Women and Birds at Sunrise

Woman and Birds at Sunrise was completed by Joan Miro in 1946 and is one of a number of artworks with the same name that he created around this time. Another can be found at the Tate Modern.

Within this painting we can immediately spot the two eyes of the woman mentioned in the title as well as a surrealist representation of the rest of her body. A red sun sits proudly in the top tight of the canvas, which immediately helps us to understand that we are outdoors. The birds themselves are constructed from further series of abstract shapes and Miro places them in the space around the human figure. He predominantly uses strong black lines to create form, with colour then used to underline the key parts of the work. The entire Surrealist mantra was about taking items from reality and re-arranging them into something alternative, similar to what you might find in a dream.

Miro liked to make use of lighter toned backgrounds during this period and would leave them rough and almost random in their tones, in a similar way to the disorder of nature. The intention was to avoid the backgrounds looking like they had been carefully crafted, which may then have taken attention away from the key parts of the composition. The artist had earlier worked in high levels of detail before slowly becoming more and more abstract, eventually arriving at the reduced style found here, where we see just individual shapes, lines plus standard use of a limited palette of colours. He had truly arrived as an abstract artist by this point, and his re-arrangement of things that we know from the real world would mark him out specifically as a surrealist painter.