Estate of the artist (sale: Sotheby's, Madrid, 9th December 1986, lot 39)
Gallery Veranneman, Brussels
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Osaka, Royal Hotel Osaka & Tokyo, Seibu Department Store, Joan Miró, 1986, no. 14, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, attached to the mount at all four corners and to the centre of the top edge, floating in the mount. Apart from a minor nick to the right of the upper edge, this work is in good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate, although the paper tone is warmer and the browns are more subtle in the original.
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Executed toward the end of the artists's œuvre, this work from 1974 exemplifies the culmination of Miro's lifelong exploration of representation and abstraction. Personnage demonstrates the impact of the younger generation of 'action painters', who themselves credited Miró as inspiration for their Abstract Expressionist style. The dynamic drips, splatters a🌃nd scribbles reference the frenzied gestural canvases of Jackson Pollock, while the weighty black brushstrokes are reminiscent of Franz Kline's monumental calligraphic compositions. Miró first saw their work in New York in 1947, and the experience, the artist would later recall, was like 'a blow to the solar plexus.'

In the early 1960s, Miro's work had almost abandoned representation altogether in favour of gestural abstraction. However by the 1970s he had begun to reintroduce his familiar visual vocabulary of signs and symbols that he had developed over the years. In this composition he has carried with him these experiments in gesture and expression, but he has maintained faithful to his own artistic pursuits. His insistence on the expressive power of signs sets him apart from the purely abstract expressionists. 'A form is never something abstract...it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never form for form's sake' (quoted in Margit Rowell, Miro, New York, 1970, p. 207). This work on paper may then be viewed as a synthesis of these two distinct styles, of abstract expressionism and his own poetic vision of reality, on the border between abstraction and representaℱtion.

 

Comp: 352L10005_COMP

Joan Miró in his Palma Studio, 1962