Miró’s New York “Shock” Comes to Washington in a Phillips Collection Exhibition
Joan Miró arrived in the United States looking for impact. “I feel like diving into the turmoil of New York,” the Barcelona-born artist Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983) said in 1947, drawn to the city’s subway churn and the glare of its skyscrapers. He wanted, he explained, to be “in direct, personal contact” with the ideas circulating there. “My work will benefit from that shock.”
That jolt — and the artistic crosscurrents it set in motion — is the subject of “Miró and the United States,” opening at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, on March 21 and running through July 5. Bringing together paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and film, the exhibition places Miró’s work in dialogue with key American contemporaries including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Alexander Calder, and Barnett Newman.
The show debuted last year at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona as part of the institution’s 50th-anniversary program. In Washington, it arrives as the first in-depth museum study devoted to Miró’s engagement with American artists, tracing how influence moved in both directions during the postwar period.
Elsa Smithgall, chief curator at The Phillips Collection, frames the exhibition as a portrait of a moment when artists on both sides of the Atlantic were testing the limits of form and feeling. The period’s charge, she suggests, lies in the sense of makers “freeing themselves, pushing the boundaries” of postwar art. “There’s so much vitality in this moment,” she says.
Miró’s own work from these years carries that restlessness. His lines can appear hair-thin and searching, dipping and looping across fields of ochre and powder blue; eyes, at once comic and disquieting, hover like signals. He pursued what he called “a world of real unreality,” aiming for poetry and a delicacy of touch even as his compositions flirted with rupture.
By the 1940s, Miró’s reputation was firmly transatlantic. He had already been the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and had secured commissions across the United States — a level of institutional and public visibility that helped make his language of signs, stains, and floating forms newly legible to American painters searching for alternatives to European tradition.
American artists did not hide their admiration. Krasner, the exhibition notes, described herself as “mad for Miró,” calling each painting “a little miracle.” Among the most magnetic works for her circle was Miró’s “Constellations” series in gouache; a print version will be included in the Phillips presentation. Newman, for his part, cast Miró as a pioneer whose compositions “will change the face of art for many years to come.”
The exchange was not one-sided. Miró saw in the United States a “pulsating spirit” he could fold into his own practice. In 1952, he attended an exhibition of Pollock’s black-and-white paintings and later said it “showed me a direction I wanted to take, but which up to then had remained at the stage of an unfulfilled desire.” Pollock, meanwhile, admired Miró above nearly all others, second only to Pablo Picasso.
“Miró and the United States” also follows the relationships that became personal as well as aesthetic. Miró exchanged works with Frankenthaler, and the exhibition highlights her “Canyon” (1965), a vermillion-stained painting that underscores how color-field experimentation could carry emotional heat without traditional figuration. Calder appears not only as a fellow modernist but as a friend: his spidery portrait of Miró, included in the show, points to a connection that endured.
Taken together, the exhibition argues for Miró as both catalyst and collaborator — an artist whose lines and chromatic fields offered American painters a “liberating way,” as Smithgall puts it, to translate “intangible feelings” into form. In Washington, that story is told not as a tidy lineage, but as a set of charged encounters: artists looking hard at one another’s work, borrowing, resisting, and returning to the studio with new permission.
“Miró and the United States” is on view at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, March 21–July 5.
