A picture used to obey the world
To feel why this little room mattered, set it beside what came before. For centuries a painting organized itself around recognizable things in real space. A still life was a table with nameable objects (a jug, a loaf, a lemon) sitting where you could imagine reaching for them. A history painting set real figures in a real room. Even Cubism, the radical movement just before this one, fractured and re-faceted real things: it broke a guitar or a bottle or a person into planes, but you were still meant to reassemble a guitar. The picture, however strangely, still answered to the seen world. It obeyed.
An invented vocabulary that answers to nothing on a table
Miró cut that cord. In The Harlequin’s Carnival there is no observed scene underneath the shapes, no still life on a table that the squiggles are a stylized version of. He floats an invented vocabulary: squiggles, dots, single eyes and ears, ladders that look back at you, notes drifting in the air, half-animal sprites, a wholly biomorphic cast that corresponds to nothing you could photograph. The forms come from inside, from the hunger-hallucinations and the unconscious the Surrealists prized, not from a motif arranged on a tabletop. And the real-world rules of space go with the still life: nothing has proper weight, nothing casts a settling shadow, objects are alive and the room ignores gravity.
That is the break. Painting stops depicting the seen world and starts staging the unconscious as a populated little universe, a room you could never walk into because it never existed anywhere but in a hungry man’s head. It swaps the sober academic still life, objects sitting obediently on a table, for a playful, weightless Surrealist worldwhere a ladder has an ear and the music is visible. The grim, fevered dream-paintings of some other Surrealists pushed the unconscious toward menace; Miró pushed it toward a nursery-bright party. Either way the move underneath is the same one, and this is one of the pictures that made it: a canvas that answers to no scene, only to what was rising from below.