Femme VI (Woman VI)

The interest in a fluid painting process with the medium playing a central role was fundamental in Joan Miró’s later paintings. Femmes VI (Women VI, 1969) is the last work in a 1969 series entitled Femmes et oiseaux (Women and Birds). This painting, in which the expression of the stroke and the depth of the use of colour are essential, expresses the overwhelming quality of Miró’s artwork in a period that coincided with the rise of American Abstract Expressionism. The painter adopts a type of quick execution, without giving up his identity as the undisputed master of modernity, while retaining his universe of symbols and an extremely free pictorial syntax, inherited from his painting during the years that Surrealism emerged, when he defined and expanded all the expressive and poetic capacity of painting. Femmes VI shows the dynamism with which Miró integrates different subject matters and processes. The line, the blurred line, and the fluid brush-stroke share a small canvas made of untreated raw material in such a way that it permits one to see small graphite drawings which are reminiscent of his work from the twenties. These drawings make one think that, on this occasion, the reusing of an old canvas is a conscious and subtle reference to his past as one of the classics of the 20th century, at a time when the trend in the international art scene would once again push the limits of painting.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio