Blue I

A field of deep blue fills nearly the entire canvas, broken by a scattering of small black shapes that drift across it like specks caught in water. One bright red mark sits near the top left, curved like a comma or a small boat, and a thin black line trails down the right side. This is Joan Miró's "Blue I," painted in 1961 as the first of three large blue canvases he made together. The trio marks a big shift for the Spanish artist, who spent much of his career filling paintings with playful creatures, stars, and swirling forms.

Miró wanted these works to feel almost empty, and he thought about them for a long time before ever touching the canvas. He compared the process to the discipline of a Japanese archer, who prepares slowly and then releases the arrow in a single motion. The result belongs to a stripped-back, meditative side of abstract art, where the blue itself does most of the work and the black dots ask you to slow your eye and follow them across the space. The three Blue paintings usually hang side by side at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where visitors can see how the rhythm of marks changes from one to the next.