simple and calligraphic. The support is shown in its bare and organic materiality, traversed by various traces of colour and letters printed with commercial stamps (“M” on the right-hand side of the painting), accentuating the residual and phenomenological dimension of a work closely tied to the existent. We can interpret this cycle in dialogue with the contemporary scenario of international pictorial renewal - from the signs of Art Informel to the material research of Alberto Burri and the figures and letters of Jasper Johns. 

As regards the “bare nudity” of this series, Jacques Dupin observes an affinity with the Varengevilla cycle, produced by Miró in 1939 and considers it to be potentially infinite. In fact, “upon every outburst of energy, another Woman and Bird pairing could be triggered [from it], identical yet new.” And Dupin also observes: “This suspended and awaited honeymoon, both a trial and a consummation, is conducted in the privileged space of this carnal night, in this intimacy of the nature that Miró has never abandoned and where what is real is discovered almost as the result of a laceration, a sudden illumination in the smooth passage of time.”³ 

The painting belonged to Sir Roland Penrose, a British Surrealist painter and poet, as well as a gallery owner and collector. Penrose’s friendship with Miró dated back to 1922, when he also moved to Paris, coming into contact with Surrealist intellectual circles. Organiser of the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in London in 1936, Penrose acquired the London Gallery in 1938 and began collecting Surrealist artworks. The presence of the painting in the Cerruti Collection, which it entered after forming part of a number of different collections, is already documented in the handwritten inventory compiled in June 1993. 

Lara Conte 

¹ Penrose 1989, pp. 125-126. 

² Dupin 1963, p. 471. 

³ Ibid.