Miro, Joan Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird 1926 Oil on canvas 29 x 36 1/4 in. (73.7 x 92.1 cm.) © 1999 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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From "Techniques of the Great Masters of Art":

"Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird was painted at a time when Miro was working at an intense pitch and in a variety of original and persuasive styles.

"By 1926 Miro had moved definitely towards calculation and even anecdote. Personage is much more deliberate and posed. Indeed, on one level the work seems to be all about balances and oppositions. The figure throwing the stone, which writer William Rubin aptly characterized as an 'amoeboid biomorph with a cyclopean eye and giant foot', combines the organic contours of its 'body' with the strict linearity of the long straight line that designates its arms. There is a wry enjoyment of the very specific fulcrum in the person's body section, from which the arms lurch in the effort of throwing and which topples the body backwards, drawing attention to the spread-eagled stability of the out-sized foot.

"The color and linear components of the picture operate in localized areas to suggest oppositions of space and scale. The tail feathers of the bird 'invert' the sky and foreground hues, as if to signify the bird as an adept of both media; its chromatic head and crest are strikingly complementary, and this is faintly echoed in the eye of the figure.

"Miro demonstrates here enormous technical skill in the management and disposition of the paint in both the larger color 'fields' and in the minute bands and ribbons of color. The whole of the green sky area, for example, is deliberately given a scrubby appearance with small, strong brushstrokes aligned predominantly along the diagonal axis described by the 'arms' of the person, but more densely worked in places. This is particularly apparent around the contours of the figure and of the stone, and has the effect of projecting the figure slightly from the surface and of giving it a kind of mock three-dimensionality.

"Clearly visible behind this textured area are a series of faint lines, suggesting the original grid from which Miro tended to construct his work. The thin black arm-line terminates precisely against one of these grid markers. Notable also is the miniature signature and date, near the 'wing' of the bird, which stand out against the yellow ground rather like the color that highlights the mini-cliffs and peaks of the shoreline.

"In this work, Miro has allied the skills of the detailist to the larger sweep of Surrealist biomorphism with its continuous curves and contours, and he sets the two within abstract-looking color fields and geometries. Personage is one of the most remarkable syntheses in inter-war painting."