A starving painter in a Surrealist Paris

In the winter of 1924 a young Catalan painter named Joan Miró (1893–1983; the surname is roughly “mee-ROH”) was living in Paris, and he was hungry. Not metaphorically. He had come up from Barcelona, splitting these years between Paris and his family’s farm at Mont-roig in Catalonia, where the landscape and folk vocabulary he was steadily inventing took shape; and he was poor enough in these Paris years that, by the account the holding museum gives, he could once feed a dinner guest only a plate of radishes. That fact climbs straight into the painting, hole and all.

He had also walked into the middle of something. Paris in 1924 was the birthplace of Surrealism, an art and literary movement that had just been given its founding document. In 1924 the poet André Breton (1896–1966), the movement’s organizer and chief theorist, published the first Manifesto of Surrealism. It argued that the truest material for art was not the visible world but the unconscious: dreams, free association, and above all automatism, the practice of letting your hand make marks, or your pen write words, without a conscious plan steering it, so that whatever was underneath could surface on its own.

Miró never formally joined Breton’s circle, but he was at its center in a more literal way than that sounds: his Paris studio was on the rue Blomet, next door to the painter André Masson, and Masson’s studio was the room where the writers and painters who became Surrealism gathered (Masson, Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, and the rest). Miró and Masson, drawing without a plan, are often credited with starting Surrealism as a way of painting, not just writing. The picture Miró made across 1924 and 1925 became one of the touchstone works of that early Surrealism, widely counted among his greatest. Its title is The Harlequin’s Carnival (in French, Carnaval d’Arlequin; the museum that owns it titles it Carnival of Harlequin, and all three are the same picture). A harlequin is the diamond-patterned clown of old Italian street comedy, and a carnivalis a riot of costume and noise, so the title alone promises a party. What Miró delivered is a small room so crammed with dancing, half-alive shapes that it looks like the inside of a dream having a party with itself.

Two things, then, are sitting in the room with him as he begins: a brand-new theory that says paint what rises from the unconscious, and a body that has not had enough to eat.