Each August, the sky loosens its grip on light, scattering nights with the slow choreography of falling stars. People slip away from the city’s static, tilt their faces upward, and watch as stars trip and tumble through the night’s hush. While waiting for something to descend, they sketch with the mind’s pencil, tracing shapes and constellations. They search for the hunter, the bears, the queen enthroned.
Here is the quiet secret at the heart of it all: the shapes do not exist. The stars, flung across impossible distances, are strangers to one another. We are the ones who draw the lines, threading them together in the privacy of our own minds. A constellation is not something found in the sky, but something we inscribe upon it.
In January 1940, in a house on the Normandy coast, Joan Miró began drawing those lines for himself: twenty-three small paintings, the Constellations, spun out over twenty-one months as France unravelled. Critics call them an escape; Miró did too. But escape feels like the wrong shape for what unfolded on those sheets. He was not fleeing the world. He was mending the one fragment left within reach.
Twenty-Three Nights
At Varengeville-sur-Mer, in 1939, he said later, “began a new stage in my work which had its source in music and nature. It was about the time that the war broke out. I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music, and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings.”
The escape had a format. Sheets of paper of virtually identical size, about 38 by 46 centimetres, worked in gouache and oil wash, each one taking a month or more, taken up day after day, a few tiny stars and washes at a time. And each one dated, precisely, like a diary: the first, Sunrise, on 21 January 1940; the second, ten days later, The Escape Ladder. The ladder had been in his pictures since the beginning, leaning against the farmhouse in The Farm. Now it had work to do; it had to elevate the painter towards the sky.
He painted the tenth sheet on 14 May 1940. The German offensive in the west had opened four days earlier, and Normandy had begun to learn the sound of aircraft.
The Blank Sheets
The family fled: Pilar gripping their daughter’s hand, Miró with a portfolio tucked under his arm. Inside were the ten completed Constellations, and the blank sheets he hoped would become the rest. Picture him, one among a tide of refugees, carrying his own unpainted nights to safety, as if the papers were the family’s third child. They threaded through Paris, joined the great exodus south, and crossed into Spain, to Palma de Mallorca, his wife’s city.
The series records the escape in its own way. The tenth sheet is dated 14 May 1940, in Normandy; the eleventh, 4 September, in Palma. The four months of silence between the two dates are the flight.
In Palma he lived like a monk in hiding. “After lunch each day I would go to the cathedral to listen to the organ rehearsal,” he remembered. “I would sit there in that empty Gothic interior daydreaming, conjuring up forms.” Bach and Mozart entered the sheets, and so did the reading of those months: Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Mallarmé, Rimbaud. “It was an ascetic existence,” he said. “Only work.” The ladder climbed back into the pictures almost at once: the twelfth sheet, painted that October, is called On the 13th, the Ladder Brushed the Firmament. He finished the series at the family farm at Mont-roig, in Catalonia; the last sheet, The Passage of the Divine Bird, dated 12 September 1941.
Another Man’s Stairs
Six centuries earlier, another man had looked at the sky in the same way, from the wrong side of it. In 1302 Florence condemned Dante to exile, then threatened to be burnt if he ever returned. So he never did.
He wrote the entire Commedia displaced, on other people’s bread, and he knew exactly what that costs:
Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui.
You will learn how salty another man’s bread tastes.
E come è duro calle lo scendere e ‘l salir per l’altrui scale.
And how hard a road it is, the going down and the climbing up of another man’s stairs.
Another man’s stairs. Miró, marooned on his island, in a country he had already once abandoned, climbed them each day. At night, on paper, he painted his own ladder.
Dante, too, understood what hell is made of. He names it at the threshold: an air sanza stelle, without stars. From within hell, the sky is invisible; the punishment, distilled into two words. Here the two exiles diverge, and in that divergence lies the modern world. Dante looked up and read: his sky was a text already written, every sphere in its appointed place. Miró looked up and wrote the very webs of line in the Constellations. No one handed him an order of heaven, so he drew one. A constellation for Miró was a decision.
That is what these sheets are: not images of the sky, but decisions about it: twenty-three choices, made slowly, in hiding, while the world’s supposed order was being unmade by artillery.
The Exit Word
Dante ended all three parts of his poem on the same word.
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And then we came out, to see the stars again.
Puro e disposto a salire a le stelle:
Pure and ready to climb to the stars.
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle:
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
The three endings in sequence are a single instruction taking shape. First the stars are something you recover the sight of; then something you climb toward; and at the last they are the thing that has been moving you all along. Seeing again, climbing, being moved: hell, purgatory, paradise.
The Constellations repeat the sequence: begun by a man recovering the night sky from a war, continued up a ladder that brushed the firmament, finished under a divine bird.
In July 1944, twenty-two of the sheets sailed from Lisbon on a neutral Portuguese ship, and in January 1945, with the war still on, they were shown in New York, where they were received as the first message from Europe’s studios since France fell. Twenty-two, not twenty-three. The Morning Star never made the crossing, because Miró had given it to Pilar. One constellation stayed quietly at home, held back by the force Dante says moves all the others.
The stars are the possession of the dispossessed. Exile can take the ground, the bread, the stairs, everything that is under you; what is above you cannot be taken away. So go out, some night soon, while August is still shedding its lights, and catch a falling star if you can. Then stay a moment for the ones that do not fall, and draw the lines. It is the oldest thing we do with what we cannot reach.
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Absolutely fascinating. I loved reading this so much🤍
I found this story deeply moving. There is something so beautiful about Miró turning to the stars, music and imagination while the world around him was falling apart. It reminds me that even during the darkest moments, we can still create our own little space of beauty, hope and freedom.