“I really feel like diving into the turmoil of New York,” Joan Miró stated in 1947. The Barcelona-born artist (1893-1983) was enamoured by the US metropolis, by the turbulence of the subway, the luminous skyscrapers. He resolved to go to, to be “in direct, private contact” with the concepts stirring there. “My work will profit from that shock,” he added.
The after-effects of his journey to the US will probably be on present in Miró and america on the Phillips Assortment in Washington, DC. Work and sculpture, works on paper, and movies by the Catalan will probably be proven alongside items by his US contemporaries, amongst them Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Alexander Calder and Barnett Newman. The exhibition, which debuted final 12 months on the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona to mark its fiftieth anniversary, is the primary in-depth research of Miró’s engagement with US artists. The present attracts out these crosscurrents, the keenness of these “releasing themselves, pushing the boundaries” of post-war artwork, says Elsa Smithgall, the chief curator on the Phillips Assortment. “There’s a lot vitality on this second.”
US artist Alexander Calder’s Portrait of Joan Miró (1930) © 2026 Calder Basis, New York; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Miró seized on that second, portray and sculpting restlessly. In his photos, pencil-thin tendrils dip and whirl, jaundiced eyes float in opposition to grounds of ochre and powder blue. From his compositions, he sought poetry, a delicacy of contact, “a world of actual unreality”. His imaginative and prescient caught on. By the Nineteen Forties, Miró was established on either side of the Atlantic, with a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Trendy Artwork and commissions throughout the US.
Altering the face of artwork
Krasner stated she was “mad for Miró”, every portray “somewhat miracle”. Particularly charming for her and others was Miró’s gouache Constellations collection (a print model will probably be within the present). Miró was a pioneer, Newman famous, whose compositions “will change the face of artwork for a few years to come back”.
Miró noticed within the US a pulsating spirit, an power he may inflect in his photos. In 1952, he went to a present of Pollock’s black-and-white work that “confirmed me a course I needed to take, however which as much as then had remained on the stage of an unfulfilled want”. Pollock, in flip, admired Miró greater than every other artist, save Picasso. “That’s the fantastic thing about artwork,” Smithgall says, how one attracts from and reimagines one other’s compositions, arriving at one thing new.
Miró exchanged work with Frankenthaler, whose vermillion-stained Canyon (1965) is among the many present’s highlights, and with Calder, whose spidery portrait of Miró, on view right here, hints at a lifelong friendship. For US artists, Miró embodied “a liberating means”, Smithgall says, a method of “expressing these intangible emotions by means of line, by means of fields of color”
• Miró and america, Phillips Assortment, Washington, DC, 21 March-5 July
