Women, Bird and Serpent in Front of the Sun

Joan Miró began studying art in his native Barcelona in 1907. He moved to Paris in 1920, and during that decade his work moved from realism toward abstract, whimsical shapes often reminiscent of natural forms. He worked in this style, which he continued to refine, throughout the rest of his life, dividing his time between France and Spain.

Miró's dreamlike painting shows the rhythmic figures, birds, suns, stars, and other elements that characterized his creative output in the 1940s and '50s. It is reminiscent of his Constellations series of small gouaches on paper, created during 1940-41, in which he created biomorphic and astronomical forms.

Women, Bird and Serpent in Front of the Sun is from a group of works the artist made in Spain during the years of the Second World War. In 1948, he spoke of this group, stating,

I produced a great deal at this time, working very quickly. And just as I worked very carefully [in the Constellations] which had immediately preceded these, "controlling" everything, now I worked with the least control possible-at any rate in the first phase, the drawing. Even here, however, only the broad outlines were unconsciously done. The rest was carefully calculated. The broad initial drawing, generally in grease crayon, served as a point of departure. . . . I drew carefully around the stains [in the canvas's ground] and made them the center of the composition. The slightest thing served me as a jumping off place in this period. .!.!. The first stage is free, unconscious; but after that the picture is controlled throughout, in keeping with that desire for discipline which I have felt from the beginning.

The irregular shape of this work is original; the canvas was likely cut from a larger primed and stretched support, and small holes, filled and in-painted when they were noted in 1978, may indicate it was tacked to a support. It is one of forty the artist painted on unstretched canvases of irregular shapes. Another Miró in the AMAM collection-The Spokesmen of the Birds Plunges into the Night, made a decade later- is painted on cardboard and contains the biomorphic and animal shapes seen in the artist's earlier works, but in a composition which is more open.

Both of these paintings, along with two Miró pastels made during the war years, Women Dreaming of Escape (1942) and Woman and Bird in Front of the Sun (1943), and numerous other mid-twentieth century European works, were gifts of Joseph and Enid Bissett. On the advice of their nephew, J. R. Judson, who graduated from Oberlin and went on to become an eminent Dutch and Flemish art historian, they gave much of their important collection of mid- twentieth- century European art to the AMAM, greatly strengthening the museum's holdings in this area.