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The Constellations: from Gouache to Pochoir

Painting immensity in wartime

In January 1940, in his studio at Varengeville-sur-Mer, Joan Miró began a series of small gouaches across which cosmic worlds unfold. In them he took up and condensed the vocabulary of signs he had been forging since the 1920s: stars, birds, women and crescent moons, pared down to essentials and scattered over an almost bare field. The German invasion of May 1940 forced him to leave Normandy for Spain, where he continued the series, completing it in 1941.

The titles reflect the world that absorbed him: the sky, birds, women, the stars. Among them are Le 13 l’échelle a frôlé le firmament (1940), La poétesse (1940), Le passage de l’oiseau divin (1941) and Vers l’arc-en-ciel (1941). Miró confided that the spectacle of the sky overwhelmed him, that a crescent moon or a sun in an immense sky moved him deeply. His paintings, he added, actually consist of “tiny forms in great empty spaces”.

That is the true subject of the series. The sheets do not tell a story: they set a network of signs, stars and dreamlike figures, black and coloured, against the expanse that surrounds them. They express a longing for freedom, poetry and escape in the face of the chaos of war. Far from being neutral, the background plays a decisive role. To translate these sheets, then, is to render both the signs and the space.

Joan Miró, La Poétesse (Constellations), pochoir, 1959

La Poétesse (Constellations), pochoir, 1959

New York discovers the Constellations

The sheets travelled in secret: they left Spain in the diplomatic bag to be shown in New York at the Pierre Matisse Gallery from 9 January to 3 February 1945. The exhibition was entitled “Ceramics 1944, Tempera Paintings 1940 to 1941, Lithographs 1944”. The name Constellations does not appear: its origin remains unknown, and it is found neither in the correspondence between Miró and Matisse nor in the documents published in 1945.

Twenty-two gouaches were shown, as Miró wished to keep the twenty-third. The moment mattered as much as the works: these were among the first new creations from Europe to reach America, and the exhibition was a huge success, particularly among artists. Every gouache was sold, and the series was dispersed.

The impact on young American artists was profound. The Cleveland Museum of Art notes that their “all-over” composition – with no centre and no hierarchy, where the eye settles on no single point – left a lasting mark on the artists who followed. Painted in exile and amid scarcity, these light, colourful works struck many as a victory of creative freedom over barbarism.

Joan Miró, Femmes encerclées par le vol d’un oiseau (Constellations), pochoir, 1959

Femmes encerclées par le vol d’un oiseau (Constellations), pochoir, 1959

Translating gouache: the 1959 edition

Almost twenty years later, the gouaches returned in another form. In 1959 the publisher Pierre Matisse issued in New York a portfolio accompanied by prose poems by André Breton. The Surrealist writer saw in these sheets an artist who, in an hour of extreme turmoil, had deployed the full register of his voice, “outside the world and, moreover, outside time”. The phrase applies to the book too: a work conceived in the shadow of war appeared in a radically different world. Each plate brings together two moments, that of the gouache and that of its translation. Breton’s text is a third, this time poetic and literary.

Twenty-two pochoirs after the gouaches, together with two etchings and two lithographs, were eventually produced in Parisian workshops, including that of Daniel Jacomet. The twenty-third gouache, the one Miró had kept, is not included.

Pochoir is a technique that demands decisions. Each colour requires its own cut stencil, applied to the paper one after another. The gouache must therefore be analysed, its tints separated, an order established, and a choice made as to what will be rendered and what must be sacrificed. The translucency of a wash, the accident of a brushstroke, the vibration of a background cannot be transposed as they are: they have to be recreated by other means. “Reproduction” is a poor word for this work. “Translation”, with all it implies of fidelity and interpretation, suits it better.

Collotype and pochoir: the Jacomet process

The Jacomet workshop described its process as the combination of two techniques, answering the two sides of the work: space on the one hand, signs on the other.

Collotype renders the structure. A layer of light-sensitive bichromated gelatine is exposed through a photographic negative. The gelatine hardens where the light strikes it and stays swollen with moisture where the black of the negative has shielded it. The greasy ink then settles unevenly and reproduces every value, from black to white, without any screen. In this way it captures, photographically, the drawing and the texture of the background.

Pochoir adds the colour. Each tint is laid on by brush through a sheet of zinc a tenth of a millimetre thick, cut with a blade to the shapes to be coloured. A single plate may need fifteen to forty stencils, sometimes sixty. The workshop maps out the range of values for each colour, starting with the lightest, and anticipates the effect of their overlays. The colour is sometimes softened and blended with a smaller brush.

For each original – gouache, watercolour or pastel – the workshop assesses what photography can render and what only the hand can recreate. That assessment is already a translation. Pleased with the result, Miró worked with Jacomet again a few years later on another major series: Quelques fleurs pour des amis.

To own a plate from the Constellations is therefore to hold something other than a copy: the fruit of interpretative work carried out by craftsmen on a work by Miró. Layer by layer, they recreated what the gouache achieved in a single gesture, and restored to a tiny sign the immensity that surrounds it. Each plate is thus both a testimony of 1940 and a work of 1959.

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