Untitled, from Le Lezard aux plumes d'or [The Lizard with the Golden Feathers]

Joan Miró’s search for an intuitive form of artmaking drew him first to the “anti-art” Dada movement, an important forerunner of Surrealism, before he signed the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1924. His imaginative, spontaneous compositions featured bright colors, biomorphic forms, sinuous lines, and playful motifs such as moons and kites. In later years, organic forms gave way to more gestural brushstrokes, as seen here. Miró explained his internally driven creative process: “I work like a gardener or a winemaker. Things come slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for example, I didn’t discover it all at once. It formed itself almost in spite of me.”