Joan Miró
Spanish (Barcelona, Spain, 1893 - 1983, Palma de Mallorca, Spain)Peinture (Painting) [formerly Dark Brown and White Oval]
From 1925 through 1927 Miró painted his "magnetic fields": spare, monochromatic canvases inhabited by simple and often whimsical biomorphic shapes.
The lone form in this work beams across the empty, hazy space of the picture. The only spatial definition is provided by a dotted line, which connects one edge to the form and then extends upward. Spontaneous and intuitive, the smiling shape is tenuously tied to a rectangular base, its glazed grin lit by the half-shadowed moon.
The dreamlike atmosphere is a dramatic departure from Cubism into a world defined only by the imagination.
Keywords
faces, smiling, circles, dots, Surrealism
From June 3, 2013, through early 2016, SFMOMA's building on Third Street in San Francisco will be temporarily closed for expansion construction. Selected artworks in our collection are included in a range of off-site exhibitions during this period. We regret that the remainder of the collection will not be available for study during this time.
In the meantime, we invite you to explore a wide selection of our collection online. Please note that the information presented online is subject to revision. Please contact us at collections@sfmoma.org to verify artwork details.
This resource is for educational use and its contents may not be reproduced without permission. Please review our Terms of Use for more information.















![Peinture (Painting) [formerly Dark Brown and White Oval]](/images/artwork/large/80.428_01_d02.jpg)