Dragonfly with Red-Tipped Wings in Pursuit of a Serpent

A chase unfolds among floating faces, coloured patches and thin black curves in Joan Miró’s Dragonfly with Red-Tipped Wings in Pursuit of a Serpent. The painting often appears under the shortened German title Libelle mit roten Flügeln eine Schlange jagend. Its full title carries the action further: the serpent spirals towards a comet. Painted in 1951, this oil on canvas measures 81 × 100 cm and belongs to the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. ^[1]

The title offers a story, but the picture keeps that story wonderfully unsettled. A wing can resemble a pennant; a head can hover between animal and human; a curved line can describe both a creature and its passage through space. Following the chase means attending to these changes of identity as much as identifying its protagonists.

A Title That Sets the Picture Moving

The full title establishes three connected elements: a dragonfly, a serpent and a comet. It also supplies two different kinds of movement. The dragonfly pursues, while the serpent slides in a spiral. That distinction encourages the eye to alternate between the picture’s sharper, pointed forms and its wandering curves. The final destination lies beyond the two animals, extending an encounter between small earthly creatures into an imagined celestial space.

This elaborate naming belongs to the object itself. Successió Miró records an inscription on the back containing the artist’s name, the year 1951 and the long French title. It also records Miró’s signature at the lower left. The title is therefore more than a later description invented to explain an ambiguous image: it forms part of the painting’s documented identity. ^[2]

Yet the words do not turn the canvas into a straightforward illustration. They suggest relationships without assigning every mark a fixed role. Read the title, then look away from it for a moment: the field remains full of unexpected presences. Returning to the words changes the picture again, making loops seem more purposeful and pointed shapes more alert. The chase emerges through this exchange between language and looking.

Faces, Wings and Wandering Lines

A tall black form commands the left side. Its small face sits above a long, narrow opening, while fine curved filaments spring out around its head. The heavy black edges give it a planted, almost upright presence. Beside it, a tapered shape divided into red, yellow, blue, green and black compartments rises towards the upper edge. The two forms share a vertical emphasis, but their textures differ: the dark figure looks soft at its borders, while the coloured blade is more crisply partitioned.

Across the upper half, long black lines travel between rounded endpoints. Some sweep gently upwards; others sag, loop or reverse direction. Their delicacy becomes especially noticeable beside the dark horizontal form near the top centre. A few broad patches of colour anchor these otherwise weightless trajectories. Blue, yellow and red punctuate the field without establishing a continuous landscape.

The lower right introduces another face, pale blue within a dark arch. Small black marks are enough to suggest features, and curled lines extend from the surrounding form. Below it, a grid of coloured compartments echoes the divided shape at the left. This repeated patchwork provides a link between figures that otherwise seem to belong to different kinds of creature. The picture’s inhabitants share visual habits even when their bodies resist a common anatomy.

Several stars interrupt the curves with straight radiating strokes. One is small and spare near the centre; another has heavier, broader arms at the right. These variations matter. Miró does not scatter identical symbols across a neutral background. He changes their weight and scale, allowing one star to behave like a delicate crossing of threads and another to assert itself as a solid coloured presence.

A Surface with Different Speeds

The warm, uneven ground brings these scattered elements into contact. Its cloudy passages shift around the firmer forms, while the red surrounds of the circular patch and the lower-right head spread beyond clear outlines. Looking across the canvas, the eye encounters both crisp divisions and softened edges. The difference creates an impression of speed: a thin line can be followed quickly, but a dark, blurred patch makes the gaze hesitate.

The coloured compartments add a further rhythm. They call for short, successive movements from one unit to the next. The sweeping lines instead encourage a long, continuous glance. Meanwhile the tall left-hand form slows that movement through its weight and length. These competing invitations prevent the chase from becoming a simple arrow across the picture. The composition circulates, doubles back and gathers around its denser areas.

Oil on canvas is the medium confirmed by both the museum and the catalogue. ^[1][2] The visible variety should not be mistaken for evidence of additional materials. What can be observed is the contrast between different appearances of paint: broad dark masses, thin linear marks, colour enclosed by boundaries and colour allowed a more diffuse edge. Their coexistence gives the surface much of its animation.

The Painting’s Place around 1951

Miró was working with markedly different scales and pictorial densities around this time. In his 1959 MoMA study, James Thrall Soby discusses the Harvard Harkness Commons mural, painted during the winter of 1950–51, alongside nearby easel paintings. He stresses that the large commissions did not stop Miró producing smaller canvases with atmospheric grounds and fantastic figures. His account also places a densely populated painting, Birds, Figures, and Blue Star, beside a renewed exploration of collage in 1950. ^[3]

That context is useful for this canvas’s mixture of clarity and profusion. Its fine lines and scattered creatures occupy a much smaller field than a mural, yet the broad black vertical and separated zones of colour retain a strong presence across the rectangle. The painting rewards attention both to its overall balance and to small encounters within it.

Soby’s account does not establish that a particular commission caused this painting’s arrangement. It helps show the range of problems Miró was considering nearby: how to sustain large forms, how to connect fantastic beings and how to make an atmospheric field active. Here, those concerns meet within a compact pursuit whose participants repeatedly dissolve into marks.

Another Dragonfly, Seventeen Years Later

The related subject becomes remarkably sparse in Flight of the Dragonfly in Front of the Sun, painted in 1968 and held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. There, a large red oval occupies much of a blue-violet field. A small black dot and a thin waving line appear near its upper right, with white outlining around the principal elements. The later painting measures 173.9 × 243.8 cm, considerably larger than the Madrid canvas. ^[4]

The comparison reveals how flexibly Miró could treat a recurring creature. In 1951, the dragonfly belongs to an inhabited field with faces, stars, coloured compartments and several directional threads. In 1968, the title asks the viewer to discover its subject in a few isolated signs. The later work expands the surrounding space while reducing the number of incidents within it.

Neither picture requires the dragonfly’s wings and body to be described in naturalistic detail. But their different arrangements produce different experiences of flight: the earlier canvas suggests entanglement and pursuit, while the later one places a tiny presence beside an enormous expanse of colour. The shared subject makes that change especially easy to see.

From a Family Gift to the Museum Collection

The Reina Sofía credits the painting to Pilar Juncosa de Miró’s donation of 1986 and records 1992 as its year of entry. These are separate dates in the museum’s account, and neither changes the painting’s documented year of creation. ^[1]

Its public history also touches the Prado. The Reina Sofía’s leaflet for Miró en las colecciones del Estado, the exhibition held from October 1987 to January 1988, reproduces this composition and identifies it as one of the paintings then in the Prado’s holdings. The exhibition brought together paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints and illustrated books from the state collections. ^[5] Seen in that company, the canvas represented one part of a practice that moved across many media.

Today its long title remains an especially helpful invitation to look. The chase gives the crowded field a thread to follow, while the surrounding faces and stars keep opening alternative routes. The painting’s energy lies in that combination of direction and distraction: the serpent seems to have somewhere to go, but the viewer has many reasons to linger.