The forms of his paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds and are painted in a limited range of bright colors, especially blue, red, yellow, green, and black. Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miró later produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines, and bursts of colors.
Miró also experimented in a wide array of other media, devoting himself to etchings and lithographs for several years in the 1950s and also working in watercolor, pastel, collage, and paint on copper and masonite. His ceramic sculptures are especially notable, in particular his two large ceramic murals for the UNESCO building in Paris (Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun, 1957-59).
Miró died in Son Abrines, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, on December 25, 1983, after sending the rest of his later years on the Island. In 1992 the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró was established in Mallorca.
In his still-life paintings of bottles occupying a highly atmospheric space, Stokes achieved a tonal purity that is his most distinctive accomplishment as an artist. It may be that in his landscape paintings of olive trees, the subject itself offered too little resistance to the fluidity he cherished; and in the paintings of female nudes, the subjects offered too much resistance to the purely aesthetic response he was aiming for. The nude, after all, was a subject on which Stokes had lavished a good deal of serious thought. In a book called Reflections on the Nude (1967), written around the same time he did the two paintings of nudes in the current show, Stokes characterized the subject as "the object of many passions," "an immense power" and many similar terms. I think these nudes are very fine paintings, but they are shaped by impulses and ideas that are emphatically different from the emotions governing the still-life paintings.
Iridescence
Coldstream, Moore, Hepworth and Wollheim