Joan Miro – Trois Soeurs

Description

Trois Soeurs, 1938 by Joan Miró is a Drypoint print made in black and white. This print is signed in pencil in the lower right and numbered from the edition of 30 in the lower left.  Paper size: 12 3/4 x 10 inches.  Image Size: 10 1/2 x 7 3/4 inches.  Printed by Lacouriere, Paris. Published by Pierre Loeb and Pierre Matisse.  Dupin 25.

Joan Miró rejected the constraints of traditional painting, creating works “conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness,” as he once said. Widely considered one of the leading Surrealists, though never officially part of the group, Miró pioneered a wandering linear style of Automatism—a method of “random” drawing that attempted to express the inner workings of the human psyche.

In Trois Soeurs, Miró used form in a symbolic rather than literal manner, his intricate compositions combining abstract elements with recurring motifs like birds, eyes, and the moon. “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music,” he said. In turn, Miró has inspired many artists—significantly Arshile Gorky whose bold linear abstractions proved a foundational influence on Abstract Expressionism.

His automatism and biomorphic figures intertwined to become one of Surrealism’s dominant modes of painting, influencing contemporary painters such as Ernst,and Dalí. Alexander Calder’s mobiles also recall Miró paintings, rendered in hanging, open-form sculpture. Miró spent significant time in New York in the 1940s, where he and other Surrealist émigrés inflamed the imaginations of the next generation’s Abstract Expressionism.