Art by Joan Miró

Miró developed a private visual language of biomorphic shapes, stars, eyes, birds, floating figures, that reads as playful on the surface but drew, by his own account, on something closer to trance or hallucination, partly induced during a period when he deliberately starved himself for lack of money in 1920s Paris. His "Constellations" series, small, densely worked paintings on paper, was made while he and his family were fleeing German advances during the fall of France in 1940, work made under real fear that still comes across as luminous rather than anxious. The Fundació Joan Miró in his native Barcelona now holds the largest collection of his work anywhere.