Between 1948 and 1967 Joan Miró (1893-1983), one of the greatest modern artists of all time, made seven trips to the U.S. from his home in Spain, and it was his influence on 30 American artists between the 1940s and 1960s and their influence on him which is the focus of the latest Phillips Collection exhibition, “Miró and the United States.”
It’s a big show of 75 works, paintings, sculpture, films and more by Miró and his fellow artists whose creations display their effects upon modern art around the world.
For some of the art, it’s a public debut; many are on loan from major institutions.
Not that Miró ever wanted to be labeled a Surrealist, but with a fading Dada movement, he became Surrealism’s informal leader whose works some say include elements of Fauvism and Expressionism, movements which associated artists helped usher in.
He began drawing classes at age seven in a private school at a medieval mansion and he was only 25 when he had his first solo show which did not go well. Some made fun of him and defaced his art.
Throughout his life, Miró frequently experienced depression, the first time when he was 18, some of the illness which may have been prompted by the business school he attended at the same time that he attended art school, and later, when he worked in the business world.
Art rescued him.
Miró excelled at dream interpretations and the portrayal of the unconscious, resisting conventions and bourgeois society, favoring instead, upending them on paper.
In the U.S. Marcel Duchamp and collectors included Miró’s “Somersault” at a Brooklyn Museum show in 1926, which added to Miró’s European allure, the painting on view at the Phillips.
A smaller reproduction of the mural Miró made for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati in1947 welcomes visitors to the exhibition.
It was his first visit to the U.S, his first commission in the U.S. for the first hotel in the postwar era, the first hotel to have elevators without operators in them, rooms with individual temperature controls and sofas that would convert to beds at the push of a button.
(Today the hotel rests in a sad state, owned by a developer after it fell into disrepair and was one of 11 on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places for 2020.)
For the Texas Commerce Bank in Houston, the architect, I.M. Pei chose Miró to design a sculpture, installed in 1982, the artist’s largest public monument in the U.S., a cast found in the Phillips’s stairwell.
“His work is a celebration of life,” The Phillips quotes Pei.
In 1944 Jackson Pollock (with art in the Phillips’s show) called Miró and Picasso “the two artists I admire most,” and Miró later noted: “It was really American painting that inspired me.”
The other artists featured with Miró at the Phillips are Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Jeanne Reynal, Len Lye, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Janet Sobel and 21 more.
The Fundació Joan Miró in his hometown of Barcelona organized the exhibition with the Phillips, which is the only venue in the U.S. to see this Miró.
An almost 300 page catalogue with 260 illustrations is for sale in the gift shop for $65.
The museum hosts several related events for the show:
May 21, 2026, 6:30 p.m. A panel discussion, “Miró and the United States” (on a third Thursday with free admission from 5 – 8 p.m. with required reservations)
May 29, 12 – 1 p.m., “Miró and Poetry with Paul Jaskunas”
June 13, 12 – 1 p.m., “The Phillips Plays: Abstract Collage,” good for families
Every Thursday through Sunday at 1 p.m., a “spotlight talk” on one work from the exhibition.
Admission is $20, adults; $15, seniors; $12, military; $10, students and educators with I.D and no charge for anyone 18 and under or for members.
Several discounts make admission at the Phillips more affordable: Pay what you can after 4 p.m. daily, and on the third Thursday of every month, the museum has extended hours until 8 p.m. with free admission beginning at 5 p.m.
Regular operating hours are Sunday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Tuesday – Saturday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Special events will close some or all of the Phillips on May 6, 7 and 8.
1600 21st St., NW, Washington, D.C. 20009. Ph.: 202 387-2151
