Painting

Set against a warm, earthy brown ground, this work by the Spanish artist Joan Miró plays with a handful of strange, floating shapes. A large outlined form on the left suggests a face, complete with a bright yellow nose, a dark eyebrow, and a single red eye. Nearby, two long tapering black shapes cross like giant paddles or blades, while on the right side rounded forms in black, red, and yellow curve like little arcs or rainbows. The bits of white plaster and rough texture in the background make the whole thing feel almost like a wall someone has been painting over for years.

Miró made this in the 1930s, a period when he pushed toward a kind of stripped-down, dreamlike language of signs. He was tied to the Surrealist movement, and like his fellow Surrealists he wanted his images to come from the imagination rather than the real world. Rather than naming his pictures, he often just called them "Painting", leaving us free to read the shapes however we like. The pull here is between the childlike simplicity of the forms and the careful way they are balanced across the surface, each shape given room to breathe against the plain brown field.