The Juncosa Aysa Family, Mallorca (a gift from the artist)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

Palma de Mallorca, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Palma, territori Miró, 1996, no. 4, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Eduard Hüttinger, Miró, Bern, 1957, no. 47
Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, London, 1962, no. 853, illustrated p. 564 (as dating from 3rd December 1953)
Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró. Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings, Paris, 2001, vol. III, no. 976, illustrated in colour p. 239

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the background has a less grey and more cream tonality in the original.
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Executed in 1954, L'Oiseau de proie fonce sur nous combines Miró's love of signs and symbols with a thematic narrative that is at once passionate, playful and intensely creative. Its title expresses the whimsy and flight of fancy that characterised Miró's best paintings, and the composition itself also presents a mix of poetic lyricism, radical abstraction, and semiotic complexity that was groundbreaking among the avant-garde painting during this period. As was often the case in Miró's works of this time, the title of the painting clarifies the action it depicts, adding a narrative that would otherwise be indecipherable, and enticing th𒆙e viewer to consi🃏der each element of the composition more closely. 

In Miró's most successful work, his remarkable visual vocabulary strikes a perfect balance between abstraction and image-signs. There is always energy and movement in these pictures and never a sense of stasis. Moreover, each work is the result of active and ongoing improvisation that renders a precise interpretation impossible. By the 1950s Miró heightened his audience's engagement with his art by giving his canvases poetic titles. The artist had experimented with incorporating poetry, or lyrical text, into his pictures in the late 1920s, but then largely rejected the use of highly descriptive titles over the next two decades. His return to using language as a didactic tool was a major shift in his art in the 1940ܫs, allowing him to create compositions that were much more engaging for his 🅰audience. 

 

As Margit Rowell wrote: 'Miró's use of evocative poetic titles became more systematic in the late forties and early fifties [...] In the late twenties and throughout the thirties – those years immediately following his poem paintings – the artist shunned titles almost completely. The Constellations of 1940-41 marked the beginning of the use of long poetic titles as an accompaniment like words to music, perhaps inspired by the poetry the artist had been writing in the late 1930s or perhaps inspired by music itself. [...] In the late forties Miró showed a new interest in titles conceived as distinct poetic phrases. Again it would seem that Miró felt the need for a verbal accompaniment so that his motifs would be taken not at face value but as allusive poetic images' (M. Rowell, Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 228).