The Harlequin’s Carnival

A small room boiling over with squiggles, single eyes and ears, drifting musical notes and half-animal sprites, painted, Miró said, out of the hallucinations his own hunger produced. The founding picture of Surrealism’s playful, automatist stream.

1. 1
   The moustached harlequin

   Center-left, a tall guitar-shaped figure standing upright, wearing the costume cues

   The traditional commedia-dell’arte Harlequin (the diamond-patterned clown of old Italian comedy) reimagined as a near-musical body. He wears a face split red on one side and blue on the other, a diamond-patterned tunic, a curling moustache, and smokes a pipe; some accounts add a small admiral’s hat. There is a dark hole in his belly, commonly read as a sign of Miró’s own hunger and poverty in this period. The costume cues are on the canvas; the belly-hole-as-hunger is a reading the museum offers, not a label painted on it.
2. 2
   The ladder with an eye and an ear

   Left side, a ladder standing on its own

   A ladder that is also a creature: it carries a single eye and a single ear, an everyday object given sense organs. The ladder is a motif Miró returned to again and again, usually read as a sign of flight, escape, or climbing toward something. Here it stands and looks back at you, which is exactly the kind of impossible aliveness the whole room runs on.
3. 3
   The cat and the ball of yarn

   Lower right, a cat-like creature playing with a round, threaded shape

   A cat-like sprite bats at what looks like a ball of wool or yarn. Miró’s own writing about the painting talks about a ball of yarn and cats, so the motif is his, not a museum invention, though the exact wording of that passage wobbles between sources and is best treated as a vivid description rather than a fixed quote. On the canvas: a cat, and something round it is playing with.
4. 4
   Musical notes in the air

   Drifting through the upper and central room

   Small black musical notes float free in the room. The museum describes the revelers “playing, singing, dancing, and celebrating, with music literally in the air,” and the notes are the literal sign of that: the whole scene is a noisy carnival of sound, a party you are meant to half-hear.
5. 5
   The window with the black triangle and globe

   Upper right, an opening onto a sky

   An opening reads as a window onto a small patch of sky. Inside it sit a dark triangle and a round dark sphere or globe. The triangle is often read as the Eiffel Tower (a nod to the Paris setting) and the sphere as the world or the globe, but those are the standard interpretations rather than facts the museum states, so hold them as “commonly read as,” not as caption.
6. 6
   The swarm of small creatures

   Filling the rest of the room, top to bottom

   Every remaining inch teems with small hybrid sprites: half-animal, half-human, half-object shapes, plus insects, fish, and winged beings, all playing and singing and dancing. The museum calls them hybrid creatures with the characteristics of both humans and animals. This biomorphic crowd (biomorphic meaning soft, rounded, organic, life-like shapes) is the carnival itself.