The Phillips Collection is pleased to present Miró and the United States, a major traveling exhibition organized in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. This groundbreaking exhibition recounts a little-known yet decisive period of transatlantic exchange between Joan Miró and American artists, revealing how the United States informed his artistic development and influenced post-war art on both sides of the Atlantic. For Miró, the United States represented more than just geography—it offered expansive horizons, new audiences, and the possibility of creative freedom. Assembling significant loans and notable first-time showings, the exhibition stages rare juxtapositions that foreground the generative impact of these cross-cultural encounters, revealing how Miró and his American contemporaries mutually influenced one another and advanced new artistic directions.
First shown at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, the exhibition opens in Washington, DC, on March 21, 2026, and runs through July 5, 2026.
While Miró’s relationship with France and his native Spain is well-documented, Miró and the United States centers the US as a key point of contact in the artist’s career. An established international figure by the 1940s, Miró engaged in the US with new ideas, large-scale projects, public commissions, and an influential network of American artists, institutions, and collectors. His partnership with his longtime dealer Pierre Matisse, his seven visits to the United States between 1947 and 1968, and two retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1941 and 1959) all proved instrumental. Coming from a Spain devastated by the Franco dictatorship, the United States represented for Miró not only a creative frontier but also a landscape of hope, democracy, innovation, and endless possibilities.
“Presenting this exhibition in Washington, DC, underscores art’s role in fostering cross-cultural exchange and affirms the Phillips as a space where global conversations in modern art unfold,” says Jonathan P. Binstock, Vradenburg Director & CEO of The Phillips Collection. “At a moment when the geopolitics of culture are being reexamined, Miró’s transatlantic journey feels acutely relevant. His movement between Spain and the United States—from repression to optimism, from constraint to openness—speaks powerfully to the role of art as both a personal and political act. The Phillips Collection invites visitors to reflect on this history and to imagine broader horizons.”
The exhibition brings together approximately 75 works—paintings, sculptures, works on paper, films, and archival material—from American and European collections, including significant loans from the Fundació Joan Miró. Major works by more than 30 American artists whose paths intersected with Miró’s, among them Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Norman Lewis, and Adolph Gottlieb, represent two generations of Abstract Expressionists. Together, the artworks chart a dynamic period of artistic dialogue and experimentation.
Miró’s interactions with American artists spurred some of his most inventive work, from sculptural explorations informed by Calder and Bourgeois to gestural, energetic painting in conversation with Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. Creative exchanges with architect Josep Lluís Sert expanded Miró’s ambitions for murals, public art, and monumentality. Through repeated visits to the United States, Miró met artists in their studios, collaborated on prints and architectural projects, and closely followed exhibitions at galleries and museums, connections that transformed his practice and reverberated across post-war American art.
Highlights of Miró’s work include Somersault (1924) and Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird (1926), which helped launch his reputation in the US early in his career; the monumental Mural Painting, 20 March 1961 (1961), on loan for the first time from Harvard Art Museum; and 22 pochoirs on paper from his Constellations series of 1959.
“Miró and the United States reframes Miró’s legacy by tracing the exchanges his work ignited with a rising generation of American artists—encounters that accelerated modern art on both sides of the Atlantic,” says Elsa Smithgall, Chief Curator at The Phillips Collection and curator of the museum’s presentation in collaboration with Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, and Dolors Rodríguez Roig from the Fundació Joan Miró. “The exhibition is a glowing testament to the vitality of transnational exchange as a driver for experimentation in contemporary art. We invite audiences to rediscover a pioneering Catalan artist whose art of human feeling continues to resonate today.”
By tracing the fertile exchange between Miró and American artists, Miró and the United States deepens understanding of the artist’s legacy and the transatlantic networks that defined the post-war era.
Featured Artists
Louise Bourgeois
Alexander Calder
Elaine de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Perle Fine
Sam Francis
Herbert Ferber
Helen Frankenthaler
Arshile Gorky
Adolph Gottlieb
Grace Hartigan
Franz Kline
Lee Krasner
Norman Lewis
Len Lye
Alice Trumbull Mason
Peter Miller
Joan Mitchell
Joan Miró
Robert Motherwell
Louise Nevelson
Barnett Newman
Isamu Noguchi
Alfonso Ossorio
Jackson Pollock
Jeanne Reynal
Mark Rothko
Rufino Tamayo
Sonja Sekula
Theodoros Stamos
Janet Sobel
Michael Corinne West
This exhibition is organized for The Phillips Collection by Elsa Smithgall, in collaboration with Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, and Dolors Rodríguez Roig, at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona.
Joan Miró, The Red Sun, 1948, The Phillips Collection.
Oil on canvas
36 1/8 × 28 1/8 in.
The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1951
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Joan Miró
Painting (Fratellini)
1927
Oil and aqueous medium on canvas
51 1/4 × 38 1/4 in.
Philadelphia Museum of Art: A. E. Gallatin
Collection, 1952-16-1
© Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris 2026
Joan Miró
Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman
from the Constellations Series
1959
22 pochoirs on paper after the gouaches
24 x 20 in.
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
© Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris 2026
Joan Miró
Sketch for Mural for Cincinnati
1947
Gouache, pastel, ink, and graphite on paper
19 1/8 × 49 7/8 in.
Fundació Pilar I Joan Miró a Mallorca
© Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris 2026
Joan Miró
b. 1893, Barcelona, Spain–d. 1983, Palma de Mallorca,
Spain
Somersault
1924
Oil, graphite, charcoal, and tempera on canvas board
36 3/8 × 28 5/8 in.
Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Collection Société
Anonyme
Joan Miró
b. 1893, Barcelona, Spain–d. 1983, Palma de Mallorca,
Spain
Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird
1926
Oil on canvas
29 × 36 1/4 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase, 1937
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Joan Miró
b. 1893, Barcelona, Spain–d. 1983, Palma de Mallorca,
Spain
Painting
1927
Tempera and oil on canvas
28 3/4 x 36 1/4 in.
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Pierre
Matisse, in memory of Pierre Loeb, 1984
Joan Miró
b. 1893, Barcelona, Spain–d. 1983, Palma de Mallorca,
Spain
Still Life with Old Shoe
1937
Oil on canvas
32 × 46 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of James
Thrall Soby, 1970
Joan Miró
Woman and Birds at Sunrise
1946
Oil on canvas
21 1/4 × 25 1/2 in.
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, On loan from a
private collection
© Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris 2026
Joan Miró
b. 1893, Barcelona, Spain–d. 1983, Palma de Mallorca,
Spain
His Majesty the King
1974
Acrylic on wood, bronze, and iron 100 3/8 × 14 1/2 × 16 3/8 in. Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
