Joan Miró said that The Birth of the World depicts “a sort of genesis”—the amorphous beginnings of life. To make this work, Miró poured, brushed, and flung paint on an unevenly primed canvas so that the paint soaked in some areas and rested on top in others. Atop this relatively uncontrolled application of paint, he added lines and shapes he had previously planned in studies. The bird or kite, shooting star, balloon, and figure with white head may all seem somehow familiar, yet their association is illogical.
Describing his method, Miró said, “Rather than setting out to paint something I began painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush.… The first stage is free, unconscious. But, he continued, “The second stage is carefully calculated.” The Birth of the World reflects this blend of spontaneity and deliberation.
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
Miró painted this towering canvas in summer or fall of 1925 at his family’s farm in Montroig, a small village nestled between the mountains and coast of his native Catalonia. He was buoyed by the success of his recent exhibition in Paris, where he had been feted by many of the young poets and painters associated with the Surrealist movement. Their signatures emblazoned his exhibition’s invitation, claiming Miró as one of their own. The question after he returned to Spain was what he would do next. The Birth of the World is one of his answers.
With this work, Miró went, to quote a favorite Surrealist dictum, “beyond painting,” with “painting” understood to be his own past work and Western artistic tradition. He jettisoned the rules of perspective that painters had used since the Renaissance to construct illusionistic pictorial space, and instead he covered the ground of his vast canvas with an astonishing variety of abstract painterly incidents: spatters, smears, stains, drips, cascades, bursts, smudges, explosions, spurts, and diaphanous washes vie for attention with a series of minimal motifs that are as much drawn as painted. The result was a new and radically unconstrained form of painting that Miró would later describe as “a sort of genesis,” and that his Surrealist poet friends titled The Birth of the World.
Kids label from 2025
Can you find a kite, a shooting star, and a balloon?
What other shapes do you see? Joan Miró poured, brushed, and flung paint to make this work, leaving some of these marks up to chance. On top of the uneven layer of paint, he added lines and shapes. Notice how the paint seems to soak into the canvas in some places and rest on the surface in others.
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The artist
René Gaffé (1887-1968), Brussels and Cagnes-sur-Mer. Acquired from the artist c. 1926 - 1968
Jane Gaffé (Jane Labie, Mrs René Gaffé), Cagnes-sur-Mer. Inherited from her husband, November 1968 - 1972
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased from Mrs. René Gaffé, Cagnes-sur-Mer, October 1972
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Joan Miró
Spanish, 1893–1983 487 works onlineJoan Miró’s painting The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) brings together the real and the imaginary, abstraction and figuration, and image and text in a way that would characterize much of his work to come.
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Automatism
Strategies of writing or creating art that aimed to access the unconscious mind. The Surrealists, in particular, experimented with automatist techniques of writing, drawing, and painting.
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A Surreal Lens
Gallery 517In 1924, André Breton published his Manifesto of Surrealism, which, guided by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, declared a radical break from the rationalism of modern society in favor of imagination, erotic desire, and unconscious thought.
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