Underrated Joan Miró Paintings That Deserve More Praise

Feature image: Joan Miró,  Landscape (The Hare) (Paysage [Le lièvre]), 1927

© 2023 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris via The Guggenheim Museum

Joan Miró is one of the great visionaries of modern art. His paintings combined elements of surrealism, abstraction, and symbolism into a language that was uniquely his own. While his most iconic works, such as The Farm, Harlequin’s Carnival, and his large-scale murals, remain fixtures in art history, Miró’s career was far richer and more complex. He constantly shifted his style, experimenting with figuration, dream imagery, and near-minimalist abstraction.

Because of this constant reinvention, many of Miró’s works exist in the margins of his reputation. They are overshadowed by the famous canvases that define him in surveys and textbooks, yet they often contain some of his most radical ideas. These paintings trace Miró’s transformation across decades, showing how he responded to personal, political, and artistic challenges.

Exploring these underrated works reveals an artist who never stood still. They reveal his humor, melancholy, and fascination with the mysteries of life and the cosmos. Together, they remind us that Miró’s greatness lies not only in the celebrated masterpieces but also in the hidden corners of his oeuvre.

Painted during his early years in Paris, The Table (Still Life with Rabbit) shows Miró’s keen observation and careful draftsmanship. A table is laid out with food and everyday objects, but the centerpiece is a rabbit that hangs unnervingly upside down. The attention to detail links this work to traditional still life, yet the strange composition already hints at his interest in dreamlike dislocation. The painting marks a bridge between realism and surrealism, a sign of Miró’s readiness to dismantle convention.

This painting has a childlike charm but also a surreal bite. A dog barks at a tiny crescent moon, the gap between them impossibly large. The simplicity of the scene underscores Miró’s fascination with absurdity and poetic contrast. It is both humorous and slightly tragic, a vision of yearning that cannot be fulfilled. Many scholars view this painting as Miró’s rejection of rational order and his embrace of the illogical. Despite this, it is often passed over in favor of more crowded and colorful works from the same decade.

The Spanish Civil War profoundly affected Miró, and Still Life with Old Shoe is one of his most striking responses. Everyday objects are placed on a table, yet the colors are fiery, acidic, and violent. The shoe appears distorted, while a fork juts out like a weapon. The painting is unsettling, an allegory of destruction conveyed through simple domestic forms. While Picasso’s Guernica dominates discussions of war and modernism, Miró’s canvas provides a more intimate yet equally powerful vision of conflict.

Miró frequently returned to motifs of women, birds, and celestial bodies, and in Women and Bird in the Moonlight, these forms achieve a lyrical balance. Reduced to curves, arcs, and scattered shapes, they create a cosmic conversation between the earthly and the divine. The painting speaks to Miró’s ongoing search for a universal language of symbols. While the imagery is delicate and poetic, it rarely receives the same attention as his large-scale commissions, though it captures his essence just as powerfully.

By the 1950s, Miró had moved toward an increasingly gestural and abstract approach. The Smile of the Wings demonstrates his fascination with movement and energy. Bright shapes float across the canvas like fragments of flight, evoking the freedom of imagination. The painting reads almost like visual poetry, with each form acting as a word in an abstract sentence. It is a joyful work that showcases Miró’s continued playfulness, yet it is often overlooked in comparison to his bold sculptural experiments of the same decade.

This monumental triptych, housed in the Centre Pompidou, is among Miró’s most daring works. Each canvas is dominated by a vast blue field punctuated by sparse marks. The effect is both meditative and cosmic, evoking an endless sense of space. At the time, these paintings were radical in their restraint, moving away from dense surrealist imagery toward a purity of color and gesture. While highly regarded in France, the triptych does not always appear in broader discussions of Miró, though it represents one of his most forward-looking contributions.

In his later years, Miró continued to distill his art down to its essence. This painting presents a stark white canvas with a few black marks, evoking both silence and possibility. The title suggests solitude, yet the composition feels liberating, as though the act of painting opened a path to transcendence. Works like this show Miró’s kinship with abstract expressionism and minimalism, and yet they are rarely highlighted in mainstream accounts. The restraint and clarity of this painting prove his continuing innovation.

Miró’s reputation as a playful surrealist is well earned, yet it tells only part of the story. His overlooked works reveal a painter who wrestled with darkness, experimented with form, and continually sought new modes of expression. By revisiting paintings such as Still Life with Old Shoe and Painting on a White Background for the Cell of a Recluse, we discover an artist who was both playful and profound. These underrated works remind us that Miró’s legacy is not confined to a handful of masterpieces, but rather in the restless and daring journey of his entire career.

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