“My feet are on the ground, but my eyes are always turned toward the stars.” — Joan Miró

Joan Miró was one of the pioneers of Surrealism. By engaging with contemporary psychology and especially theories of the subconscious, and playing with form, he developed a style based on whimsical allusions to reality and lyrical, fancifully colored compositions. In January 1940, he began a series of twenty-three works on paper that later became known as The Constellations. Composed on identically sized sheets of paper over twenty-one months, this remarkably poetic suite was created from January 1940 to September 1941, under the duress of World War II, when Miró and his family moved from France to his native Spain to avoid the advance of the Nazis.

In the work presented in this auction, Untitled (Personnages et étoiles) from 1952, Miró conjures a world poised between earth and sky, reminiscent of The Constellations. Enigmatic figures and celestial signs seem to emerge from the depths of his imagination. The fluid watercolours, the broad strokes of black ink and the delicate touches of crayon create an interplay of gesture, colour and space. Neither fully figurative nor entirely abstract, the composition invites the viewer into a private universe in which the familiar dissolves into the marvellous.

This lyrical freedom reflects Miró’s postwar artistic vision, shaped in part by his two visits to the United States, in 1947 and 1952. During his first visit, he executed the monumental mural for the Gourmet Room of Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza Hotel, translating his intimate vocabulary of signs and symbols to an architectural scale. In 1951, a second mural for the dining hall at Harkness Commons, Harvard University, was completed. The motif of artist's favorite characters and stars, against darker tones of a night sky recurs in the present work, dated 1952. The underlying tension between conflict and freedom, beauty and forebodance, echoes the imagery that runs throughout Miró’s oeuvre.

Miró’s imaginative universe also found expression in his graphic work of the 1940s and 1950s, including the Constellations series, mentioned above, and numerous lithographs published by Galerie Maeght during these decades. Across these different media, stars, figures and mysterious organic forms recur as elements of a universal visual language. In the present work, they come together with particular intimacy and spontaneity, conveying the sense of wonder, freedom and quiet mystery that lies at the heart of Miró’s art.