Woman and Birds

Joan Miro would develop a particular style with which to capture birds and figurative art within his career, and for a period of several months he would release multiple versions of these symbols within his particular abstract style.

There is an impressively bold style to this work, with bright colours contrasting against the heavy use of black paint. Miro even allows the bottom third of the canvas to be entirely assigned to a single black tone, which then repeats upwards from wavy lines that criss cross to produce new spaces. We see several elements here which are typical of Miro, with curves at the end of each main line, which are similar to smiles or perhaps a claw or hand. There are also eyes dotted around the piece, which are easy to create within an abstract style, with just a few circles normally suffice. That top two thirds are given a white background, with speckles of black paint which may have been flicked onto the canvas by the artist in a random manner that could never have been replicated in quite the same way again. This was Miro expressing himself to the full, and it was down to us to decipher the meanings of each line and shape.

It is difficult to learn much about the individual elements of this series of work because of how the artist created so many similarly titled artworks. We are all aware of Woman and Bird, which would become one of his most ambitious sculptures, but there were also countless painted versions featuring women and birds together, most of which came about in the years 1967-1968. Today we will tend to summarise this group of paintings because of the similarities that they held, and that individual content on each one is very hard to find. Spanish speakers might be able to locate more, and these lesser known artworks are also spread around private collections, which makes it even harder to really examine any of them in greater detail.

Miro would go on to produce Woman and Birds in the Night and Woman and Bird at around the same time, using a fairly similar method. He liked to create series of work from time to time in which he would take an idea just as far as he could before then moving on again and seeking other forms of expression. He never stood still as an artist and was constantly mixing with others, sharing ideas. Miro understood that ceramics, for example, required the help of specialists and so he partnered with others for those artworks, and did much the same with his sculptures too. There are few who have managed to enter so many different art movements across their career and do so successfully, but this is very much the case with this innovative Catalan whose legacy today is felt right across the international art world.