L'Aigle et la femme dans la nuit (Eagle and Woman at Night)

Joan Miró

1938

Etching, drypoint, and plate tone

Minneapolis Institute of Art

By 1938, Miró was anguished by the tragedy of civil war in his Spanish homeland. In response, his subject matter became increasingly brutal and aggressive, as in this nocturnal vision of an eagle preparing to attack a woman on a desolate beach. Miró's surrealist style is manifest in the woman's distorted and abstracted body, while the eagle is depicted in the form of an aggressive shape with a single eye and sharp talons. The nightmarish, sexual explicitness of this image became a mainstay of Miró's art, which sought to reveal the deep, unconscious violence that characterized modern humankind. Gallery Not on View Gift of Mr. Earl St