Joan Miró (1893-1983)

'As you see I attach an increasing importance to the content of my works. To me, rich and vigorous material seems necessary to give the spectator a blow between the eyes at first sight, which must hit him before other thoughts can intervene. In this way poetry expressed visually speaks its own language.'
Miró, quoted in R. Penrose, Miró, London, 1995, p. 69.

In Sans titre, Joan Miró’s whimsical, playful and idiosyncratic pictorial language is brought to the fore. The gouache on black paper depicts a striking purity of form and simplicity, as glyph-like symbols which oscillate between the figurative and representational rhythmically punctuate the picture plane. The monochromatic design, with gouache on black paper, is evocative of white chalk on a blackboard, which in turn conjures the paraphernalia of the classroom. This visual pun is also heightened by the charmingly childlike, imaginative and intuitive quality inherent in Miró’s oeuvre. In Sans titre, Miró exploits the pictographic potential of the line as a signifier. In two of the forms, the anthropomorphic capacity of the line is expressed in shapes that suggest stick figures, while an evocation of a profile of a face is illustrated in the lower right foreground.

Line dominates, and shading is present in only one of the glyphs, in which a crescent shape supplants a figure-like shape. This crescent shape appears indicative of Miró’s penchant for cosmic and celestial imagery, which he often explored in his work, curious about the correlation between dreams and reality with a surrealist vivacity.