Joan Miró
Woman, Bird and Star [Homage to Picasso]
![Woman, Bird and Star [Homage to Picasso]](/assets/img/obras/AS03162.jpg "Joan Miró: Woman, Bird and Star [Homage to Picasso]")
Joan Miró's painting in his later years stands out for its focus on a fluid pictorial process in which the material plays a leading role. Femmes VI [Women VI, 1969] is the last work in a 1969 series entitled Femmes et oiseaux [Women and Birds]. In this painting, an example of the overflowing quality of Miró's art, the expression of the brushstroke, where he adopts a type of rapid execution, and the subtlety and depth in the use of colour are fundamental; characteristic elements of this period contemporary with the expansion of American abstract expressionism. Without renouncing his identity as an undisputed master of modernity, the painter maintains his symbolic universe and an extremely free pictorial language, inherited from his early Surrealist works, when he defined and expanded all the expressive and poetic capabilities of painting.
Femmes VI shows the dynamism with which Miró integrates different materials and processes. This small canvas combines lines, smudges and fluid brushstrokes on raw, unprepared fabric, revealing small graphite drawings reminiscent of his work from the 1920s. The reuse of an old canvas could contain a conscious and subtle reference to his past as a 20th-century classic, at a time when, once again, the limits of painting were being pushed on the international scene.
In this work, Miró uses a wide variety of shapes and planes to create a composition rich in nuances. The broad range of whites and the different ways of applying the paint, from dripping to small touches of colour applied with a brush, are particularly noteworthy. In this way, he fills the entire surface with pictorial elements and qualities, leaving very little free space in the composition.
In the first phase, the artist uses white to define the planes and create a composition that he nuances and enriches with new layers of paint. He also uses dry drawing to outline the different shapes that connect one space to another, adding new elements such as his characteristic stars, which are partially covered in subsequent phases.
He then inserts new shapes into the composition with long black brushstrokes that overlap the initial base. When applying the colour, it can be seen how some of the marks appear to have been applied with the thick straw brushes that the artist had in his studio and with which he painted other works such as Tríptico azul [Blue Triptych, 1961].
Another recurring element in some of his works is that intense, bright white spot that can be seen at the edges of the composition and which can also be seen in other works of his, such as Mosaic, painted three years earlier.
Exposing paint to ultraviolet light reveals how different types of paint, their constituent materials and the ageing process respond to this radiation.
Within the range of whites, different fluorescence can be observed depending on the properties and characteristics of each one. The fluorescence of the small circle around some brushstrokes and drops of paint is striking, a phenomenon that could be caused by the composition and characteristics of the paint when applied.
Infrared photography makes it possible to confirm certain aspects of the painting process. By reducing the covering power of some layers of paint, depending on their thickness and chemical composition, it is possible to see how the graphite shows through beneath some brushstrokes, something that can be seen more clearly in the cobalt blue and chrome green.
The X-ray allows us to see all the layers of paint superimposed in a single image. In this way, we can see how the white areas lie beneath the black brushstrokes that partially cover the initial composition, and how the large patches were created by emphasising the contours.
This technique also serves to detect certain corrections or modifications in the composition. In the central area, there are some very defined elements made in the first phase of the process, which were finally covered with a black stain. There are also small variations in the black areas, where the artist emphasises the brushstrokes, in some cases lengthening them to modify the composition or widening the stroke to give greater prominence to the brushstroke.
