From 1945, Joan Miró largely abandoned easel painting, preferring to direct his energies into mural painting, book illustration and ceramics. He continued to draw, however, and unlike his collaborative projects these works provided him with a free space in which to exercise an elementary type of visual creativity. This work was made a month before a large-scale retrospective of Miró’s work opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in March 1959. In the estimation of John Thrall Soby, MOMA’s curator, ‘[Miró] works still with the abandon of youth and with youth’s defiant assurance. Today he is as free in invention as at any time in his long career.’ The free invention and youthful esprit evoked by Soby are apparent in this untitled drawing. It uses spontaneous, curling contours and unblended lines of bright, contrasting crayon. The schema is resistant to a literal description and only contains hints towards representation, most obviously the star-like asterisk at the upper lefthand corner, though faces also begin to emerge in certain places. Further efforts to discern representational content in the drawing are apposite; Miró himself sanctioned this activity, remarking that ‘[f]or me a form is never something abstract; it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me painting is never form for form’s sake.’ It was Miró’s practice at this time to leave his drawing inventions untitled, relying on the work to give its own account. This aspect of playful, viewer-led interpretation remained important throughout the artist’s career. The careful attention which Miró gave to dating and signing the work was partly inherited from Picasso, who also inscribed a specific date on his paintings and drawings, and who often boasted of the great speed at which he completed work. Aside from providing a useful documentary record of his output, the inscription of a specific date – 18 February 1959 – was a mark of Miró’s artistic professionalism and the value he saw in these free, fantastic line drawings.