Plate (folio 8) from Il était une petite pie (Once There Was a Little Magpie)

Plate (folio 8) from Il était une petite pie (Once There Was a Little Magpie) by Joan Miró is a foundational work of Surrealist printmaking created between 1927 and 1928, published the following year. This striking image is one of eight pochoirs that constitute the illustrated book, featuring poetic text by Lise Hirtz. The medium employed, pochoir, is a highly refined stencil-based technique that allows for the meticulous application of color, yielding the saturated, flat planes essential to Miró’s aesthetic during this period.

The work reflects the Spanish artist’s decisive shift toward abstraction in the late 1920s. During his time in Paris, Miró embraced the Surrealist pursuit of automatic drawing and simplified sign systems, moving away from conventional representation toward a vocabulary of biomorphic shapes. Plate (folio 8) features several such forms, rendered in bold primary and secondary colors that seem to float weightlessly against a neutral ground, suggestive of both childish spontaneity and sophisticated compositional balance.

The creation of Il était une petite pie underscores the avant-garde’s emphasis on collaboration between visual artists and poets. The illustrated book format allowed Miró to explore narrative concepts through sequential, graphic media. The high quality of the pochoir prints ensured that the edition retained the intensity of the original drawings, cementing the importance of Miró's graphic output. This piece is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where it serves as a critical example of both 20th-century illustrated books and the development of modern Spanish art.