Personnage, oiseau

Personnage, oiseau (1977) belongs to the final decade of Joan Miró’s work, a period in which the artist drew and painted with increasing directness on found and humble supports. Executed in grease pencil on a sheet of corrugated cardboard, the drawing retains the material’s ridges, creases and irregular edges as active elements of the image.

The two motifs named in the title — figure and bird — were among the most persistent in Miró’s vocabulary, recurring across six decades. Here they are reduced to a small number of thick, unhesitating strokes: a curved horizontal mass at the base, a vertical scaffolding of lines above, a hooked form at the right.

The Late Work

From the 1960s onward Miró worked with a growing appetite for the gestural and the provisional. He painted on burlap, on masonite, on discarded wood, and he drew on cardboard, wrapping paper and envelopes. The choice was deliberate: the roughness of the support resisted refinement and forced a blunter, faster mark.

The grease pencil suits this purpose. It drags across the ribbed surface, breaking and thickening, leaving a line with weight rather than precision.

Sign and Figure

Miró’s late signs hover between legibility and abstraction. The eye reads a standing figure, a beak, a wing — but no element is fixed, and the drawing resists being resolved into a single reading.

What remains constant is the economy. Miró worked toward a vocabulary in which a very few marks could carry the full charge of a figure, and drawings such as this one represent that ambition at its most stripped down.

Provenance & Documentation

Signed lower right.

Provenance: Private Collection Certificate: ADOM (Association pour la Défense de l’Œuvre de Joan Miró) Reference: MC-GRO-17