Le Lézard aux plumes d'or (The Lizard with Golden Feathers) is one of Joan Miró’s most important illustrated books (livres d’artistes) of the 1960s and 70s. Consisting of 15 lithographs built around his 1948 poetic text imagining the various forms and spaces lizards might exist in. This elaborate project explores the ancient mythology of metamorphosis evoked by the animal’s transformative ability to regenerate their own limbs. The mystic interest surrounding lizards dates back to classic antiquity, and Miró’s lithographs continue this narrative in highly imaginative scenes, where he portrays the lizard transforming and transgressing across space and time – coming out of a wall, orbiting the sun, morphing into a harp, or being carried by a seer. He oversaw the entirety of the project, making and combining every element of the portfolio into something highly intentional and meaningful.

There had been an earlier version of 18 lithographs made in 1967 that printer Fernand Mourlot and publisher Louis Broder determined with Miró to have flawed paper; as a result, what had been done for this edition was destroyed. Since the zinc plates had also been erased, Miro completely redrew new images, with the printing and assembly finally finished in 1971.

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”
—Joan Miró

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Each lithograph is characterized by Miro’s use of the color black, which often makes up a third of the compositions and are accompanied by abstracted red, green, blue, and yellow forms. While some of the images share similar compositions made of contained forms dictated by black outlines, others in the series diverge from this appearance with more rudimentary and ephemeral mark making, appearing splotchy like the scribbles a child would make with crayons. Here, the artist abolishes the distinctions between calligraphy and spontaneity with his writing which accompanies the images, stylistically coalescing into a baroque design.ⁱⁱ The final few texts become completely deconstructed, with words being reduced to their simplest, most fundamental forms made by the human hand, thus transforming along with Miró’s lizard.

 “What is first perceived as a unit is apt to dissolve into parts after we discover them in other pictures” 

—Nicolas and Elena Calas, on Joan Miró

ⁱJoan Miró and Margit Rowell, Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, trans. Paul Auster and Patricia Mathews, 1986
ⁱⁱ Nicolas and Elena Calas, “Preface,” in Joan Miró Lithographs IV, 1981, p. 16