Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection.
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.
Private collection, Europe (acquired from the above); their sale, Christie's, New York, 6 November 2007, lot 76.
Private collection, Europe (acquired at the above sale).

Literature
Exh. cat., Miró: The Last Bronze Sculptures, 1981-83, New York, 1987, no. 3 (another cast illustrated on the cover).
Exh. cat., Miró en las colecciones del Estado, Madrid, 1987, no. 99 (another cast illustrated p. 114).
Exh. cat., Miró: Gemälde, Plastiken, Zeichnungen und Graphik: Werke aus den Kunstsammlungen des spanischen Staates, Frankfurt, 1988, no. 99 (another cast illustrated p. 130).
Exh. cat., Miró: El sueño interrumpido, Paris, 1988, no. 35 (another cast illustrated).
Exh. cat., Joan Miró, a retrospective, London, 1999, no. 49 (another cast illustrated p. 71).
Exh. cat., Miró: Mein Atelier ist mein Garten, Ludwigshafen, 2000, no. 70 (another cast illustrated p. 117).
Exh. cat., Pierre Matisse and His Artists, New York, 2002 (another cast illustrated p. 292).
E.F. Miró & P.O. Chapel, Joan Miró, Sculptures. Catalogue raisonné, 1928-1982, Paris, 2006, no. 376 (another cast illustrated p. 349).

I feel myself attracted by a magnetic force to an object, and then I feel myself being drawn towards another object which is added to the first, and their combination creates a poetic shock – which makes the poetry truly moving, and without which it would have no effect.
- Joan Miró in a letter to Pierre Matisse, 1936.

Stridently modern and relentlessly obscure, Joan Miró's Tête et oiseau generates shifting narratives of the ancient, the comical and the bizarre. This eerie symphony of morbidity and mythology meets its maker in the hands of Miró, a maestro in creating deeply personal and evocative assemblages. In his life-long dialogue of interventions with objects, Miró generated seismic shifts in the 20th Century conception of art. With its totemic gravitas and playful spontaneity, the present work forms a monument to the perpetuity of Surrealism, and of Miró's ever-lasting mark on this storied movement.

Joan Miró spent a colourful childhood between Barcelona and the Catalan town of Mont-roig del Camp. His native region's festivals, architecture and art – particularly its vibrant Romanesque frescoes – were foundational to his early artistic style. Between 1912 and 1915 he studied at the progressive Escola d'Art Galí in Barcelona, wherein he was trained to intuit the life-force and substance of objects. In 1915 he struck out on his own, thence developing his iconic style – one rooted in fantasy, collage and organic forms. The Surrealists inducted Miró shortly after he moved to Paris in 1919, as he was attracted in turn to their edicts of spontaneity and metamorphosis.

Ceramics and sculpture began to dominate Miró's artistic output at the end of the Second World War, during which he experimented with 'primitive' materials. In the 1950s, whilst collaborating with the ceramicist Josep Llorens i Artigas, Miró would incorporate fragments and off-cuts from the studio floor into his work. At that time, his close study of the prehistoric cave paintings in Altamira ignited his spiritual connection to bygone creators. In the 1960s, under the influence of his friend and dealer, Aimé Maeght, Miró's focus turned toward the natural environment. He began to assemble found objects and cast them in bronze. He paid close attention not only to their compositions but also to their patinas, which he considered to be of equal importance to the surfaces of his paintings. In this new poetic language, Miró's objects functioned as visual metaphors and as conduits to a broad spectrum of fantasy worlds.

Tête et oiseau is a case in point, its rough-hewn nature granting it the guise of an ancient ruin. Comprising twisted anatomical features upon an orderly, perpendicular structure, the sculpture seems to take on the form of a perverted herma. Hermae are ancient Greek and Roman sculptures consisting primarily of a male head and genitalia upon a squared, columnar form. This sculptural topos thereby evokes a mythical past, one in which gods and heroes were embodied within piles or columns of stone. These sacred objects – encompassing carved, collected and curated elements – often delineated cross-roads and land boundaries. Passers-by would honour them by throwing stones onto their heaps or anointing them with oil. Creatures of public spaces and of the natural environment, hermae possessed apotropaic powers, protecting the townsfolk from evil and harm.

