How a Paris dream-room reached Buffalo

The painting Miró built out of his hunger has had a quiet, lucky afterlife: it found one home early and stayed there. In 1940, only fifteen years after it was finished, it crossed the Atlantic and entered an American museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York (renamed the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2023). It has been there ever since. The earlier chain of Paris dealers and collectors who handled it in the 1920s and 1930s is not nailed down in the records used here, so it is better left blank than guessed at; what is documented is the moment it reached Buffalo.

And the way it got there is itself a small piece of art history. The museum bought it through its Room of Contemporary Art Fund (its accession number, the museum’s catalogue tag, is RCA1940:8). The Room of Contemporary Art was an unusually forward-looking program for an American museum in 1940, an endowment set up specifically to buy the work of livingmodern artists at a time when most institutions still waited for an artist to be safely dead and canonical. Miró was very much alive (he would live until 1983), and a teeming Surrealist dream-room was exactly the kind of risk the fund existed to take.

Time has been kind to that bet. The Harlequin’s Carnivalis now held up as one of the touchstone paintings of early Surrealism and among the greatest things Miró ever made, the picture where his lifelong vocabulary of squiggles, single eyes, ladders, and biomorphic sprites first arrived in full. The cast of little creatures he assembled in that cold, hungry Paris room would populate his work for the next half-century. It just moved to a wall in Buffalo, where you can still stand in front of it, small as it is, and hear the music in the air.