Curator, Anne Umland: Rope and People I, is one of a series of 16 pictures that Miró made on uniformed-sized sheets of cardboard. Miró later described this group of works, as an auto revision as though he set out to go back and test past practices and approaches to art-making against the realities of his current time.
In this particular work, what he's doing is revisiting the strategy of collage. If you think of the rope that is so prominently positioned in the center of this work, it has an iconic presence, like the hat pin and the cork that Miró earlier on used to create this figure of a feminine form, a dancer. But here, this material has this heavy, obdurate physicality. And you're made aware of its weight…
In Rope and People I Miró tests two different ways of, it seems, representing figures. Both the rope and the drawn figures are vertical. They are upright. He seems to have deliberately rhymed the toes of the figure at left with the lower edges of the rope, as though to test, in a way, what creates a more powerful sign for a figure—something found, that is rather raw, brutal, has nothing to do with his own hand, or touch, as opposed to this drawn figure with its distended body parts. And I think that in the end, what is most powerful about this work is the tension that is staged between the two. The rope's violent character is exacerbated and enhanced by that of these grimacing vertical figures that surround it, just as the figures, too, take on a greater shock value because of this large, ungainly, heavy, solid, object that has somehow smacked into their midst.