La danse des coquelicots (The Dance of the Poppies)

Joan Miró questioned the foundations of painting throughout his entire career, from attention to detail in his early painting, the evolution of this practice into the creation of his ideographic language, the subsequent construction of picture-objects, experimentation with the language of his painting-poems, his anti-painting period, and the almost total stripping that characterized his last period, to which this work belongs. In this stage the broadening of the pictorial space becomes evident, as is the progressive simplification of his universe, in which he turns yet again to a theme present throughout his entire career, the reality of the earth in nature and landscape, of which La danse des coquelicots (The Dance of the Poppies) forms part. The motifs are reduced to calligraphy signs, derived from Miró’s interest in Asian art, which he learned more about in his visits to Japan in 1966 and 1970. The paintings from this last period show, in the liberation of the pictorial gesture, a wish for immediate realization, whose language of signs, rhythm and colour is refined so as to attain maximum concentration in space, in an attempt to transcend the physical boundaries of the canvas. Joan Miró’s later work coincides in time with modernity’s final crisis, in which some of the artists, like himself, who had articulated the languages of the avant-garde, begin to practice a form of painting that seems to draw up inside itself.