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.
Organized jointly by the Fundació Miró and The Phillips Collection, the exhibition also revisits, alongside Miró’s legacy, the importance of many women artists of the time who were essential in redefining contemporary art and served as references for other artists. Curated by Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, Dolors Rodríguez Roig, and Elsa Smithgall, it is supported by the Institut Ramon Llull.
