![Joan Miró - The Sparkling Gold Bird Encircles the Thought of the Poet [1951]](http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1524/26336429601_6ebc7a44b2_o.jpg)
When Miró painted this work in 1951, he had already become acquainted with the new techniques and aesthetic agenda of the Abstract Expressionists. He first saw their work in New York in 1947, and the experience, the artist would later recall, was like ‘a blow to the solar plexus.’ Several young painters, including Jackson Pollock, were crediting Miró as their inspiration for their wild, paint-splattered canvases. Miró was both flattered and a bit awed by the acknowledgement, not knowing immediately what to think of it. But in the years that followed he created works that responded to the enthusiasm of this younger generation of American painters and the spontaneity of their art. The paintings he created at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s are a fascinating response to these new trends of abstraction, but also they show Miró’s allegiance to his own artistic pursuits. “For me a form is never something abstract,” he said at the end of the 1940s, “it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never form for form’s sake.”
[Sotheby’s, New York - Oil on canvas, 60 x 81 cm]