Constellation - Towards the Rainbow

Miro completed Constellation: Toward the Rainbow in 1941, and made use of gouache and oil wash on paper. It is one of a number of artworks which formed his Constellations series.

Miro had been forced out into the French countryside in order to protect himself from the invading German forces and was limited in his access to artistic materials at that point. He would also have to rely on natural light from time to time and so eventually decided to make use of the constellations that he could see from just outside his small cottage. He would stare into the sky and use what he saw as inspiration for his work. That said, not all of these paintings were actually completed in this location, as he continued the theme even after he had relocated back to city life. Within this artwork we find the standard style of rough background in a single tone with abstract shapes and a small palette of colour to produce these fantastical series of abstract shapes and lines.

We can immediately see a busy composition, where the artist fills every last space with detail. The general colour used here is black, which captures the less important shapes. We then have many elements of red which provide the focus for your attention, before then a few blue and greeny yellow spots are added on top. There is minimal use of white in some areas, but very little. There are also some single black lines which continue this myriad of excitement upon the neutral grey expanse which holds a randomness of colour which could easily remind one of the natural sky, in how shades of colour vary without plan or design. One finds this piece immediately accessible, but those with an interest in the artist himself will certainly wish to dig deeper to understand quite what we are looking at here.

This item can be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the US and they have reported that this painting was the 15th of a total of 23 gouaches on paper within this particular series. They are collectively dated as between January 1940 to September 1941. Others have claimed that each one took around a month to complete but they are relatively small, at around 40cm tall and wide.