This shift is reflected in the handling of the work itself, with Miró highly attentive here to the expressive possibilities of his materials. This period of his practice (1952–54) is described by his friend and scholar Jacques Dupin as ‘The Expansion’, drawing “upon the power of the most direct, the most brutal expression, a kind of grandiose and severe improvisation.” [1] The grain of the canvas is allowed to show through thinned layers of white and blue paint, while the figure of the girl is rendered in stark, opaque strokes. The flattened red sun is set against dots of thicker white paint that rise from the picture plane, suggesting Miró’s active exploration of varying densities and surface textures. In a smaller format, the painting captures this broader transition in his practice with considerable clarity.

‘Le soleil se retourne vers la fillette pour fêter son allégresse’ is also a notable example of Miró’s poem-titles, in which the sun appears as a recurring presence from 1948 through 1955. For Miró, these titles were not descriptive labels but something closer to an atmosphere, a quality which emerged from the work in the process of its creation. Here, the title evokes warmth and gentle whimsy, the idea of a girl whose joy is so alive that the sun itself turns to acknowledge her.