Painting 1936

This painting was made by Joan Miró, we don’t know exactly when, and as you can see, it’s a wild dance of shapes and colors. The process feels so open, like he’s letting the painting just happen, each mark leading to the next. Look at how the blacks and whites crash together. The paint isn’t overly thick, but there’s a real physicality to it, especially in the way the white kind of smears and feathers out. And then those thin, spidery lines that seem to skate across the surface, connecting everything, like little thought bubbles or pathways. Notice that shape over there, the one that looks like a ghostly face with an ‘X’ over it. Is it a face at all, or just a bunch of shapes that happened to land that way? That’s the beauty of Miró, isn’t it? You might see echoes of Klee in the way he uses simple forms to suggest deeper meanings. But Miró is really doing his own thing, inviting us to play along and find our own stories in the chaos.