Femme et oiseau

Miró found his bearings as a sculptor in the solitary years of the Second World War, embracing the culture of peasant craft in rural Catalunya and Mallorca as a source for a new and vital approach to sculpture rooted in the world of objects. In notebooks from this time, Miró anticipated a new engagement with sculpture, writing: “When sculpting, I start from the objects I collect, just as I make use of the stains on paper and imperfections in a canvas–do this here in the country in a way that is really alive, in touch with the elements of nature...do it like a collage of various elements...that is the only thing–this magic spark–that counts in art” (in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, pp. 175, 191). By the late 1960s, his sculptures had become fully three-dimensional collages: “My collages, today, are my sculptures,” Miró declared in 1977–and in these colorfully painted bronzes first conceived a decade earlier he raises his gift of metamorphosis to new heights (quoted in W. Jeffett, The Shape of Color: Joan Miró’s Painted Sculpture, exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 33).
These later sculptures reflect retrospectively on Miró’s oeuvre, invoking both the playful, risk-taking attitude of the Surrealist 1930s and the nationalism more characteristic of his work upon his return to Spain. “To paint, to sculpt, to etch, is maybe to give form to a myth,” Miró reflected in 1974. “If I frequently integrate the objects as they are, with raw materials, it is not to obtain a plastic effect but by necessity...I need to walk on my earth, to live among my own, because everything that is popular is necessary for my work” (quoted in ibid., p. 21).
The black patent leather tricornio hat of Spain’s guardia civil, a symbol of authority in Franco’s republic, is transformed in the present work by Miró’s imagination into the body of his favorite surrogate, the bird. Among the other elements of Femme et oiseau are regular habitués of the studio built for Miró near Palma by his friend, Joseph Lluis Sert, in 1956. A four-legged stool, here painted pitch black, was a familiar presence in the Sert studio; the sawn-off end of a cylindrical container, here in rich blue, also played various roles. These forms had undergone a long gestation in his creative imagination. “This character is neither male nor female,” William Jeffett has explained, commenting on Miró’s painted bronzes of this time. “It is more of a fantastic apparition of a mythic creature” (ibid., p. 36).
"All the sculptures, in one way or another, seem to express the fantasy of matter becoming animate...But they do it in such a way that not even the most timid child would be frightened. These monsters are friendly, or at the most burlesquely frightening like the Meanies in the Beatles cartoon film, something to giggle about rather than cry over, an attempt, perhaps, on Miró’s part to laugh us out of our bad dreams" (quoted in L. Coyle, "The Monsters in America: The Presentation and Reception of Miró’s Sculpture in the United States," in op. cit., exh. cat., 2002, p. 80).
Miro at work outside his studio near Palma, circa 1970.
The present sculpture at Brooklyn Museum of Art, A Family Album: Brooklyn Collects, 2001.
Spanish Guardia Civil wearing the tricornio, 1950, photographed by W. Eugene Smith.