Most people consider Joan Miro’ as being part of the Fauvism, also known as the Naive movement. This artistic movement used a variety of bright colors and looked at the Primitives as artists unaware of the law of harmony and balance and, for this reason, free from any form of artistic constriction. However, Miro’ went through multiple influences during his career. He always gave great importance to shapes, which was common in the Cubism art form, and he was open to the unexpected, like Dadaists and Surrealists.

These influences led him to elaborate a very personal concept, a way of looking at Art that eventually became the core of all his artistic work. The concept that representational painting no longer corresponded to artistic truth, nor that the previous artistic movements were able to express adequately the world in which we live, weighted heavily on Miro’. For example to Miro’ war was part of his life and his art. He felt that the current movements of art did not show the effects that World War I and World War II had on the world.

For Miro’ to convey his own artistic style and message, he started to research and experiment with many different techniques. Eventually he realized his own identity. Breaking away from the classical thinking and the “rules” that bound his artistic expression, Miro’s technique was a manipulation of reality, in a sense, and its influence is visible in the fragmented and apparently non-organized shapes of this work Barbare Dans La Neige and many others of Miro’s artworks.

Barbare Dans La Neige is characterized by the use of pure primary tones with a thick black border, big simple forms and exceptional poetic expression. The artist often worked with a limited palette, yet the colors he used were bold and expressive, emphasizing the potential of fields of unblended color.

This whimsical and fanciful subject appears to be quite harmless against the white background and circled by colorful stars, a green crescent moon (a very important element in his iconography) and a bright red accenting mark in the upper margin  – maybe a sun.  Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the print seeming nonchalance.

This work has a childlike simplicity and playfulness to it, showing how Miro’ sought an essential pictorial vocabulary in primitive sources, particularly prehistoric cave paintings of his native Spain. These painting were formed by signs, symbols and basic linear ingredients. Miro’ invented a new kind of pictorial space in which objects issuing strictly from the artist’s imagination are juxtaposed with basic, recognizable forms.

Barbare Dans La Neige is a perfect example of this.