When Miró remarked to his friend Alexander Calder, “I am an established painter but a young sculptor,” it was direct acknowledgment he had much to learn working with three-dimensional form. After all, Miró had devoted the entirety of his first 53 years to the decidedly unpainterly-paintings with their organic-like forms, flattened picture planes drawn in sharp delineations for which he fundamentally known. But the comment was also accompaniment to the fact he did not turn his attention to producing sculpture in bronze until 1946. Either way, sculpting and casting in bronze attracted a lion’s share of his attention the last four decades of his life. The bronzes in particular represent a substantial contribution to any appraisal of his impressive oeuvre and ultimately invigorated Miró during these later years. The endeavor reminded him of his earliest times when he was excitedly processing information and discovering his unique language of expression that André Breton characterized as ‘the purest Surrealism of us all.’ 

Tête de femme is based upon one of Miró’s most utilized themes. He characterized his sculptures as being from the ‘truly phantasmagoric world of living’ which is, undoubtedly, intended as a term of endearment. Yet Tête de femme seems to evince something less monstrous or grotesque and instead presents in more sobering light as a free-standing, monolithic presence suggesting essential nature, if not a monumental one. Its attributions are fixed, intrinsic, and suggestive of its innateness; a strikingly austere design that adheres to Miró’s resistance to a classic bourgeois concept of ideal beauty. While it does not suggest a simple ‘female figure’ designation, there is plenty of referential material in the curves, domed protrusions, and a central depression suggesting a birthing matrix that in sum, evokes a celebration of fecundity and the creation of life. In any event, any tether to representational reality is a tenuous one, yet one that is calculated to stimulate the imagination and evoke unconscious primordial references and long-forgotten mythologies.