L’oiseau s’enfuit vers l’azur (The Bird Fled Towards the Blue) belongs to the group of small paintings that “indirectly expresses the artist’s new or more dynamic diffidence towards easel painting”.

The long career of the Catalan artist Joan Miró is characterised by a series of recurrent formal motifs, starting with the shapes-figures that emerge in his paintings from 1922-23 onwards following his encounter with Surrealism in Paris. It was at this point that he began to explore automatic writing processes in his own way, drawing upon a new inventive and imaginative freedom, always fluctuating between figuration and abstraction. Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, Miró alternated more action-based and instinctive research with more carefully meditated and formally constructed work as part of an incessant formal renewal, illustrated by a well-defined stylistic universe. During the period between 1952 and 1953 in particular, the latter path of research was combined with a desire to experiment with reproduction techniques such as engraving and lithography. As well as making it possible to publish and democratise art on a larger scale, these techniques allowed for greater formal simplification, also influencing his paintings at the time. Between 1952 and 1953, Miró painted around sixty large and small works in a single creative streak, some of which featured in exhibitions held at the Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1953.¹ 

L’oiseau s’enfuit vers l’azur (The Bird Fled Towards the Blue) belongs to the group of small paintings that “indirectly expresses the artist’s new or more dynamic diffidence towards easel painting”.² A composition based on the use of flat fields of colour - red, green, yellow and black - stands out against a pale background, processed by subtracting paint. The vertical tension of the composition accentuates the connection that can be glimpsed between the earthly dimension and the intangible world, as highlighted by the title of the work. The bird, which is a central element of Miró’s work, is linked to the myth of flight, to the magical and mysterious dimension, which brings earth and sky together. Miró’s field of operation is situated in the bond between shape and figure, in a dialogue between abstraction and figuration that reactivates the sense of a dreamlike, fantastical and playful narrative. 

The painting is linked to the history of exhibitions in Turin, inasmuch as it was presented at La pittura moderna straniera nelle collezioni private italiane exhibition held at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in 1961, together with other works from the Emilio Jesi Collection to which it belonged at the time.³ 

Lara Conte 

¹ Dupin 1963, p. 385. 

² Ibid., p. 386. 

³ Turin 1961, no. 76 ill.