Hunger, a trance, and a carefully built picture

Miró himself was at pains to correct the easy story. That story is that this is a painted dream, the unconscious transcribed while he slept. That is not what he said. By his own account the strange creatures came from hallucinations brought on by hunger, the way a starving person can begin to see things that are not there, and he was careful to separate that from the dream-painting Breton’s group prized. The line the museum quotes is the clearest statement he left about how this picture came to be:

“I tried to capture the hallucinations that my hunger produced in me. It’s not that I painted what I saw in my dreams, as Breton and his lot predicated in those days, but that hunger provoked in me a sort of trance.”

Joan Miró, on The Harlequin’s Carnival, as quoted in the Buffalo AKG account of the work.

The line does two jobs at once. It ties the boiling imagery directly to his empty stomach, and it gently shoves away from Breton’s pure dream-painting. He described coming home at the end of a foodless day and, “in a kind of trance,” drawing the forms that became the picture. So the source of the imagery is real, bodily hunger, not a remembered dream.

Now the second correction, which matters just as much. The picture looks like pure automatism, like marks that spilled out unplanned, and that look is exactly why it’s a Surrealist icon. But Miró was equally clear that the canvas itself was deliberately built and revised, not poured out in one unguided rush. In another statement the museum records, he described a planned, considered process:

“After long meditation on what I proposed to do, I began to paint, and as I painted I introduced all the changes I believed to be appropriate.”

Held apart, the two halves give the whole truth of how it was made. The hallucinations of hunger supplied the cast of creatures; the execution was meditated on at length and adjusted as he went. The spontaneous, automatist surface is partly a constructed effect, a careful arrangement made to feel like an accident. That is a much better picture of the artist than the legend of a man hallucinating onto a canvas: hunger lit the imagery, and a disciplined hand laid it down. None of which means he literally starved at the easel, or that the whole picture is an unmediated vision. He was poor, he was hungry, that hunger was the well he drew the imagery from, and the painting on top of it he composed.