Snobbish Soiree at the Princess's House

Painted in 1944, this playful scene comes from Joan Miró, the Spanish artist who spent his life turning painting into something closer to a game. The title tells you it is a fancy party at a princess's house, but good luck finding the guests dressed in their finery. Instead, Miró gives us floating red ovals, wobbly stars, dots that could be eyes, and thin black lines that dance across a pale green background. These strange shapes are his way of drawing people and creatures, boiled down to their simplest form. The joke seems to be that the snobbish partygoers, for all their airs, end up looking like funny little cartoon beings.

Miró worked in a style tied to Surrealism, which was all about tapping into dreams, memory, and the imagination rather than copying real life. He often said he wanted to paint the way a child sees the world, free from rules. Look for the red star near the top and the fish-shaped figure below it with three round eyes stacked together. Miró made this during World War II, a grim time, and works like this show him escaping into a bright, whimsical universe of his own invention. It is less a picture to figure out than one to enjoy for its color and its odd sense of humor.