| Artist: | Miro, Joan |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers | |
| Date of Work: | 1942 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Post-War Fantasy | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: "The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers" is part of the later constellation series, done at the beginning of WWII. Each is characterized by an allover linear tracery that forms a kind of constellation of linking lines and quasi-geometric shapes. Miro called them "musical space fillers," but they read like galaxies with orbiting suns, stars, birds, and lovers. The effect is calligraphic and magical. The cast of this particular image includes a female personage on the right, whose breasts and "flaming vulva" form a kind of face (the "lips" being her buttocks). She lifts her snout to sniff the bird going by overhead. Her pint-sized lover is on her left. He has lumps on his head that sprout hairs. There is a snail above his head, inching its way to the moon. It is a world overcharged with the "marvelous" and the erotic. Style: In the Constellations, an allover linear network seems almost to dance across the delicately modulated spatial fields, created by spreading oil on moistened paper. Miro works as a "seer," a visionary poet of the unconscious. Using free association, he only discovers his motifs, shapes, and forms in the act of painting itself. Focus is on what unfolds in the creative process (as in the surrealist game, "The Exquistie Cadaver"). He embraces the surreal idea of psychic automatism, the undirected play of thought. Context: Miro offers us a more playful, stream-of-consciousness, abstract surreal vision than the highly calculated, technicolor, precisionist images of Dali's paranoaic-critical method. Miro puts the emphasis on process (dream painting) rather than product (painted dreams), but both affirm the unconscious as a valid source of creativity. Miro sees the unconscious, however, as a secretly coded language of abstract sign-symbols that mischievously speak of hidden desires. As the painter Robert Motherwell said: "His pictures breathe eroticism, but with freedom and grace . . . a true sensual liberation. . . . nothing sexual is repressed or described circumspectly . . . hair waving in the wind as sensitive to the touch as an insect's antenna . . . dancing with ecstasy. They have a life of their own. . . . no creatures ever had so many openings to ge into, and so many organs with which to do it." | ||
