Constellation the Morning Star

The Morning Star is an artwork from a Joan Miro series titled Constellations which was completed between the years of 1939-1941 and totalled 23 paintings in all.

This painting is now in the collection of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona having been gifted by the artist to his wife initially. This entire series was forced by a blackout in the family home during their time in Normandy. It opened his eyes to the beautiful night sky which is always at its clearest with less artificial light on the ground. His use of abstract shapes and lines was always destined for this type of cosmic content, as that is how we tend to view foreign planets and stars from afar. Many other artists have also used the constellation system as inspiration for their abstract art, including Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. The simplicity of its shapes is ideal for modern art and many of the offshoot movements that exist within that broad umbrella.

For this series Miro would tend to use gradiented, random surfaces of colour for the background using a mixture of different techniques as if to create the randomness of nature. He would then add over the top a series of shapes to create his surrealist, abstract environment of which we are so familiar. Shapes are filled with tones of black, blue and red with further dark lines used to connect some of these shapes together. This whole painting feels particularly close to what one might consider to be the true trademark style of Miro, even though he took on different styles of abstract art in his career, across a variety of different series of paintings. The simplicity of his forms combined with the bright colours has made Miro print reproductions particularly popular and can be purchased from a number of retailers who have purchased the necessary licenses to sell such products.