Landscape with Rooster

Joan Miró painted this bare stretch of land in 1927, during a stretch of years when he stripped his canvases down to almost nothing. A wide field of ochre meets a solid block of blue sky, and floating across this empty space are a handful of odd little characters: a rooster with a spiky crest perched on a black box on the right, a fish gliding through the sky on the left, and a mysterious dark wheel that looks like it belongs to some invisible machine. The thin lines crossing the field could be a ladder, a fence, or nothing at all. Miró liked to leave those choices up to us.

These wide, dreamlike landscapes came out of Miró's time in Paris, where he mixed with the Surrealists and let his imagination run loose. He grew up on a farm in Catalonia, and even his strangest paintings often circle back to the countryside, its animals, and its wide-open feeling. Rather than paint what a place actually looked like, he tried to capture the feeling of it using just a few signs and shapes. The playful spots and pebbles scattered along the ground give the whole thing a sense of humor, as if the land itself were doodled by someone having a good day.