“I feel like diving into the turmoil of New York,” Joan Miró said in 1947. The Barcelona-born artist (1893-1983) was enamoured by the US city, by the turbulence of the subway, the luminous skyscrapers. He resolved to visit, to be “in direct, personal contact” with the ideas stirring there. “My work will benefit from that shock,” he added.
The after-effects of his travel to the US will be on show in Miró and the United States at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Paintings and sculpture, works on paper, and films by the Catalan will be shown alongside pieces by his US contemporaries, among them Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Alexander Calder and Barnett Newman. The exhibition, which debuted last year at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona to mark its 50th anniversary, is the first in-depth study of Miró’s engagement with US artists. The show draws out those crosscurrents, the fervour of those “freeing themselves, pushing the boundaries” of post-war art, says Elsa Smithgall, the chief curator at the Phillips Collection. “There’s so much vitality in this moment.”
US artist Alexander Calder’s Portrait of Joan Miró (1930) © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Miró seized on that moment, painting and sculpting restlessly. In his pictures, pencil-thin tendrils dip and whirl, jaundiced eyes float against grounds of ochre and powder blue. From his compositions, he sought poetry, a delicacy of touch, “a world of real unreality”. His vision caught on. By the 1940s, Miró was established on both sides of the Atlantic, with a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and commissions across the US.
Changing the face of art
Krasner said she was “mad for Miró”, each painting “a little miracle”. Especially captivating for her and others was Miró’s gouache Constellations series (a print version will be in the show). Miró was a pioneer, Newman noted, whose compositions “will change the face of art for many years to come”.
Miró saw in the US a pulsating spirit, an energy he could inflect in his pictures. In 1952, he went to a show of Pollock’s black-and-white paintings that “showed me a direction I wanted to take, but which up to then had remained at the stage of an unfulfilled desire”. Pollock, in turn, admired Miró more than any other artist, save Picasso. “That’s the beauty of art,” Smithgall says, how one draws from and reimagines another’s compositions, arriving at something new.
Miró exchanged work with Frankenthaler, whose vermillion-stained Canyon (1965) is among the show’s highlights, and with Calder, whose spidery portrait of Miró, on view here, hints at a lifelong friendship. For US artists, Miró embodied “a liberating way”, Smithgall says, a means of “expressing those intangible feelings through line, through fields of colour”
• Miró and the United States, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 21 March-5 July
