Le Lézard aux plumes d'or

Though best known as a painter and printmaker, the Catalan artist Joan Miró was drawn to the art of the book throughout his career. Indeed, in his later years, he produced several dozen deluxe, limited-edition books, sometimes illustrating texts by others, but just as often working from his own words. The immersive quality of a book project must have appealed to Miró, whose whole career was, in a way devoted to desire to the creation of separate, hermetic universes of his own. Le Lézard aux plumes d’or, or The Lizard with Golden Feathers, is one of Miró’s most important books of the 1960s and 70s, not least because he controlled every aspect of the project, including the text; the book is built around a poem the artist began composing in 1948, and text and images together serve as a sort of allegory of artistic inspiration. Miró and his printers at atelier Mourlot lavished enormous care on this project; in fact, they had printed most of the edition in 1967 before deciding that the paper they were using was flawed. They pulped the book and began again, finally issuing the work in 1971.