Joan Miró
Spanish, 1893–1983
Painting (Figures with Stars)
INV-7761
Joan Miró
Spanish, 1893–19831933
Painting (Figures with Stars)
Joan Miró Spanish, 1893–1983 →paintingmodern and contemporary art
Date
1933
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
198.1 × 246.4 cm (78 × 97 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice E. Culberg
The "personages" we see here—organic figures with tiny heads, disjointed appendages, and schematic breasts—reflect the experimentation across media for which Joan Miró is best known. First in his Barcelona studio in 1933, the artist made a series of small paper collages from precisely rendered engravings of household and mechanical objects. Then, he translated these compositions into large abstract paintings, with multicolored, amorphous forms rendered in silhouette. Inspired by this series, Miró derived Paintings (Figures with Stars) as a cartoon, or full-scale preparatory work, for a tapestry commissioned by French art collector and gallery director Marie Cuttoli, effecting yet another material transformation of his original design from collage to painting to textile.
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