Libelle Mit Roten Flugeln Eine Schlange Jagend

Here we find a bright composition which is akin to a number of Wassily Kandinsky's famous abstract artworks. We find Miro here in full, expressive mode, avoiding detail and declaring war on traditional art, just as he promised to do.

The cosmology theme is here, either intentionally or just as a result of how Miro would construct his forms, normally using shape and line, circles with bright colours. He also depicts stars here, those the normal red sun found throughout his career has been left out. He often produced matrixes of lines, like a grid, and then fill the shapes produced by the crossing lines with colours such as black, white, red, blue and yellow. This painting has some clearly demarked shapes, whilst others are actually blurred and seemingly produced without much planning. Miro regularly experimented with automated art, as did many members of the Surrealist movement, a group around which he sat on the fringes.

It is really only once we translate the title of Libelle Mit Roten Flugeln Eine Schlange Jagend into its English alternative that we start to understand just quite what we are looking at. Dragonfly with Red Wings Chasing a Snake is the surprise result, and immediately sets us off to find these items within the composition. We first find the standard background used by this artist, with a rough tone of brown brushed unevenly across the entire canvas, leaving fluctuating tones of light and dark. It is intended to look natural and random, so as not to distract your eyes. We see almost a primeval style of art, with these shapes being something one might come across with cave paintings from prehistoric communities, a style that the artist was known to have studied in depth whilst developing his abstract style.