Tête et oiseau crashes this inner circuity of classical art, borrowing yet thwarting its reverent and practical dimensions. The craggy form at the base could be a pile of stones – or of decaying skulls in a catacomb – awaiting some apotheosis or spiritual acknowledgement. The protruding nub above it could be a crudely rendered phallus, while the central head evokes a mask of a god's face. The wider form could also be interpreted as a shamanic or indigenous totem, imbued with the mystical gravitas of some other creator, whose name has fallen into the abyss of time. Indeed, totemic compositions are a hallmark of Miró's late 1960s and early 1970s oeuvre.

With his mastery of inventive fantasy, Miró threads together even more layered, bewildering meanings, their interlocking stitches forming patterns of happenstance. The focal head's wide-set eyes, farcically long nose and gaping mouth evoke a twisted commedia dell'arte mask. The clam shell mounted on the reverse adds a further classicising aspect, grounding this weathered construction firmly in the natural world. Indeed, Miró would often collect such jetsam of nature on walks in the countryside or on the beach, while residing at his Catalan country house or at his home in Mallorca. By the same stroke, he would paint directly onto the stones and trees he encountered, forging a creative and spiritual dialogue with the landscapes that enveloped him: 'May my sculptures be confused with elements of nature, trees, rocks, roots, mountains, plants, flowers. [I will] build myself a studio in the middle of the countryside, very spacious, with a facade that blends into the earth... and now and then take my sculptures outdoors so they blend into the landscape' (Miró quoted in M. Rowell (ed.), Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 175).

With freshness of vision, Miró juxtaposes this Surrealist objet trouvé tradition with the ancient method of lost-wax bronze casting. He cast his bronze in a rough fashion, leaving the accidents of the plaster and of his tools visible, then allowing his creations to weather outdoors. Choosing and combining objects – often discarded among the foundries in which he worked – was a further artistic impulse: 'When sculpting, start from the objects I collect, just as I make use of the stains on paper and imperfections in a canvas... Use things found by divine chance: bits of metal, stone, etc., the way I use schematic signs drawn at random on the paper or an accident... that is the only thing – this magic spark – that counts in art' (ibid. pp. 175 & 191).

Miró collected many objects throughout his life, forever open to unexpected discoveries. His studio functioned as a museum or Wunderkammer, constantly inspiring him. In alignment with his Surrealist colleagues, Miró was ingratiated with popular, folk and indigenous art forms, accumulating puppets, toys, African sculptures, pre-Colombian artefacts and Majorcan whistles. He saw the true value of his plastic art in the miniature lives of each of these found objects, which he placed in a vital discourse with one another. These manufactured yet chance encounters evoke a Surreal drama which is immortalised in bronze. Miró considered this theatre of the object to be the true essence of art – a gateway into 'a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters' (Exh. cat., Joan Miró: Sculpture, London, 1989, p. 175).

Miró transformed his found objects with a Freudian flourish. Sigmund Freud considered that objects could function as channels into one's subconscious motivations and sexual desires – a theme that resonated strongly with the Surrealists. Indeed, members of the Surrealist pantheon, such as André Breton, experimented with l'objet surréaliste well into the dusks of their careers. The wider Surrealist ethic of anti-aestheticism underscored Miró's career-long objective to 'assassinate painting' – an idea that germinated in his early reliefs and collages and endures in the present work. Representational artworks were, to Miró, antithetical to artistic truth. This philosophy manifested in Miró's keenness to distinguish his work from the luxurious and theatrical creations of his contemporary sculptors, such as Julio González and Pablo Picasso.

Miró has opined about this particular work, that it 'has to do with the unlikely marriage of recognizable forms' (Miró quoted in D. Swanson, 'The Artist's Comments' in Miró Sculptures, exh. cat., Minneapolis, 1971). Conceived near the conclusion of his illustrious career, it comes from a small limited edition of lifetime casts, and is the first time such a cast has appeared on the market in almost a decade. A testament to Miró's superb craftsmanship and multi-dimensional vision, Tête et oiseau is a true hallmark of Miró's resounding influence on Modern art.