Curator, Anne Umland: We're looking at a drawing collage that Miró made in the summer of 1933, immediately after completing his series of paintings based on collages. This is a work that is executed on a flocked, textured paper, onto which Miró has adhered various types of collaged elements, ranging from these slightly sappy, romantic, turn of the century postcards, juxtaposed, then, with these more textured elements-- that abstract rectangle of sandpaper that's in the upper right-hand corner—and then that contrasted with the head of the woman, which is one of those machine-made embroidered postcards with typical Spanish senoritas in mantillas. And then other small, clipped collage pieces linked by these wonderfully free, meandering, drawn lines that connect these different collage elements, into a strange figure of sorts.
When you introduce photographically reproduced imagery, you have things that have illusion space and depth, versus something like the sandpaper that is just obdurately flat, that has a real texture to it. And what Miró does is set the two into opposition together.
When Miró and others spoke, or wrote about these collages early on, they were described as very spontaneous or automatic. Whereas, in fact, if you go back and look at these closely, you can see that there are registration marks around each of the postcards, and once again, it is Miró, in a very calculated fashion, working to create an image that looks as though it is chance.