Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Miró's 1978 painting, Femme Oiseaux, reflects the combined influence that American Abstract Expressionism and Japanese calligraphy had on his artistic development from the 1960s onwards. Here, in his own unmistakable iconic style, Miró explores the splattering free gestures of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, the powerful juxtaposition of black and white pigment mirroring Franz Kline's work, and the smooth marriage of writing and drawing reminiscent of artistically rendered symbols in calligraphic texts. In recalling his visit to Tokyo in 1966 for a retrospective show of his work, Miró remarked, "I was fascinated by the work of the Japanese calligraphers and it definitely influenced my own working methods. I work more and more in a state of trance these days...And I consider my painting more and more gestural" (quoted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró, Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 219).

This gesture is demonstrated to the viewer in what Jacques Dupin calls a "heavy graphism traced in an unbroken flow of black paint" (Joan Miró, New York, 1962, p. 479). The Femme Oiseaux's body is born from such a free line of brushwork that carries the richly applied oil paint across the expanse of his working plane of simple cardboard. Miró reveals the form of a leg with a sickle-like symbol and draws the viewer into the work's center with one of his signature spots, a hypnotizing black dot doubling as belly button. Transforming the work into a writing ground, Miró takes a graphite pencil and scratches invented signs, delicate and playful but with an aura of mystical meaning, into these bursts of white spattering pigment.

Femme Oiseaux reveals a graffiti-like quality in Miró's late work, evocative of an emerging Basquiat in the late 1970s and hinting at a youthful rebelliousness present even in his final years of painting--always progressing, always becoming freer. In fact, Miró openly formed a symbiotic relationship with younger artists. As Dupin writes, his works "disclose affinities with the researches of a new generation of painters. Many of these, Jackson Pollock for one, have acknowledged their debt to Miró. Miró, in turn, displays lively interest in their work...Nor does he consider it beneath his dignity to use their discoveries" (ibid.., p. 481).