An Invitation into Joan Miró’s Imagination

This is exactly the feeling evoked in the exhibition Miró and the United States, now at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. The works’ buoyant exuberance is intoxicating; viewers will find themselves laughing out loud with delight as the show invites them into Miró’s lively, playful imagination. It is no wonder that he influenced so many artists of that time, coming out of the Cubist era and two World Wars. Miró cracked open the compact geometry of the art world, infusing post-war artists with new and exciting energy. Robert Motherwell said, “He was so original that hardly anyone has any conception how original; it immediately strikes us to the depth.”

The Phillips’ show graces viewers with 75 works of art, including works by 30 American artists who were under Miró’s spell. Paintings, sculptures, works on paper, films, and archival material all come together in an exhilarating display. Artists included in the exhibit are Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, along with Miró’s great friend, Alexander Calder—a Miró in three-dimensional flight. One can readily see Miró in all of these works. 

While ascending the wide, curving staircase into the show, there are four Miró sculptures, along with a wire portrait of Miró and a floating mobile by Calder. Lift off! Painting after painting holds the same buoyant charm of color, line, and shape. Each exudes spontaneity and a love of exploration. Louise Bourgeois wrote, “He was a prolific workaholic.” In Miró’s lifetime, he produced some 2000 paintings, 500 sculptures, 400 ceramics, 5000 drawings, and 1000 lithographs. Many of his sculptures are made with things he found on the beach. At 82, he started painting with his fingers. He died at the age of 90, still creating.

Woman and Birds at Sunrise, 1946, oil on canvas, has an ethereal blue background with a large white water stain. Suspended in the watery blue are thin black lines, like wire of the woman—breasts, three-toed feet, sprouting wings, a dangling penis-shape for an arm and hand, a dark crimson sun, one yellow and red eye at the center, little creatures sprinkled here and there. The earlier 1927 Painting (Fratellini) is solid cobalt blue with his signature bright red and yellow shapes hovering near the edges of the canvas.

Contrast these works with Perle Fine’s Polyphonic, 1945, oil on canvas, with the solid background and dancing shapes; Adolph Gottlieb’s 1948 oil, Vigil, with its hieroglyphic faces and signs; Louise Nevelson’s fanciful, painted terracotta Archaic Figure with a Star on Her Head from 1949-50; and Rothko’s Untitled, 1945, with his blobs and glyphs morphing around the canvas. All the work in the show, deftly curated by Elsa Smithgall, Chief Curator at the Phillips Collection, clearly shows Miró’s mark. Lee Krasner said she was “mad for Miró…his painterliness. There was no separation between idea and painting… Each painting is a little miracle.” 

Miró and the United States brings us a fantastical world filled with movement, a joyous imagination, and skillful execution. If you go, plan to spend the day. There is so much to see.