In August 1939, a month before the outbreak of the World War II, Miró, with his family escaped Paris and moved to Varengeville-sur-Mer, a small town in Normandy. This sentiment of escaping is clearly reflected in this series' harmonic and poetic production. At Varengeville-sur-Mer he painted the top ten works in the series which was later called Constellations, beginning with The Dawn and The Scale of Evasion. After escaping from France, Miró continued the series of Constellations in Mallorca, creating a more complex group of ten more. The last three were created in 1941 in his ancestral home in Mont-roig del Camp. Whilst completing this series he began the first sketches of the Barcelona Series engravings, where he would repeat part of his imagery.
Description
This series is characterized by the shapes of stars, birds and women. Miró was making up his own mature language. The shapers are overlapping in different ways to create a specific colour space. This new idea was repeated constantly in the artist's work. Luckily the series are dated, allowing the sequence in chronological order. The backgrounds of the works are all painted in soft tones, and the vast majority of works are full of intersecting black lines, with details painted in the primary colours. Miró used astral maps which were like representations of cosmic space. Joan Punyet, grandson of the artist, said in an interview at TV3:
Legacy
In 2002, American percussionist/composer Bobby Previte released the albumThe 23 Constellations of Joan Miró on Tzadik Records. Inspired by Miró's Constellations series, Previte composed a series of short pieces to parallel the small size of Miró's paintings. Privete's compositions for an ensemble of up to ten musicians was described by critics as "unconventionally light, ethereal, and dreamlike".https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-23-constellations-of-joan-mir%C3%B3-mw0000014817 Previte's compositions had their American performance debut in 2008 with an eight-piece ensemble conducted by Christian Muthspiel. Featuring readings of Miró's letters and diaries by David Patrick Kelly, the performance was reviewed in The New York Times, mostly positively, which noted that large projections of the paintings behind the musicians were helpful in underlining Previte's compositions: "Some of the gouaches feature a gridlike clutter of dots and dashes that seem to allude, if obliquely, to musical notation." The performance was broadcast live on WYNC, which is available as a podcast.
